[Suggestion] Open:MP and MTA:SA

[Jusonex]

The question is then, why didn't you do it already?

Why do you need open.mp's developers??

Considering how much you've done with MTA, adding compatibility with PAWN seems like a week worth of coding.

It's definitely more than a week of coding. Adding the PAWN virtual machine isn't the problem. The problem is that many SA:MP functions cannot be mapped directly to MTA as they behave differently. So you have to essentially translate all SA:MP function calls into a set of Lua instructions and transform parameters as needed.



An alternative approach we've been brainstorming about is to implement a transpiler that actually "converts" PAWN code to Lua, similar to how https://mta-slipe.com transpiles C# to Lua. The feasibility of that approach depends a bit on the usage of showstoppers like the #emit statement (as it would require an additional bytecode to Lua transpiler), but the big advantage is that you can start immediately with adding new features.

One of our developers has recently written a blog post about that matter: https://qaisjp.com/2019/04/24/exp-transl...o-lua.html



We are in no way SA:MP or PAWN experts, so there are surely pitfalls we don't know about, but open.mp devs do. Also, it's about manpower.

And what would really stop any server from adding the same tag?

[...] Possible solution could be adding a whole another master list where you would have "Multi theft auto" and "San Andreas Multiplayer" servers where San Andreas Multiplayer servers would be limited on what can be done, but are able to switch to Multi theft auto whenever, thus, removing the limitations.

Nothing would stop them from adding the tag unless it's manually managed by MTA moderatiors. I'm personally open for splitting the server list into categories, but I don't think they should be artificially limited as there'd be a pretty big gap between "SA:MP" and MTA servers then that is difficult to overcome.

Or a way for the player to know how big is the download before having to enter to the server, even better, that the player can sort players by how much he would have to download.?

I'm happy to tell you that we've already reacted to issues mentioned in this thread:

• https://github.com/multitheftauto/mtasa-blue/issues/893
  
  
• https://github.com/multitheftauto/mtasa-blue/issues/896 (to get rid of the download performance issues)