To our community and fans:

Earlier today at 6:00 PM GMT, we hosted our first instance of a release of Vice City Online since 2009 in the form of a public beta for Developer Preview 1. However, as those who played on this build soon realized, the public beta was nothing short of a disaster.

Certainly we thought that a server of 3, or even 2, people was stable on gamemodes which we’ve been testing and developing for weeks, but not even that worked. The servers were, for some unknown reason, consistently crashing. Deaths, amongst other events were causing crashes that never arose in our tests before the release.

We verified that the build was correct in the installer, and that the server hosts were using the correct builds. Something’s seriously wrong here that we have yet to discover.

So how do we feel about this? Well, for starters, we openly accept any criticisms towards the appalling and terrible quality of the unplayable beta test. We thought that people would have fun today after hard work developing a plethora of features and brand new synchronization. Now, the fun that we hoped for has turned into fun for people to defame us as a modification, as if we were the laughing stock of the century.

We also understand how long you’ve all been waiting for a crappy quality public beta. It’s really pathetic when you put it like that. The public beta turnout was severely lower than we had expected, which in hindsight was for the best, but not the turnout we’d hope to see at future events.

What was the purpose of the public beta? It was certainly not to publicly humiliate us and lose your complete trust. But that’s how it appeared to have manifested itself. That is extremely regrettable.

We’re not going to apologize or make excuses for this, for we had plenty of time to get things right for you. Apologizing would just dust this incident under the rug. We’re also not going to run away from this as if it never happened--we’re fully responsible for the turnout and now we must deal with the consequences of your loss in faith of us. Just don’t forget that one person (opposed to a team of software developers) is managing tens of thousands of lines of code on a daily basis and that we historically have the smallest team out of all GTA multiplayer modifications.

For those wondering why the test ended prematurely, it was out of the fact that it was unplayable and we wanted to save ourselves further embarrassment. If you’re able to contact team members with a server build (i.e. Ricoow and Yoshifirebird), you’re more than welcome to continue testing on your own time.

So, what’s next? Well, that all depends on how badly the public wants us to fix our embarrassing builds and how badly the public wants to see us progress further. If everyone’s lost complete faith in us, we will move onto something else, leaving VC behind. However, if there’s still hope for us to continue developing VC-O, we will continue to develop a quality build which is representative of our tests within the team, only with a much larger number of players in mind.

What about February 10th? There is virtually no way to fix everything in less than 5 days, given that we don’t have enough people now to test and we’re short an executive consultant (Mex is now inactive due to personal reasons). If the test went how we planned it to (a limited amount of replicable crashes and general bugs to be fixed), Februrary 10th would be green-lit.

We make no further promises for anything, no matter how certain we think we are, as we can now see point-blank that it just leads to false hope and embarrassment. VC-O RC1 led to embarrassment with Patch 2, which broke weapon sync, and now this. We can’t continue this way. We’re obviously doing something wrong, which myself and DECEiFER have just heavily disputed. We have devised several plans of action which we will continue to analyze until we reach a solid agreement, and act on those actions as soon as possible.

Thank you for your time today and we’re sorry if we wasted an hour of it for you. We’re just asking for your continued trust in our ability to work with VC (but you can laugh at us on the side if you want to--but great things are to come and we will gladly prove wrong any of your doubts).

We will have more information concerning changes and future plans in the coming days / weeks. Please do not badger us, as there are a lot of issues to be worked out within our limited availabilities.

Stay tuned!

As we have been steadily approaching our Developer Preview 1 (DP1) release deadline of January 22, 2012, it has become increasingly apparent to us through extensive testing and development that we, unfortunately, are no longer able to abide by the date which we confidently supplied to you in our video just over three weeks ago. We do understand your anticipation for our long-awaited release, which is exactly why we are not able to release it on the 22nd as planned. Since we were not able to gather enough concrete data through our progressively small tests, which would be representative of a mass-test such as the Developer Preview 1, we cannot conclude that this build will be playable on scales of 20-50, or even more players at a time on a server. The following explains our reasoning for this, along with our easily acceptable new release date.

If you were around for our release of Vice City Online RC1 years back, you will probably remember that the first build showed telltale signs of not being tested because it was consistently crashing and there were embarrassing mistakes evident. Not only that, but our master server was also consistently changing hosts, for we had not settled on a firm agreement on which company would be hosting it. Additionally, you will probably also remember that there wasn't a whole lot to do in terms of stock game modes--you had to practically script everything yourself for a long while until our Executive Consultant Mex developed and released his VCO Lua Extensions (VLE) scripting API, which eased the process tremendously and actually made scripting fun.

What kind of product were we releasing back then? It was a primitive product which existed solely for experimentation and which was not intended for public release by any means. We had no idea at the time how it would behave with more than five players on a server. The whole concept of creating a multiplayer GTA was still new and fresh to all of us.

Immediately following the release of our last VCO RC1 patch, we were in the process of working on RC2, which featured improved synchronization, improved stability, and more features (some of which were just prototypes at the time for systems we have implemented in our DP1). Despite these facts, it was still mostly a research project. On a positive note, it greatly expanded our knowledge of the game and gave us a new leaf on what we were able to do with the game. It was also in this period that we developed documents which would prepare ourselves for an entirely new team structure and website. We like to consider this as our transition period. Unfortunately, this is also the time that you--the public--was mostly in the dark with what we were doing. Just to give you an idea of how long this period was, it lasted from the moment after our last patch for VCO RC1 up until about a few months after our merge with the GTA: State of Liberty project.

Soon after, we decided that the RC2/SOLO prototype wrapper/game engine was not going to be released because the cost and efficiency of the performance was too high and there were loose ends in terms of the features and functionality available. Thus, the entire source code was entirely scrapped and re-done, and the methodologies of reverse engineering have been revised and optimized.

Ever since that decision, it's been a scramble to balance optimization with features in a timely manner. We have been working quickly in order to deliver a product of our highest caliber which would give Vice City the best chance it had as a multiplayer game. In a sense, instead of a "rush job," we have actually taken the time to do everything pertaining to this project at a comfortable pace correctly. It was our mistake to hide our progress to the public, which we now see generated much mistrust and disinterest in not only this project, but even worse, in Vice City as a game!

What are we asking you for? We need just three more weeks to maximize everything up to the standards of a Developer Preview (essentially a public beta). Specifically, we are promising to release the final build of DP1 up to and including Februrary 10th, 2012. To further boost insight, we will also be hosting a public beta test up to and including February 5th, 2012. Advance notice will not be supplied if we decide to release sooner than the maximized dates--please make sure to check for any updates. We don't want to fulfill false promises. However, keep in mind that as a reward for your patience, you will, at long last, have proper fun in Vice City!

Also, keep in mind that this is still a Developer Preview. The public beta will give us insight into fixing last-minute crashes directly before the release of the final product. Still, a Developer Preview is essentially still beta software, and has the capability of being expanded and refined. We hope to see you there for both our public beta and our developer preview releases!

With the holiday season passing and the recent venture into the new year, we have been busier than ever before, fueled by our holiday spirit. To show you how much spirit we attained, it is our pleasure to publicly announce our long-awaited release of our developer preview of Vice City Online on Sunday, January 22, 2012 which will showcase our state-of-the-art multi-player core.

Ever since the merge between the Vice City Online and GTA: State of Liberty projects, our team has made it their mission to not only deliver a multi-player for, but also to provide a high-quality, professional, and feature-packed stand-alone modification for GTA: Vice City. Our new VC-O promotional video, released on Sunday, January 1, 2012, showcased the basic features of our mission statement, including our state-of-the-art synchronization and magnificent stability. We hope that you noticed drastic improvements from our RC1 promotional video which was released exactly three years earlier than our new promotional video.

To provide some insight on our new features, our name tag system has been upgraded to industrial standards, comparable to popular multi-player games today. Alpha blending, anti-aliasing, and camera-based clipping are just some of the features of the new name tag system. Additionally, the developer preview features new and exciting opportunities to add to the Vice City multi-player scene. These features include, but are not limited to civilians, vectorized vehicle rotation, full control over spheres and coronas, and client-side scripting.

We haven't forgotten about our server owners and Lua scripters either. Vice City Online now takes advantage of the full potential of Lua 5.2. Instead of adding functionality only at a global level, we have taken things up a notch by adding functionality at a functional level, which adds to the speed, easiness, and efficiency of scripting. Systems which use this new style of scripting include, but are not limited to, our timer, callback, and command systems. For those who are curious, we plan to showcase over 300 functions as early as our developer preview release!

For those of you who were expecting a full-fledged release of GTA: State of Liberty Online, we have not forgotten about you! Unfortunately, we are still working on the map as fast as we can, and thus a firm release date is still unknown. We are hoping that the developer preview will also raise awareness of the mapping side of the project and thus lead to capable mappers and modelers joining the team. Nevertheless, you can rest assured that once the map is ready, we will release a full-fledged version of GTA: State of Liberty Online, opposed to just Vice City Online. In preparation for this, we plan to make GTA: State of Liberty Online cross-compatible with Vice City Online to meet your demands for the map you want to play on while also maintaining the same level of multi-player and functionality.

After the developer preview is released, we will hopefully be receiving bug reports and feedback from the community to prepare for Vice City Online 1.0 (final). The more feedback and interest we receive, the quicker a release will be. We are currently projecting a release for Vice City Online 1.0 (final) within the first half of 2012.

This video showcases Vice City Online 1.0 with similar functionality as RC1, however in a much more evolved and reliable state.

We decided to embrace our nostalgia and replicate the scenes from the old "Vice City Online - RC1 Promotional Video," which coincidentally was released on January 1, 2009 - exactly three years ago!

Original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwRp7rDjwTc

Re-uploaded in HD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYRf1fAwV8E&hd=1

More details will be released tomorrow (January 2nd, 2012).

Please check out our brand-new blog. It's going to be the primary source of all things State of Liberty. The blog will contain all news posts, whereas this site will only be updated with major "breaking news."

http://blog.gtastateofliberty.com

Stay tuned and please subscribe for your regular dose of updates.