About this project

Multi Theft Auto (MTA) is an open-source project that adds network play functionality to Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a feature the original single-player game lacks. It works through code injection and hooking techniques, manipulating the game without altering its original files, and installs itself as an extension of the game. The project began in early 2003 as an experimental C/C++ piece and has grown into a multiplayer platform for players and third-party developers. It provides minimal sandbox-style gameplay that can be extended through the embedded Lua scripting language, letting servers run custom game modes with custom content for many online players. Both client and server can run and synchronize Lua scripts layered on top of the game framework's classes and functions. Gameplay content such as Lua scripts, images, sounds, custom models and textures is grouped into "resources" — archives plus a metadata file describing content and dependencies. This design eases transfer of content between clients and servers, allows resources to import functionality from common resources (which are then automatically downloaded and started), and lets administrators control access via user rights. Building is documented for Windows (Visual Studio with C++ desktop workload and MFC, DirectX SDK, project generation scripts) and GNU/Linux (make, GCC 10+, libncurses-dev, libmysqlclient-dev; script or manual premake/make builds for x86, x64, arm and arm64, with ARM described as experimental). A Dockerized build environment is also provided. The repository is licensed under GPLv3 unless otherwise specified.