We don't have much news and I checked that news blog which isn't used either so I thought I might as well post about stuff that's been happening.
We started an exclusive server which you can get more information about it at it's forum board here:
https://cit2.net/index.php?board=321.0 It has the old drug shipment and train robbery in the event cycle as they were disabled on main server due to them being outdoors so it ruined everybody's FPS and made server lag. It also has a drug lab script which allows criminals to make drugs which police can stop. The idea of that is to help reduce the stupid prices of speed on the server.
The last 2 weeks updates in-game are here, you can see who's been working hard:
Thursday 24th January
- Increased cop killed in drug shipment from 20 to 30 drugs (Arran)
- Made the 'Chat' tab in J synchronized across all CIT servers (Arran)
Wednesday 23rd January
- Drug lab is enabled again.
- Added /comics (Cheeze)
Thursday 22nd January
- Drug lab is disabled, exploitable.
Monday 21st January
- Added walking style customizer to gyms (Arran)
- S2: Added LS jobs to GPS (Arran)
- S2: Made turfing twice as quick (Arran)
- Lowered quiz prizes as they were too excessive. (Nvreformat)
Sunday 20th January
- S2: Increased job payments by 10% to encourage server 2 usage (Arran)
- Removed the camping bottleneck in PD Raid (Arran)
- S2: Disabled sprinting in train robbery area due to abuse by police (Arran)
- S2: Doubled criminal payment at train robbery to $14,000 (Arran)
- Made the sniper rifle take 100 HP in 2 shots rather than 3 (Arran)
- Simplified the server rules (Arran)
Saturday 19th January
- Added high capacity AK-47 magazines as nobody uses AK-47 (Arran)
- Added /getpos to get your XYZ (useful for development) (Arran)
- S2: Lowered payment for cops at train robbery from $4000 to $2500 (Arran)
- Added Restaurants (Smart + Arran)
- Made it so civilians can't hurt or be hurt when no wanted level (Arran)
- S2: Removed some unnessecary rules (Arran)
- Fixed bug that used to leave white markers anywhere (Nvreformat)
- Added levels to Iron Miner job (Nvreformat)
- Added /qc drugs - drugssold - drugsbought (Nvreformat)
Friday 18th January
- Doubled speed duration to 80 seconds, lowered game speed from 1.25 to 1.2 (Arran)
- S2: Due to continued, mass team stacking at DS, lowered escape drugs from 80 to 60
- S2: Lowered the criminal event wait time to 50 minutes (Arran)
- S2: Added LS Train Robbery criminal event to the cycle (Arran)
- Added /pkcount to know how many people is in PK Dimension (Nvreformat)
- Added Bus Driver stops in LS (Nvreformat - xb0x)
Thursday 17th January
- Added some locations for delivery man in LS from an old copy (Arran)
- Increased turf ($1500), briefcase ($6000), weed harvest (10 hits) (Arran)
- Added pay and spray marker to Michelle's Auto's in San Fierro (Arran)
Wednesday 16th January
- Improved the Cop v Crim interface for drug shipment (Arran)
- Added info bar for when you lose or gain drugs (Arran)
- Again lowered drug payment at DS from 100 to 80 due to team stackers (Arran)
Tuesday 15th January
- Lowered DS drugs from 150 to 100 due to everyone being criminal.
- Reduced the minimum VIP sell amount from 28 days to 14 days.
- Added a command to convert 1 hour of VIP into 3 hours of server 2 access so that accessing
the server 2 will be 3 times cheaper and hopefully more people will want to go there. Usage: /convertviptoaccess vipHoursToConvert
NOTE: You do not need VIP and access hours at the same time, both will run down. You can't transfer or convert back access hours either.
Monday 14th January
- Added /dropbc to drop the briefcase (Arran)
- Added a female police officer and detective skin (Arran)
- Allowed Police Chiefs to unlock emergency vehicles (Arran)
- Added a server wide notification about 5 minutes before criminal event (Arran)
- Server 2 only: Added Drug Shipment to the criminal event rotation (Arran)
- Server 2 only: Moved Civilian jobs to LS as LS is empty (Arran)
Sunday 13th January
- Disabled turfing with any bike/quad (Arran)
- Added /switchserver to change server (Nvreformat)
Saturday 12th January
- Added race script for events (Nvreformat)
Friday 11th January
- Fixed taser not working on wanted criminals if not being violent (Arran)
- Added a gamemode called Player Killing made by Smart. Players risk $50,000 in the gamemodes private dimension. Kill other players and steal their stuff! (Arran)
/joinpk - Join PlayerKilling game which costs $50,000 so kill people and steal their $50,000..
/leavepk - Leave the PlayerKilling game.
Thursday 10th January 2013
- Fixed an exploit used by the weak nr7 gang for taking turfs faster (Arran)
- Started the CJ muscles resource, go to a gym to modify CJ muscle level
- Disabled pirate turfs paying double as they were being monopolized (Arran)
- Fixed the exploit where you could go backwards in broken boats (Arran)
- Added (with many changes) improved cruise control by 'FreelanceCoder' (Arran)
Most of you probably already know about the above though so I'll share something new and exciting especially if you're the civilian/RP type. Very recently an old developer named Tyrone, now called JTPenn, who made a lot of stuff for civilians like the pilot job and promotions has returned. I got to understand the reasons why he left and came up with an idea that'd solve many problems.
1. Civilian stuff is limited to San Fierro, which sucks especially for jobs like Pilot which require a variety of airports to make it not boring.
2. If JTPenn did make anything else for the server, the player count would increase and currently we already peak at an unstable level meaning that holding more players isn't possible.
Well after finding setting up the VIP server so easy and now that we're making S1 and S2 better synced with remote procedure calls, an S3 for civilian stuff would be a great idea. More info:
https://cit2.net/index.php?topic=60130.0Not just with what we've got now though. JTPenn will be working on a business system (and more) that would make a really interesting server. It'd be civilian only so we can disable fighting and have absolutely no death matching and businesses will be ran all around the city from factories in Los Santos to Saw Mills in Angel Pine to Farms in Flint County to Office Buildings and Docks in San Fierro to Oil Refineries in Tierra Robada to Casinos in Las Venturas and so on.
If this happens, then it will also allow CnR and MW to expand across the map to San Fierro. CnR and MW are also massively lacking in features as most of our time seems to end up working on other things, I will put time into making more criminal features.
You'll need to be patient though, that's weeks of work. I might be able to add some new criminal work much sooner but don't be too optimistic.
Edit: Most of you won't know this but 2 x 500 players is way better than 1 x 900, let me explain why. The server must send updates to every player for every player meaning that each extra player that joins the server will use more CPU than the last as each player has to be kept up-to-date on every other player.
Players updating all the other players:
100x100 = 10,000
500x500 = 250,000
900x900 = 810,000
That should give you an idea of the problem but also it's not just the CPU usage that matters it's whether MTA can use that CPU or not because it's mainly single threaded meaning that it can't use all of our CPU (It can only use about 31%) So if we had 2 different servers then that means that we would be able to use a lot more of our CPU.
Edit 2: I decided to try the server as a new player and see what it was like. I concluded that the server is an awful experience for new players, hard to get money, the only criminal job you can do is house robbing which you can't even do because you can't get back on your free vehicle when you're wanted. The vehicle DM script also made life hard, I even got punished for it. So I made a variety of small changes like making vehicle punch punisher a lot more lenient and letting you get on your free vehicle when wanted.
I also realised how incredibly bad the criminal work is. The house robbery script is a complete joke, it's something I rushed up in a few hours 2 years ago. Unfortunately though we've always been busy doing other updates and it seems that nobody was ever interested in pushing more for proper CnR updates in server development board. So I'll have to make the idea and the script by myself.