Live Podcast

On the 24th of October we had a dev Q&A podcast, which is recorded for you below:

Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTYWWsXkcDo

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to our very first live stream for open multiplayer

um can i get a mic check can someone tell me if this is working please? jamie?

it's working

it's working

okay

yeah

yeah i heard it coming through on the other side

yeah it's quite a delay

yeah that's okay

alright um hello uh what's up

we're finally here and doing this i guess, um

many days of planning

yes

maybe we should start by introducing ourselves, so... Southclaws:?

that's me

tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what you do here

uh yeah i think i've been around SAMP for like um since 2008 or 2007 i can't remember... a long time ago... um i just kind of do the website stuff at the moment, i manage the wiki and do a tiny bit of coding, but not too much, these guys are far better at that than i am. but yeah i do the wiki stuff mainly, and the website so that's kind of my area

and Y_Less:?

stream alert CJ's "here we go again"

hi i'm Y_Less:

i've been in SAMP longer than you have

i made my way onto the beta team before it was even released so there we go, it's been a while. i'm a former dev, i'm not entirely sure if i need to introduce myself but there we go

no probably not

probably not

i'm sure everybody knows you

just in case

scripters know me, but not necessarily players

no i'm pretty sure everyone does

i'm also the only form of dev currently not purged from the client "about" page

uhhh... nice... i guess?

that's an achievement

that's an achievement, yeah

ok, josh, your turn

well i'm josh and i'm one of the main developers of open.mp

i've been in samp for at least seven years now

started programming six years because of samp

and if you've been on the discord you know who i am, i'm always there, and always able to talk to you if you need any help for anything

oh that was very wholesome

who are you and what have you done with josh?

ok, Amir?

well i'm Amir and i've been around since 2010 i guess, that's the time i started playing samp actually. i'm just part of open.mp development team and i just kind of help the coding and stuff like that

nice! and bigETI?

yeah i'm bigeti, i'm 27 years old, i started playing samp around 2009, and contributed to projects, had my own servers, etc, and also i'm a contributor to

open.mp now

awesome, and michael?

i'm JustMichael:, i've been around since 2007, owned a few communities, fought my way up, these days though i pretty much just follow Southclaws: and manage all his projects that he's abandoned! and other than that i just work in free time on open.mp

he's the surrogate father to everything i've created

everyone laughs

awesome!

who are you Potassium?

that is a good question! so i'm Potassium, obviously, i've been in the samp community since about 2008/2009 maybe... so like 10 years... or more i guess... maths!

i'm not a scripter, i keep telling everyone that i will be maybe one day, i probably won't be, but anyway! i don't really have a backstory i'm just some random from the samp forum and i just, i don't know, i just love this community and want to be a part of keeping it alive so i kind of just invited myself to this team... so yay!

that's fine, you do a fairly important job

you're definitely welcome!

i can't do any technical things, they're completely over my head, so we just named my role "public relations" and i just post stupid memes every now and again... but that's okay! someone needs to!

so is there any point in quickly explaining what openmp is actually about or? i guess, yeah i guess we should, just in case anyone's listening and isn't quite sure. so basically we're all old school players of san andreas as you just heard, and we're all part of a community

called san andreas multiplayer, it's a multi-player modification for san andreas and it's a little bit outdated now i guess you could say, so we're just kind of trying to breathe some more life back into it because we're not ready to let our little community die yet. is that is that a fair summary?

i think so

yeah

i want to kind of address the big question to start with, about WHY. in some respects

we don't really want to create open.mp - we were perfectly happy playing samp, it's a nice little game, it does everything we want, but kalcor wrote it, he has the source code and

things, he had some help, and in short he was no longer interested in maintaining it which is fine and happens to everybody, and i just want to make that clear that i've no hard feelings to him for that because everybody moves on eventually, you get new interests but

he decided that he wanted to just take everything down with him. he didn't want to pass on the source code, he just wanted to stop so he felt everyone else should stop as well. and we quite liked it here so we didn't stop.

correct

yeah that sounds fine

as i said, if he wants if he wants to move on and move on to other things that's only his prerogative

yes that's right, we're not judging, we're just a little bit sad. but that's okay, because we're gonna fix it. we can do something about it so we will!

yeah let's move on to the next bigger things

yeah that's right. alright so we had a bunch of questions on our forum, which by the way is

http://burgershot.gg so sign up there!

so i guess let's just get into them.

the most pressing question right now obviously is regarding the recent samp drama. so for those who don't know the samp forum and the samp wiki have been offline for a few weeks now, and we don't want to make assumptions but it doesn't look like they're coming

back anytime soon. i think that's a pretty fair assumption to make.

the links have been removed from the home page, if it was just a temporary thing he

would have probably not removed the links.

yeah that's right, so it doesn't look like they're coming back. so people just kind of want to know what our thoughts are on this, what do we think actually happened? so... open mic... Southclaws:? anyone?

it's basically what i just said, kalcor has for years been uninterested, that's why there's

just been zero development, and several of us when i was in the beta team kept trying to push him along and release updates and things, and actually the whole community was screaming for updates, he didn't want to because he'd lost interest, he wanted to move on and that's... as i already said that's fine, we don't mind people moving on and leaving

projects, it was the fact that he refused to hand over the reins to anybody else, this is just a

continuation of that, the forums were pretty huge, they were not easy to run, it's close to a full-time job just moderating them. and i suspect he's just totally lost interest and decided he no longer wants to do it, but does not want anybody else to continue his legacy, so he's just taking everything down. i'm slightly confused that the home page is still there.

i'd imagine that's probably just because the home page probably costs next to nothing to actually keep online, whereas the forum probably took a bit of time and expense to

actually run. i'd imagine that's why.

you can still download samp from the main home page

yeah that's good, at least they can do that. but if we complete our mission

they won't have to!

personally i just hope kalcor is ok! what if he got COVID and he's in the hospital and can't maintain

that would be really bad

what if it just like ran out and he can't put it back up because he's in hospital

that would just be extremely unfortunate

and then he comes back and there's just like... a mutiny... anyway

and while he was in hospital he happened to remove the forum link and wiki...?

oh yeah... fair enough

everyone laughs

i'm just thinking we might have heard about that

yeah we probably would've heard about that, you're right

or maybe not because even beta testers barely hear anything, i can speak from

personal experience, people kept asking me when is the next version coming out?

i know just as little as you do. but we have our own private forum and it's dead.

he ended up being pretty bad at communicating anything to any of the devs

time to move on. on the subject of forums, our forum and our wiki seem to be quite popular replacements for the samp ones so feel free to check them out

they are not dead

they're very active and maintained, more than i've ever seen

yeah, particularly for scripting help

yeah the wiki contributions have been great, when the wiki went down, having

loads of people just copying pages from the old wiki onto the new one was really good, so shout out to everyone who contributed, thank you, that was really cool. the translation stuff is great because i think that's one thing that the old wiki definitely lacked, it had a handful of pages that were translated but not many i think.

i think it was like polish, brazilian, and... yeah... we lacked a lot.

yeah translating that is a definitely a priority and we've got some good people to help us with that so that's brilliant

yeah that's awesome. just for the record, http://burgershot.ggg is our forum and http://open.mp docs is our wiki, so go there!

so obviously the next discord alert noise that scared me, sorry! the next most frequently asked question is and always will be is the release date. so obviously we don't have a date, we will never give a specific date because we're all volunteers and do this in our free time, but do we have a rough idea of maybe like a percentage of how far along we are before we can make it public? are 1% through? are we halfway through? are we 90% through? what do you think?

i mean, we're pretty close aren't we?

yeah i think most of our big systems, the bulk of it, is done. they say that the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time because it's all that kind of tweaking, and there's bugs, and when this and this and this and this happen together, suddenly everything breaks. most of what we've called "modules" are done now, i can explain modules later, but essentially the large chunks of code are done now. it's just connecting them making sure all the little extra features are there. it's progressing fairly steadily, now especially recently,

yeah we've had quite a bit of a big boost of active development recently which is very nice

i was just gonna ask if anyone else had anything else to add to that

i think it depends on what you define as public, i can pretty much say that we're fairly close

to having a beta test server, i'm sure we're near that. but a public release as in everyone else having the executable is obviously a bit further off, but i think a test server will be coming fairly shortly.

woohoo!

yeah we need a fair amount of time to test all the progress so far because there's still gonna be edge cases

did you hear that chat?! a test server is coming fairly shortly! mark his words!

alright so most of the questions from this point on are from a scripting point of view, so obviously i have no idea about that stuff so this is where you guys shine! so you mentioned modules just before, did you want to explain that a little bit? or did you not want to?

yeah basically modules is an extension of kind of a general trend in library development and stuff that has developed over years, for code isolation, so all the objects, all the code related to objects, that's a module. all the code related to checkpoints, that's a module. vehicles is a separate module.

so in terms of plugins and filter scripts like we have in samp, is that what we're... are we renaming them to modules? i think i saw something about that before but i don't understand that stuff!

not quite, modules are more like a chunk of code that provides some functionality, so your filter scripts... i mean, we don't really have filter scripts anymore, we just have scripts, because game modes and filter scripts was an arbitrary pointless distinction in the first place. we do still have plugins but there's legacy plugins which is all existing ones,

most of them should work, some of them won't.

any memory hacking ones won't

yes, if they use memory hacking they won't work because that's just changing values in memory at very specific locations, but because it's completely different code, everything's

moved

yeah but then but then if someone wants to make let's say a memory hacking plug-in to work on openmp, they can just use the existing api in openmp instead of hacking memory

yeah you won't need to go about that route anymore

yeah so we have a full C API, so legacy plugins had about 3 functions that they could call in the server, and that was it. and there were all sorts of workarounds and horrible ways to

put natives from plugins, now you can do that directly so 90% of the need for memory

hacking plugins is just gone. things like samp gdk, that was just pulling pawn

functions from plugins, that's gone. the plugins are all these legacy ones, and modules are basically the replacements. like plugins, but far more powerful.

cool. i'm just smiling and nodding because i don't understand but i'm sure most of our viewers do so that's awesome!

if anybody wants any clarification on that, just ask! maybe you're in the same boat as Potassium

correct! so obviously we've got our forum for questions like that, but also we're going to have a little live question session at the end so stick around!

it's also not like we won't document the code when it's actually released, so you know if you are struggling to understand what any of this is, we will have some kind of explanation that just tells you what it is.

so we got a few questions about limits, i know that we've we talked about that in our last Q&A, and i think you guys said there won't be limits on things like vehicles and objects, is that right?

there is no reason to have arbitrary limits, but right now openmp will be just a server release for now

server release

so you have to make it competitive with san andreas multiplayer, therefore we

have to emulate limits, but then internally in openmp there are no server-sided limits. it just depends on how much your machine is capable to do

yeah so it does appear that in the very first version that the limits will be have to be in place

until we get our own client out

an internal streamer

we can't go over game limits right now

yeah that's true yeah

there was one interesting issue with limits that we were discussing last week, the server itself can stream players as well, so in theory you could have unlimited players on the server even with this legacy samp client, basically we just send the players closest to you, sync them, and then when you move further away we change which players are synced. but we've had to disable that by default because it means that everybody's constantly

changing IDs, so i would connect to the server and have a server ID of 27, but when i'm streamed to you i have your local ID of 3. i'm streaming to somebody else and i have a

local ID for them of 17. so you as an admin see that i'm cheating and type /ban 5 because you think that i'm ID 5 but the server thinks i'm ID 27. and translating those when people are just using raw IDs instead of names is tricky. we've decided to disable that for now and

make it optionally enabled if people want it, but with the caveat that their script will need to be aware of this and for example if in a command they just use strval to get typed ID, don't do that because it would probably be wrong, or do do that and then translate it to from local ID to server ID. sscanf will probably support that already, but if you do type "u", if you

use sscanf with "u" already it will auto translate. some scripts will need updating to support that.

actually the next question was "will we still be limited to 1000 player slots?" so i guess that kind of ties in.

the answer for that is no!

if you enable it

i wanted to add to that, so our idea is to have like, you can configure what you want to limit

for yourself, because for example you don't want a server where you can spawn infinite entities, because someone could abuse it and just down your server, so there should be some configuration you can do to limit stuff, like players or vehicles or something else.

yeah fair enough

i just want to say that's not me in the twitch chat

it's ok i banned them, that is not the real Y_Less: in chat, THIS is the real Y_Less:!

what is your twitch account Y_Less:?

it's ok, it's not important. so moving on with the community questions, people want to know which languages other than pawn we can script our servers in.

that's completely dependent on plug-in developers, we already have quite a few already which can be easily ported over, and some already do work, i think bigeti you were working on or at least you were thinking about writing another C# one right?

i was thinking to implement some module that implements another language like for example C# because nowadays C#... well first of all i don't want to say that it will be officially supported, but i'm thinking about making a module so it will be released under my name.

i know there's the sampnodes, that's amir, and i also help on that sometimes so that should be easy to poty over if it doesn't already work.

i think it already works with openmp, it would be better and faster if we use the C API that we are providing for openmp so it's better than going through the pawn layer

yeah well we'll have to find a way to translate the rust plug in over somehow, or the rust sdk, to make that work

samp gdk?

yeah we're gonna find a way to support the current rust plugins

no more fake amx bollocks

a lot of those plugins use samp gdk to access pawn, we just need to change the lowest

level in there

yeah the rust one doesn't... he just kind of tried to reinvent it in his own way

i don't think the rust community is that big

there are a couple of plugins that people do rely on

yeah i might take a crack at that, i don't know, but it'd be cool to write modules in rust i think, shouldn't be too difficult.

cool, ok, next question: will sampCTL/openCTL be the official package manager for open multiplayer?

that's my ballpark! yes it will, it will be renamed of course, yeah it's going to

be Open Packet Manager - OPM.

that's what we decided on

that's what i decided on!

i gave you the name!

we're kind of working on experimental features at the moment, i've sort of just built a couple of quick interesting experimental things for that, they're coming in the recent days, i've been coding, so yeah i'm thinking mainly about developer experience type things so

things like logging and command line interface environment variables, you know, all the stuff that helps you kind of build game modes faster and deploy them faster and automate as many things as you can. such as the deployment process and that sort of thing so

yeah that's where my head is at really. some CTL will remain compatible and will basically just add openmp support. so you can switch to it just by changing a string, in theory, and changing your includes and then recompile and it'll just work. that's the plan anyway!

that's gonna be a lot of fun!

and then it'll eventually have a bunch of new features as well, better log handling, better docker support, better deployment automation, stuff like that, some of which will be implemented into openmp itself, a lot of the things that sampCTL does is actually to

get around awkward design choices with the samp server, so a few of those things

won't need to happen, a few of them will just be implemented directly into openmp. so yeah hopefully that answers that

yes sampCTL/openCTL is officially supported, officially endorsed, probably distributed with it, but that doesn't mean it's required, you can write scripts without it, if you don't know how then you don't have to start using it

yeah it's kind of like how you can use node.js without npm

cool, ok, next question: what are openmp's current build times?

does that mean the C++ build times or script?

i don't know

we could just do both because they're both questions we can answer

if you rebuild the entire project, make sure to make a coffee then! click compile, make a coffee, come back and it will be done.

it's gotten way better, it used to be like half an hour, now it's about eight minutes.

i spent a lot of time improving that. the player module used to be everywhere, included by everything, if you accidentally touch that file that's a full rebuild. change one line, that's a full

rebuild.

as for scripts, that shouldn't change too much really. we have a compatibility layer, scripts will just be the same, i think there is a question about that later on so i'll leave that until then.

alright, cool, thank you. next question is: a lot of people wanted to know if we'll have a built-in anti-cheat?

no, i think we'll have a kind of very small... not really an anti-cheat but more of

just like we will try to block a few known issues, exploits, stuff like that, but i think we're going to leave it to other developers

we'll provide people the tools to build good anti-cheats, that's probably the most efficient way because then the community can come together and build solutions for specific cheats. because if the community is dependent on us for doing that then it's just going to get overtaken because the amount of people developing cheats is going to outnumber the amount of people developing openmp

i'll probably post an official kind of repo for one where anybody can contribute, and serve it as a module, because the idea is that eventually... well, it's called openmp, it's meant to be open source. it's not currently because we've not finished the first release, but once it is,

then we can release it and other people can contribute, and that's one of the major areas where we're hoping they will do. so will it have an officially included anti cheat? yes, if you help us!

yeah, that's what it comes down to really, if the community helps then yeah we'll have things like that!

a lot of people forget that samp did have one, they experimented with an anti cheat for a while, and by a while i mean about a month, before it just became completely unfeasible because oh look they've blocked this cheat, it took us seven seconds to get around it, now

you have a new cheat. it's a constant game of cat and mouse.

i feel the anti cheat should be separate, because we won't be updating the mod that much, we don't want to be updating every day or every week, it's going to be more of a long-term thing, but an anticheat needs to be updated quite frequently to combat the cheats so

having it as a separate module or something like that would probably be better for servers than having to rely on us waiting for us to release at the end of the month or however

long our update process will be

yeah that's kind of what i meant about boosting it centrally

so if we just have it open then everyone can contribute and then it's not entirely on you guys to keep it updated and stuff. and then on that note, CLEO mods, a lot of people want to know if they'll still work, or mods in general

they're all client-side

there'll be no changes

not in this version anyway

um so unless they start cheating in a way that the server can detect

ok, people wanted to know if openmp will have a fixed GPCI function like a serial in MTA

the problem with that is it's never going to be a 100% guaranteed way of banning someone or finding out if that player is that player, because anyone with any kind of skills at all will just use some kind of modifier for their system and they will just change some information and then they've got a brand new ID so there's not really much we can do with

that, we can we can provide you the tools, but i can't say they're ever gonna be 100% working.

cool, anyone got anything else to add to that? nope? okay cool

i do have something to add on the AC side of things since people are asking about that a bit more. so we definitely can't have a general ban system because servers are independent. if one server wants to keep you and one sever wants to ban you, that's

up to the server. if one server wants to let you keep cheating that's up to the server.

i used to play a cheating server and it was really fun, i just want to add that

yeah so a global ban list wouldn't work for reasons like that

oh that's a terrible idea, i know other mods have done it, that doesn't mean it's a

good idea. as for the anticheat itself, it will be separate and yeah you can update it at any rate you like.

awesome. alright we got a lot of questions about raknet, i think people just want to know what your thoughts are on it, if openmp will use the same version that samp uses, blah blah blah

there's a minor difference but nothing extraordinary, we need basically the same major version for it to actually communicate with samp perfectly

yeah the compatibility layer for communicating with existing samp clients is basically the same.

it's going to be changed, right? so it's going to be changed later, for example when openmp client gets developed we're going to add a new networking library so for example other networking library out there, each one of them is probably better than raknet, especially the version that we are using right now. so yeah for now we're going to use

raknet as the same version that samp is using, only to keep the backward compatibility. other than that for example for NPCs that josh is working on right now, i mean not right now but he was working on it, but he was using enet, that's probably, our first choice and it's way much better than raknet, and it gets contributed to more frequently, so we do not have issues with exploits or stuff that come up later because we all know that raknet project is

dead, the latest version is probably six years old by now. so that's the only reason that we're using raknet now, we're gonna change that.

cool, i don't understand any of that, but thank you. so there was a lot of discussion in

the thread about sync and c-bug and stuff like that, so i guess people want to know what the sync will be like compared to samp

the exact same

exactly the same yeah. we'll see, but we can't do that until the client comes out, and i'm probably not going to do that because that's ruining the experience of samp.

yeah so there was a lot of debate about that, and obviously there is within the team

as well.

yeah i wouldn't agree with that because my server literally relies on those bugs

people enjoy that stuff and there's already ways to stop it and prevent it anyway so i don't really think it's our prerogative to get involved in that

i think that in the client we should probably have a way to disable those kind of bugs if the server owner wants to, but it should be an option

you can disable it via pawn scripts anyway

yeah you can

so the consensus on that, just to clarify, is that we are just going to leave it how it is and

each server can choose what they do with it. is that right?

pretty much yeah

yeah pretty much

it's one of those things where you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, so yeah

again it's up to servers. servers are different so if they want it, they can have it

kind of like lag comp, some people like lag shot, some people don't like lag shot, which is why it was an option you could turn on and off

that's right yeah, i think that's the best way to go about it. ok so a very popular question both on the forum and in this chat which i know you guys don't want to answer but we're gonna do it... samp for android. what are your thoughts on that?

we're not gonna support it directly, but we're gonna give the tools so that anyone else

can do it

we don't want to support the existing samp mobile, because the existing current

version of samp mobile is based on stolen code. it's very not legal.

someone here probably wants to use openmp and then make their own android clients

so officially as open multiplayer developers, NO is the answer?

there is actually some stuff blocking us, for example to implement our own library into an APK file we need to modify that, so that means we need to modify GTA SA apk

file for android, and that actually has legal issues. so besides that, we'd actually need

to modify some code in gta apk file too, so either going to be the java assembly or

we'd patch the current gta sa code, so that would load our own library which would be openmp client, so for that as i said we'd need to modify the game. and we'd need to give people the modified version, which is not legal, so we would have issues legal issues later, copyright issues later.

technically we could legally distribute the binary to players and then let them add it to their apk

there is stolen versions of the source code out and about, so that's what the android

version is based on. if we wanted to use that we could have used that, we could have

started from that code, updated the server, and written openmp using stolen code,

and it would have been very illegal and that's entirely the reason why we started openmp from scratch, zero old source code in it, you can compare them and they are absolutely nothing alike. because we do not in any way condone stealing.

correct, that's a very important point to reiterate, we do not support stolen code

and there is NONE in this mod.

it would potentially put us in a really bad spot with legal issues if we were to go down that route anyway

it would've been out years ago if we did!

now along a similar path of questions, people want to know why they should play openmp instead of mta. so without without insulting other mods, what's different?

well we're still offering the same samp experience that everyone loves, but i guess we're now offering an upgrade path. more features down the line, a possible path for everyone to kind of like move forward, even add the stuff that everyone's wanted from samp for years. a lot of people have left samp because samp has been down the same path for a very long time, it's not gone anywhere, very little has been added. but now we're giving people the opportunity to add what they want now, after we've released it, they can add stuff you and that path's open now.

anyone got anything else to add?

mta is great, i like mta. mta's not a bad software, there's no beef there, the map editor is great! i always used to use it. but there is a cultural difference between mta and samp, and i don't think anyone's really managed to figure out what it is exactly. mta definitely has better features, it is an objectively better thing than samp, but people just kind of like samp more, i guess it stays close to the game.

they have different goals

yeah different goals, mta kind of feels more like garry's mod in a way. it's more of a sandbox type create your own crazy multiplayer game type thing

people like simplicity

and the ability to join the server without downloading 500 megabytes of anime skins is always a good thing!

i guess samp and mta serve slightly different markets, why you'd use this one instead of mta is the same reason why you'd use samp instead of mta - it's essentially samp.

the next lot of questions are more about the structure of the mod and the community rather than scripting. so people would like to know if it will be compatible with the steam version of san andreas because obviously, as we know, samp is not.

it should be.

yeah, mta does it, i'm sure we can do it

it will just take a lot of work.

there's no reason not to.

but if not, there are downgraders anywa,y and there's been downgraders for years. so either way it's not a huge issue i don't think.

no but we should be able, there's really no reason not to

well that's that's exciting!

ok now the master list. people want to know what's going to happen with that, will we have a

paid list, etc. etc. - the server list

we have a few ideas for it but i'm not sure, we've not gotten to that point where we've gone "okay this is what we're doing"

i want to reiterate that this is not a for-profit project at all. there have been ideas thrown around, because people actually do genuinely want a way to... you know, if they run a big server and it is kind of like a business, then they do want a way to kind of bump it to the top like an investment kind of thing, and i appreciate that and i've actually talked to quite a few people about that desire from the sort of larger server community, there are ideas and i don't think we're quite ready to discuss them all yet because they're not really fleshed out. but i have been working on the new server index which is currently being deployed. it's essentially going to be like samp-servers.net but with an updated backend, and it'll support samp servers and in future openmp servers, and it's kind of going to be like the advertisements board from the forum, but better because it's not on a forum, but yeah it'll be like a dedicated website and it'll be openmp servers or something like that, and that will come soon. the first version is kind of done, and that will be open source as well, so you kind of follow along the development of that and eventually that will turn into the list. as i said we're quite early on decisions like that, and i don't really know what the team's consensus is, but i think we're probably not going to split servers into two separate lists because that just kind of separates people into the bad ones and the good ones in a way, and it kind of creates us versus them sort of... not a conflict, but just like a, you know, it's kind of like a separation

a divide

and i think giving the smaller servers a chance to kind of get some visibility is good as well because sometimes people make a really cool project and maybe they can't pay to go onto the hosted list or whatever, so one of my goals in that is to kind of surface potentially interesting servers that don't have reach. but at the moment it's just going to be like a list and you can sort it by whatever you want and find servers. that'll be the first version.

yeah samp at the moment is very biased for its hosted tab

yeah, and it's limited and expensive

yeah and it's a horrible name

for our own server list we can actually add some options like ratings, voting and stuff like that, so like there can be two sections for example uh one could be the ones with most ratings, and the other could be for example a server that got rated frequently, in recent days, so we can actually see the trends and stuff like that. so new servers can go up and can be seen by other players. so that's actually a good way for new servers that have actually a unique idea so they can actually be seen by other players and get famous, it's actually a better way than spending money on some other lists or stuff like that.

so i think the really important thing to take away from that is that we are a not-for-profit project, so we're not gonna create a server list purely for the intention of making money off of it.

but that doesn't mean there won't be ways to advertise. and if you have ideas about thatm post on the forums!

yes, and that is http://burgershot.gg - sign up!

that's something we've discussed for like two years and we have no conclusion

ok, someone asked: does the openmp server actually include any kind of performance upgrade compared to the samp server? i think we sort of answered that before in the mta question but if anyone has anything else to add to that...

yeah can i just say i've actually run it on a raspberry pi zero, so yeah

yeah you can host your own server while you're walking down the street, you have your raspberry pi in your pocket and still running your samp server so yeah it should be fast that this can be possible

should we mention because we're using C++17 and there is like a minimum deployment for that, right?

what do you mean?

no? depends how you build it

i mean like library requirements as in like system operating system libraries and stuff like that

Glibc and stuff like that

it shouldn't be a problem

yeah there's no reason why you can't build it for a different system

yeah you're probably right yeah i'm thinking of edge cases like ark and stuff, but that'll probably work anyway... wait didn't someone actually build it for ark already? oh maybe that was you Hual? maybe that was you doing it for me?

oh you mean arm?

sorry yeah i said ark didn't i?

so yeah performance isfine, compatibility is fine

now the question everyone hates... 0.3 DL. a lot of people, a lot of server owners asked if

if it will be compatible on first release so they can instantly switch their servers over.

yes

that was easy

that WAS easy because the last time we talked about it we had very divided opinions and we kind of just asked the community what their opinions were,

yeah well we already know it's possible because adrian graber wrote that plugin that literally tricks the client into connecting so we know we can do it

and then, on a similar path, i know we're not taking live questions yet but someone in chat had a really good question: have you guys thought about making a workshop for openmp something like how mta has for maps, scripts, plugins, etc?

uh that would be really cool!

yeah that would be cool!

the question is have we thought about it? the answer is no. but now we will!

so thank you! moving on, people wanted to know more about future plans. so a specific question was "what's the next step for openmp after it reaches samp flow" - so once we've we've got it to compatibility and where we want it to be, what are your future plans and ideas?

i think after release we're just going to try and start with the client, just head for the second release i guess. we haven't really thought about it too much.

we should probably fix up the server first

we'll probably have a time frame after we've released where we wait for bug reports

and stuff and handle that, because in any software there's always going to be those edge cases that need to be sorted, and no software that comes out the gates on the first try is

ever going to be perfect.

so is it fair to say the the initial release, and for a while after, won't really see any new features, they'll come later in the future maybe?

oh yeah probably not straight away

we're basically limited by the client so without our own client we can't really do much

we can do some clever things, we've got some tricks up our sleeves

watch this space, basically!

but most of them have already been done in one way or another

well there's always something new i think. on that note, what kind of things would you guys like to eventually add once it's all compatible and bugs are all sorted and everything, new things that you guys would like to see?

sex animations.

oh my god.

everyone laughs

I want unicode. I want the clown emoji in chat.

oh yeah emojis in chat!!!

the ability for russian people to talk to english people on the same server without having to change the code page

yeah that would be nice

that would be great

that's revolutionary

that is revolutionary!

multi-server clustering would be cool, there's a lot of russian servers out there that run like 20 servers and they're all connected and you can imagine it's very janky in the back end. i think facilitating that would be kind of neat, to be able to switch server in game and stuff like that.

someone in chat just asked: voice chat in openmp?

everyone laughs

do you want 12 year olds shouting at you down the street? i don't think so. there are plugins out there, and of course with the client and the server out in the future, if you want to do voice chat like plug-ins then go wild!

there are quite a few on there already, i think i know two already

i think they're closed source though so it's kind of sketchy

no i think i think one of them is open sourced

there's one actually open source

well there you go, that's the solution. i think one thing i do want to say though is just because we're making a from scratch new multiplayer mod platform to build on, that doesn't mean that the actual mod itself has to have every single possible feature crammed

into it. we're making a better plugin api for a reason, we get questions like are you going to add mysql or are you going to add sscanf, or are you going to add this plug-in to that plug-in, and most of the answer to those questions is no, because there's no reason to. in fact there's more reason to build more things as plugins because then they're modular, you can add and remove them when you don't need them. so i think the same goes for things like

voice chat and client things. we'll provide a better set of tools for people to actually augment the experience and add new things to it, and i think that's better than cramming

it full of features that maybe most people won't actually use.

yeah but also since installing plugins in samp is kind of annoying, we probably should think about having an official plugin registry where servers can actually specify what client plugins the clients download

yeah like a client version of sampctl i suppose. and of course the worry there is always about being able to run arbitrary code on a user's computer so you know i think having a repository would be kind of good

just something to bear in mind, half of the big plugins that everybody uses like mysql, streamers, sscanf, all that, the developers for those plugins are ON THIS TEAM! we're not just going to stop developing them and say you can't get my plug in now because i wrote

something else.

so can we just clarify for some people asking in chat about making a client. so that's

that's a future plan, right? making our own client?

yes, that's the second version

that's the fun part

people were asking about other communities that speak different languages and such, and they kind of want to know what we're doing to work with those communities and how we plan on spreading the word to those communities. i think it's fair to say that we're working on that, we're recruiting volunteers i guess to translate our wiki pages and whatever else to other languages, to moderate language sections on the forum, http://burgershot.gg by the way, and generally just to be the point of contact between our team and the other communities i guess

we've made a huge effort already to translate the wiki, so we're making an improvement to

make it easier for those communities to combine with the larger community. i myself

have already talked to quite a few because i know quite a lot of balkan area servers, i

actually run one even though i don't speak the language, but there you go. i actually run a second one now, and a role play server, so i've been in touch with quite a few of their areas and tried to get quite a few of them over and a lot of them are on board, a lot of server owners from those areas are on board, so that's that's always good

i was surprised to know there's quite a big chinese, japanese, taiwanese community as well that i didn't even know about, so i've been talking to people in those communities

and helping translate and stuff.

i found out that there was a big chinese and japanese community about seven seconds ago when you said that

i've mentioned it before in the discord but yeah there is actually a big community, the problem's always been the language barrier, but the translation stuff is really helping with that the fact, that you can actually do it, because the old wiki you couldn't create an

account for many years for some reason, so no one could translate the wiki

the reason is kalcor

so people usually make their own wikis and stuff and they got outdated and yeah, problems and problems. i have heard apparently in thailand there's actually a single translated version of the godfather game mode that everybody copies and uses

there are already multiple language sections on discord, and the forums. the big issue that we had, because the samp forums used to have language sections as well, the problem

was moderating them because if we don't speak the language we don't know what you're saying. if there's issues people make reports like oh this person's doing something bad.

well we don't know, we can't review that really, so we'd love to reach out to communities,

we kind of need people within those communities that speak english to liaise with, but we're very interested in finding those people who are involved in one of the foreign

language communities, and speak english, please speak to us!

yeah so if you know trustworthy members of the community who speak other languages and want to help us out, tell them to get in touch with us on our forum, our discord, wherever, um because we would love that

i mean we already do have several languages in the team, we speak english or german or

persian or...

australian

that's about it, yeah, australian, that's a unique language... yorkshire...

also we're pretty close with the turkish and romanian communities as well,

they're pretty big

and i do have contacts in the russian community as well.

so we are trying.

it's tricky, it's hard, that's why it's not worked before.

yeah and lack of effort. so the last kind of pre-loaded question from the forum today

is: what are you most looking forward to about openmp? and i just thought this was

really wholesome.

the release.

after the release, just in general. it's a nice question because i'm glad that people can see that we're happy to be doing this and excited to be doing it. so yeah what are you looking forward to?

just looking forward to getting to a state where either players are finally enjoying the

features, or we get to a point where the rest of the community can take over, pretty much that to be honest

anyone else want to add anything?

no bug reports

i just i'm honestly just kind of looking forward to bringing together the community again

because we all kind of separated and went off

it'd be nice to have a big increase of players, especially now that we talked

about including the other communities that have gone their own ways, it'd be

nice to have them then because yeah you know more players are better

not even just player count, just in general, bringing the community back together

yeah we're not doing this for the sake of a 15 year old game because the game is the greatest game ever, we're doing it because of the community

yeah that's right

HOWEVER, it IS the greatest game ever!

can confirm!

uhhhh vice city is better.

liberty city is my home, i'll always love gta 3.

so the team is completely split

yes. but on that note, we get a lot of questions asking like san andreas is such an old game, why are you bothering, why do you care, kind of thing. and i just want to answer

that one, or start by answering that one, and say that i think it's important to remember that a large portion of the samp player base come from countries where technology isn't necessarily as up-to-date or as high priority as it is where some of us live, and a lot of our players play samp because it's one of the only games that can run on their pcs or that they can afford, so i don't know i just absolutely love the fact that we can give them the ability to play and create their own game modes like battle royales or racing modes or whatever,

so that everyone can still experience these kind of games even though they can't afford like pubg or call of duty or you know, like they can't run those things

a side thing to add to that i think is the the scripting side of it, it's like a gateway drug in a way, it's a gateway for people to learn how to code, and if you learn how to code that can be great because you can make things and you can make games and you can have fun but you can also get a job doing it

there are a LOT of people-

a lot of people here actually got jobs because of samp, i'm one of them. it's definitely a

great gateway to learning how to code because pawn is quite a simple language, and then you might move into C++ to build plugins and that's kind of a more complex language, and then you might move to doing web stuff like php and javascript because of user

control panels and forums and stuff, and it just goes out from there and that's one of the main things i love about it, i don't really play the game anymore and i haven't really written much code for a few years, but i just love the community, i love helping people with that side of things, so that's why i'm in it

i think you can track the history of games over the last 15 years through samp modes.

whatever the current popular games is, there's a samp version of it

yeah absolutely, and i love that!

pubg - samp. battle royale - samp. microsoft flight simulator samp.

among us...

i've always wanted to write a Trouble in Terrorist Town style game mode... maybe that's our next stream, making a TTT gamemode.

but yeah just back on that note, i don't think there are many games or communities where you can do that kind of thing, where you can have different modes, maybe roblox...

garry's mod is like the closest thing, and even that you need a semi-modern pc to actually run it, and when you join the server you usually download 500 megabytes of anime skins

every time i play garry's mod i get texture errors and stuff, and i have a good pc. so anyway i think we will go ahead and take some live questions from chat, so you guys listening...

just quickly before you do that, one other thing related to that point we were saying lots of people have got started in samp learning to code through pawn, it's quite a simple

language, and a lot of people always ask why we are using pawn when it's such a simple

language... and that is the answer, we use it because it's a simple language, anybody can pick it up. it's an 18+ game but let's face it we have a lot of kids playing, they come along and go okay i want to make my own server how do i do that? well first you need to download this editor and these plugins, and then you download this other compiler and these other things and do this and this and this, and then this and then this and this, and

then you can start writing your first code in this horribly conflicted language. they just go

oh... whereas with samp it was how do i start coding? open this, done.

and you've already got a piece of code to start with as well.

the barrier to entry is zero

put it this way, if i can do it anyone can do it. and that is not an exaggeration!

Potassium learns to code - the video series. when's that happening?

yes, i'm so down for that! but you guys are going to get very angry.

i actually think that would be a realy good series.

i'm very hard to teach, and also i will cry. but that's okay, that's good content i guess! anyway we're gonna take some live questions from chat, so if you guys in the chat have any questions, which i know you do...

someone just asked about GetAsyncKeyState

i'm not sure actually having that is actually a good idea because what samp actually does right now is listening to key events, so what player has mapped it to the gta game itself, so for example when you press F, if you change the F button to i don't know G for example, for interim vehicles when they press G, it's gonna get called on the server side, so what they want and what they were asking is actually sending all the keys, all the key events to the server, which is actually not um a good idea because you can actually run a key logger or stuff like that, and you're gonna have some security issues

it also proves the key layout is then controlled by the server and not the player, and that's kind of weird because if you like using a different keyboard layout, like maybe you like using ESDF which i know some fps players actually use things like that and other layouts for WASD, if you join a server and suddenly all your buttons are kind of different then

it can be kind of confusing. so i mean we could add more keys that can be rebound, but

i think using the games keys actually gives players the ability to customize their sort of

layout and stuff to match them, not the server forcing them to press F if they want to use E for entering cars or something, picking up items, stuff like that

i think how we should handle it is add some actions not keys just a bunch of actions so anyone can bind anything to them

we have Y and N as well that were added at some point, was it H? i can't remember, there were some new keys added at one point. we could do stuff like that, there was a there was actually a key i use... tab is actually a key action, but it's also the scoreboard, so users can't really use it, but if you rebind tab to like something like R, suddenly you've got a new key to

actually rebind on the server side. so there's there's potential there.

yeah a better way is just to have the server define actions and then the client can get that

list of actions and just assign their own keys but then still it's just they've triggered this action they've pressed this key.

yeah and also not allow people to bind every single key on the keyboard and then keylog people.

it won't work because they if they're allowed to bind their own keys they can change it so the keylogger is useless, but they've triggered these actions in this order, what key is that?i don't know

i'm not sure if this is a direct question to us but it just says what is the recommended amount of dedicated rams

everyone laughs

that's jamie

bloody troll

get trolled bro

so i've listed some questions, one of them was about ddos and people attacking other servers which is very common in the spanish community

all communities

yeah, kind of all communities, but in the spanish community there's some guy, stuff like that

oh yeah Graber had to write a weird proxy thing

yyeah and people are now asking about that, for ddos protection

there's nothing we can do about ddos itself

the thing that Graber wrote and, something that i've worked on, and actually you've

worked on this michael, is a proxy, which is kind of awkward to get working because

of how samp quote unquote encrypts data, it uses the ports like a very simple cipher but if you can put a proxy on another server and then use round robin dns or something then that can be a good mitigation technique, so i think providing the tools to do that would be a good thing

there would be a problem though if someone was to ddos the actual load balance or proxy itself then that would ruin it for all servers

yeah but a proxy load balancer is a lot lighter than the game server so you can dedicate multiple threads to actually handle that load, it's kind of how cloudflare and all those proxy services work so you know if you're a big server and you've got the budget then you can

you know rent a bunch of vps's, roundup and dns and put proxies on all of them, and then that kind of takes the load and then your actual real server you can just hide the ip address a bit and no one can ddos it directly

the results of our discussion is if they are actually targeting the server itself not the openmp server for example like the machine itself, if they are targeting that with

a stressor or some kind of exploits, stuff like that, you cannot actually do anything about it. we can fix our job but we can't fix details because that's just how the internet works. if those are exploits or stressor or some kind of ddos tools, stuff like that, if they are

actually targeting openmp server we can find the issue and fix it as soon as possible that

we figure it out, but about the server itself, the machine, there's actually no way we can handle that because there's nothing for us to fix, so that's actually other people's work buying ddos protection, having good servers, paying more

that comes with anyone running any kind of application in production, any kind of server, that's not a specific issue to us

yeah even just a simple website, people can target a website for that to take down the servers

they can target your home router

you just can't stop ddos in software, it's just not possible, they keep saying how can we stop ddos, buy ddos protection, that's it.

basically we can stop it if it's abusing an openmp exploit, otherwise nothing we can do.

it would also be good if we had the community report these to make sure they actually report these issues immediately when they find them because that would just help us

to fix them if something's gonna be on

yeah one of the biggest issues that we had in samp was people couldn't report bugs, there was like some thread or discussions stuff like that and people were reporting bugs or adding suggestions and those messages were get lost in a day.

i remember there was a bug thread that got deleted like three hours after it was created when it had i think it was like 27 or 30 different replies in it, but all bugs, and it was just gone

i found a bug where you could read logs from remotely and no one cared about it and i got no reply

i don't understand this question but Southclaws: sent it to me so it says: samp doesn't support ip failover/alias - will openmp support it?

the reason the reason samp doesn't support that is because it uses the actual port and the address to encrypt its packets, but you can just not do that when the client is out. while we've got to use the samp server we'll be kind of bound to the weird encryption that exists, but after that we can do like a regular udp proxy type thing. and yeah you can do failover

for dns as well.

uh there's also another question that i have in my list that people ask in chat, someone's asked more like a suggestion, can we consider giving servers the ability to add their favicon that is shown on the client next to the server title for example in launcher. we could we can actually do that right now with having even some client or some launcher i mean

yeah with a custom launcher we can actually add a custom rule to the query so we read that in our own launcher

there's servers.net which i wrote three years ago or two years ago or something, i can't remember, i think that actually had the support for a field called "banner" which was meant to be an image that would like be like a graphic you could put in the background of your server page or the server list or something

there is also the fact that now that we've got the indexer you've added login support for users so they could easily even without it being on the server they could technically just log into that and put it on the index and then yeah all the launchers could just go off the indexer

the the plan with the indexer is to basically launch a server and you log into the indexer and the indexer will give you a token like an api token and you put that token into your server config file and now the indexer has verified that you own that server, so then on the indexer's web interface you can go and edit the description, the icon, the image, whatever whatever we end up adding, gifs, i don't know. then you don't have to modify a config file that is on a vps, log in and upload ssh, whatever, you just go to a website and you can just edit it with your browser and it's a lot simpler.

alright before we end for today, people keep asking us to show videos of the progress. so

we don't have that, we don't have videos because there's not really anything to show at

the moment, right?

we have been live streaming recently and showing openmp progress

there's actually nothing to show on a stream or as a video because it's just a simple server application which is like a console

development is occasionally streamed on discord

so if you guys join our discord server Southclaws: and other people do often stream their development and stuff, their progress, in discord, so you just kind of join the discord channel and you watch the stream and you can just join the talk as well and chat and ask questions. we are quite open with it and do a lot of public stuff that you guys can join.

someone just asked about custom ui servers using htmlcs and js. and we have

talked about this a lot and CEF will not be part of it.

um google adsense um sources of

nonsense on your screen yeah also good

looking

so you have to work on xp oh yeah yeah

yeah also cef isn't small

yeah keyboard yeah

there's gonna be a problem with people

who have low end computers

people who have like weak computers to

play

that game so if you want to

know you can just play mta

it's fine like we want judge

i mean eventually i guess we're gonna

have um client-side

c api too right so if we actually add

that

and having that yeah josh i mean

we haven't talked about it yes but

actually having that is actually a good

idea because

uh people can add voice chat by

themselves by interacting

our own api and um

for cef stuff like that they can edit

themselves

if we add c api

so yeah it's probably uh possible

for later users

well we probably won't ever have cef

yeah we're not going to have that built

in not officially

someone else could edit it unofficially

yeah

yeah but i'm not sure we will accept it

in the

registry of official plugins also so

i don't know yeah there are things

someone asked if we have a official map and model editor

uh yeah we have a mirror working a model

viewer

uh not sure

yeah cool

all right uh and we've not really

discussed it so

we could say oh we would like one which

is true but there's no plans to make one

because there are ones already and they

work and they're fine and everyone

knows them

I think we will end it there because i think we answered a lot of questions, but you know if you have more questions please go to our forum or our discord and ask there, because we do want to answer them.

some people are concerned about not being not native speakers and not understanding what we've talked about so we'll try and write it up

yeah i'll try and get a transcript up and then our awesome contacts in other communities can translate for us, that would be great

i mean if you upload it on youtube that should be fairly easy

yeah that's the plan, we're gonna put this on youtube, and i'm gonna try to put it on some

kind of podcast platform too so people can listen to it

i'm sure youtube will generate some very hilarious captions as well

so like we said we do intend to stream regularly from now on, not just q&a sessions but we

would like to stream development progress, i think we talked about doing some community games like stuff like among us and other games that we could all play together, so make sure you follow this channel, join our discord, subscribe on youtube, follow our twitter,

facebook, instagram, sign up to our forum, all that good stuff, everything is linked

you forgot vk

yes vk

there's a reddit as well

everything should be linked below, otherwise we do have a linktree, it's linktr.ee/openmultiplayer i believe, everything is linked on that, but yeah i guess thank you guys for your time, thank you to all the viewers for watching, or listening rather, the link tree link is in the twitch chat right now, uh one more question quickly, are there plans to open a patreon for people wanting to support the project?

we haven't really discussed anything like that

donations are always good but we don't really need them right now

yeah at the moment we don't need them

i think yeah i mean stuff like the server costs and whatever it would be nice

they're fairly cheap

the indexer probably costs like five dollars a month it's like nothing

yeah yeah and the websites are all hosted for free

yeah maybe maybe in the future we'll open up some kind of way that you guys can

support the project if you want to, but you know we're not we're not doing it to make money so that's something we'll discuss

also it's kind of like you're committing even more and i don't think we can just do that

because we all work for a living

alright well thank you guys so much for being here and for answering all these questions,

and thank you twitch chat for being here and for following and everything, we'll see you on discord

thank you for hosting us

you're welcome, see you guys!