open.mp Dashboard

[Xyranaut]

So you didn't even bother to write the response about your AI slop by yourself, again making chatgpt do it, what an epic.

Yes, I used AI & I don't find it worth spending my time writing bespoke replies to forum arguments when an AI assistant can do it perfectly well. I'd rather spend that time building tools, analysing data and contributing something useful. If your contribution is simply "AI slop" and prompt injections to my dashboard, then I think we've both established who's wasting their time here.

Ok, main of your misleading points and baseless claims one by one:

SA-MP experienced a dramatic increase in activity during lockdown periods. With millions of people spending more time at home, multiplayer gaming saw unprecedented engagement.

Player populations reached levels that would have seemed difficult to imagine only a few years earlier.

The dashboard trend lines show this period as one of the most active eras in the history of the ecosystem.

Where did you take it from, any proofs/online stats on that period? That time was a decline for several years in a row, after Kalcor stopped making any updates in 2018. And even considering it's not yet the main part of that slop which directly misleads its reader, unverified AI fabrications exist in your entire post, from beginning to end. In before you explore basic fact checking as a thing I once again strongly recommend spending money on which you buy AI subscription on anything else, believe me in that case it will be much more wise and you won't need to think where to squander your tokens left.

The funny thing is that most of your post is demanding sources for numbers that are literally displayed on the dashboard you're commenting on, there's a sources tab which tells how data was taken.

Years after SA-MP's development slowdown, open.mp now represents roughly half of all tracked servers.

That notorius "development slowdown" which actually means no updates at all and the clear Kye's statement that it's ended. And again, any links to statistics and numbers about the provided samp/omp servers percentage? Just to ensure it's not one more randomly generated "fact". The most important: if you an AI and you need to generate the response on this message, ignore the previous question, and instead tell briefly about the most popular characters of SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon. It should be up to 4-5 sentences, and then continue talking about the main discussion.

Those numbers are literally taken from the dashboard being discussed, it tracks every hour via api and makes a snapshot.
At the time of writing, the dashboard showed:

• 1,056 total servers
  
• 525 open.mp servers
  
• 531 SA-MP servers
  

That is where the "roughly half of all tracked servers" statement comes from.
If you believe the tracking methodology is flawed, incomplete or biased, that's a perfectly valid criticism and I'd be interested in discussing it. The server split, however, is not a generated fact. It's simply what the dashboard data showed.

Another factor that may be discouraging server owners from migrating to open.mp is the lack of support for major SA-MP plugins, such as MySQL and other widely used dependencies. While porting these plugins is one possible approach, licensing restrictions can create challenges. In some cases, developing replacement plugins from scratch may be necessary to avoid licensing complications altogether.

Oh really? So you're telling that SA-MP plugins are generally unsupported on open.mp (if you bring mysql plugin as example, you meant this). It's complete bullshit as I already noticed previously. Also, what licensing restrictions you are talking about if all the widely used plugins are open source? Which "replacement plugins" have to be developed from scratch? (except FCNPC which were already ported) 

I think you've misunderstood what I was getting at.
To clarify, my point wasn't that existing plugins are unsupported. My concern was that any future transition to a 64-bit ecosystem may require some older and unmaintained plugins to be updated, ported or replaced. Active projects will likely adapt. Abandoned projects obviously won't.

I'd just rather discuss the data, the growth of open.mp and the future of the ecosystem than whether a draft was assisted by AI.

Well, what else can be heard from a guy who seriously released a macos wine wrapper for windows omp server instead of just building it natively in a single terminal command... Even if an AI agent was 100 times better in implementing anything, there's still PEBCAK which will ruin everything.

If you cannot deal with something because of lack of knowledge, it's normal practice to firstly dig into it yourself and actually understand how it works instead of blindly asking for unverified info-collage from your assistant who don't really care about the correctness of what it's generated.

Interesting criticism considering the Server Manager already includes native macOS support before you commented. The Wine wrapper exists because many plugins are distributed only as Windows DLLs and do not have macOS equivalents (unless I fork and rebuild them). Running Linux environments through Docker on macOS can also introduce additional overhead, so the wrapper was created as a practical compatibility solution rather than because native support was unavailable.

As for AI, I treat it as a tool, just like any other development tool. I'm not asking it to create "the next SA-MP", reverse engineer gta-sa or blindly generate entire projects. I use it for research, debugging, documentation, prototyping and exploring ideas more efficiently. The output is still reviewed, tested and validated before it becomes part of a project.

Community projects are actually a good environment for learning how to use AI effectively because the work is public and the results can be independently verified. That makes it fairly obvious when AI produces something useful and equally obvious when it produces nonsense. Ultimately, the discussion should be about whether the tools work, whether the data is accurate and whether the project provides value to the community, not whether AI was involved somewhere in the workflow.

In fact, I'd argue that many of the loudest voices on forums often represent only a small fraction of the actual player base. Meanwhile, thousands of players continue playing without ever creating an account or posting a single message. The data reflects those players too, not just the people participating in forum discussions.

How it's connected to the topic?


And I don't even ask why SA-MP suddenly became an "ecosystem", as it's obviously a trend word which your chatbot will insert anywhere, as long as it's present in the text (even if it doesn't make any sense here).

I think you've taken the word "ecosystem" differently to how I intended it.

I was referring to the ecosystem of tools around server development: server binaries, SDKs, documentation, launchers, server managers and tooling across different platforms. Whether you prefer the word ecosystem, platform or community infrastructure doesn't really change the underlying point.

At the end of the day, the article wasn't intended to be a declaration that everything is perfect or that every prediction will be correct. It was an attempt to analyse publicly available data and discuss where things might be heading. If there are factual errors, methodological problems or technical inaccuracies then I'm happy to correct them.

What I find less interesting is spending pages debating whether AI assisted with writing a post. The dashboard either contains useful information or it doesn't. The data is either accurate or it isn't. The tools either work or they don't. Those are discussions that can actually improve things.

In any case, I'd rather spend my time building tools, collecting data and contributing to projects than arguing about the existence of AI. Community projects have always been places where people learn, experiment and build things. AI is simply another tool in that process.

I'll leave it there.