The team of people working on Multi Theft Auto, the popular modification that brought multiplayer functionality to GTA III, Vice City and most recently, San Andreas, have announced that it has now become an open source project.

After over 11000 revisions since 2004, contributions by over 16 world-wide developers, 1554 files and well over 550.000 lines of mostly C/C++ code, we have made the decision to re-launch Multi Theft Auto as an open-source project.

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By open sourcing our project, we are encouraging anyone who is willing to participate in this project, to participate. For that reason, we are not "just" offering our source code: we have also opened our bug tracker and will be offering public access to our nightly build system that will be compiling a build every day (and has been long used for testing purposes). This way, any developer will be able to run the latest revisions, file bugs or submit patches.

Some may be concerned with us seemingly throwing our code and all its secrets out on the streets. Remember that, as we have seen in the past, a proper and solid multiplayer modification needs a lot more than just memory addresses and offsets. We hope that developers will be attracted towards contributing to our project, which is fairly straightforward and has an already established user base, instead of starting from scratch.

Exciting news for those of you who still enjoy playing a bit of San Andreas multiplayer, and also those of you who are interested in contributing code to the project. The MTA Team are utilising the services of Google Code to house all development, other facilities are available via the MTA community page.

No new release yet of course, the latest currently available is Developer Preview 2.3, and you can download that version here.

You can read more about MTA going open source over at MultiTheftAuto.com.