Steve's GTA Page

A happy new year, everyone! 2006 was quite a silent year, at least from my perspective. I haven’t been very active in the modding scene lately, but if you’ve followed my (rare) news posts here you probably expected that. However, since it’s quite hard to stay away from modding completely, some things actually did get done.

Most of the SA path file format has been decoded and made available at the modding wiki. Also, we have started documenting the RW stream file format there, most notably R*’s custom sections (like 2dfx) and the .txd file format. But none of these are complete yet, everyone is invited to contribute!

Additionally, I’ve been working on a new backend for my website, which produces proper standards-compliant (X)HTML code (unlike now) and will have several improvements in usability and functionality. The relaunch will include updated and extended content, especially more articles and other generally helpful stuff. I initially planned to get this done before the end of the year, but I’ve been too busy and didn’t quite make it. Furthermore, there are plans for some rather interesting tool updates, but more about that when the site is done.

Whether 2007 is going to become another big year for GTA remains to be seen. While GTA4 is scheduled for release on consoles in October, we still don’t know if there’ll be a PC release as well. Modding might become much more unattractive, not just because Rockstar/Take2 are jumping on the episodic content and (possibly) in-game advertising train, which need to be rather secure in order to guarantee the additional cash flow those are supposed to generate. They are also likely to be more paranoid and scared of another Hot Coffee incident now, although I doubt something like that would happen again anytime soon (both developers and modders certainly drew a lesson from that). I just hope they don’t continue ignoring the positive potential of the modding community and actually give us some support in the future.

May 2007 become a successful and productive year for all of us.