Nota en español / Spanish note: El post se encuentra en español al final de todo (v1). Post is in spanish at the end (v1).
Hey guys, Vari here, an old veteran from pawnoscripting.com and zonerol.net (from 2009-2013 lapse)
I'm a spanish speaker so the post will be in spanish at the end as well.
I'm here to talk about have a RP project running in 2024. Is this interesting for anyone? Let me know in the comments.
Prepare yourself for a large post, probably updated through time from now on.
1. Who am I?
As I said, a SAMP veteran. You can call me Vari.
I am 28 years old and I have 14 years in programming. I started back in 2010 with Pawn and, today, I'm a professional. I work with Javascript (React.js and Node.js) mainly. I also do some graphic design with Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma and I work a bit w Premiere Pro.
One of my dreams was always to have a great SAMP Roleplay community, both spanish/english speaken (two cloned servers).
2. Why this project?
It all started modding the original GTA SA with around 20 mods, including V Graphics. This was an amazing experience for me, and I thought that we could enjoy these graphics in SAMP... sad notice is that we can't. We could only create a client-installer to install DirectX 2.0 and that's it I guess.
Apart from graphics, I think this project as a big one, a serious one, like all my projects. I started thinking on this cause I saw plenty of players playing last night, both in Spanish and English servers... so I say to myself: why not? I have all the tools needed; knowledge, time (not too much) and money. I only need a team. But wait, very good news are at the end of this tunnel.
My idea is to have an active community in both cloned servers (english/spanish). I want to be able to get into the server at anytime and see, at least, 50-60 people connected and going around LS. I think the idea is not too crazy :) there are a lot of people waiting for a good server!
3. Good and bad things
One of the most important things today is that I don't have too much time. I mean, time to spend programming for SAMP, or moderating forums/communities. For this problem I have one solution and this is: we need a team. And I'm going to start talking as us, cause we need to start feeling the sense of community here, where each one of us create the necessary atmosphere to play and aport a bit of something. Players, moderators, mappers, scripters, designers. These maybe are the bad things, but still, hold on, I have the big power-bomb despite being alone for now.
The biggest good thing in all of these is that I have all the job done. I don't have time today, but I had it twelve years ago when I created Zonerol.net, one of the most interesting projects of my life. And I have it right now, and it works. With this, we have 80-85% of the IG job done.
4. Zonerol Gamemode
Zonerol was big part of my life, despite it lived for less than a year. I learned how to program thank to this, and thank to that I have a very good life today.
Zonerol is a big RP project, did it from scratch, from an empty file, by two young boys called Vari (I) and Bruno (one of my best friends).
Zonerol may have some bug as all systems in the world, but we loved to do fine-tunning and be perfectionist in everything, so I can assure you that Zonerol is more than enough for everyone who want to spend a good time roleplaying with friends. The job did by us is incredible and full of things to start playing soon!
Want to know about this gamemode in detail? Check this album full of screenshots and keep reading until the end! (or go to point 7)
5. New ways of roleplaying / Rethink the roleplay
I think that we all need to have a refresh of what roleplaying is in SAMP today, or at least what we want to do with this project. Thing is that more than ten years have passed and everything change through time. Is indispensable to rethink the wheel a little bit here. Why? cause we all want to have fun quickly IG, and don't waste time doing stupid things. Maybe some of us don't have too much time to play every week, so we want to assure you that you will have fun every time you get into the server, even if it's your first time, or if you are the leader of LCN.
One thing that I can say and it comes to my mind right now is: forums are very nice (I love them) but we can't force the players to enroll a forum or a web-panel to postulate to factions or that kind of things... as I said before, we want to spend time having fun quickly, and forums are nice but will NOT be mandatory for important processes like the one I said (enroll a faction). Of course, the leader of each faction will have a bit more of responsibility over his board / his faction members. Server will be all text based, we could have Discord rooms to keep us AFK / Playing, but IG will be text 100%.
6. Open source or private?
What is better? Do we need to keep the gamemode private and create a team, or do we need to upload it to GitHub and create a community, where a principal team will approve / decline Pull Requests? Let me know your thoughts! In anycase, we need to create a serious team.
7. Zonerol (Big description)
And the big fish is here, Zonerol. A gamemode based in LS mainly.
Zonerol is a very complete gamemode, full of things to see and enjoy. You can start watching this album full of screenshots, mostly headquarters and maps.
But you have it everything: a system to create accounts IG (and they will be created in a MySQL database), an introduction tutorial, not too long but a bit boring, where it explains quickly some concepts. You can go to LSPD and you will be able to rent a bike and start your journey quickly. We inject some money in the server as start-point and money evolves IG alone as players do transactions, a very interesting system (but old and probably useless today). You will see a lot of amazing maps and systems in the screenshots above.
Factions in this gamemode are 12:
Government, LSPD, Hospital, Taxi/Buses, Bodyguards, Car/Mechanical Workshop, Hot Wheels, CNN (Journalists), LCN, YKZ, Traffickers, Licenses Center. I think some of them are useless, we need an important update here.
.Government is a bit useless I guess.
.LSPD is amazing, it has an incredible interior mapping (watch the album!) and plenty of commands to play!
.Hospital is a faction with not too much sense but I have in mind a nice rework to make it enjoyable! Read the next point.
.Taxi/Buses is another faction highly useless if we stop and re-think the way players mostly travels the entire map; they always drive themselves. Some cases, not too much, we need a taxi at the beggining problably, why not to make it a job instead? good idea! if there are no taxis available, we can always rent a bike.
.Bodyguards are a good faction, with a very nice map and commands.
.Car/Mechcanics are one of the best factions, they always have work in a server where the vehicle damage is saved. Also, they sells tools to steal cars. We can rework this faction a little bit to add more interesting things around steal / buy / sell cars illegaly through this faction and Hot Wheels.
.Hot Wheels are the one that sells cars in Grotti mainly, they can also steal cars (member level 0, thief) and resell them legally. A very good faction that can work along Car/Mechanics and create very good roles between illegal / legal factions.
.CNN another incredible faction, full of stuff to do reports and play in group! Their job is so useful for the life of the game, cause they are always in the most important scenario covering the most important ropleplays for all the players in the server. They can do radio globally, and also global reports in vans and helicopters. CNN is fuc**** insane!!
.LCN is of course one of the best factions, but is not too useful since they don't have an specific role to cover IG. Maybe they could work with Traffickers to sell guns and drugs, that will be a good deal but we need to rework a little bit the factions and the guns/drugs system. Don't remember well if we had black market or something else. They are located close to Grotti, in the hills.
.YKZ same as before but they are in the opposite part of the map (close to Grove Street over the route to Las Venturas)
.Traffikers they are able to create guns based on materials created before, and cultivate / harvest marihuana (and create other drugs I guess) to sell it later. I don't remember what drugs makes to the player IG (apart from the crazy camera) but I have an interesting rework for these all. See next point.
. License Center a nice faction but useless today, we can rework this to create a mini-game to obtain all the licenses needed. We have licenses for: cars, boats, guns and I think for fishing.
Jobs in this gamemode are 5:
Thief, Street Sweeper, Fisher, Truck Driver and Boxer.
.Thief: Don't remember but I think you can get close to someone and steal money from it from time to time to not abuse this functionality.
.Street Sweeper: You need to clean the city in some checkpoints, its a bit boring since they are not too much but its OK to start.
.Fisher: Don't remember but I think you can fish and sell the fishes in some stores around LS.
.Truck Driver: Don't remember at all lol
.Boxer: ?? xD
Some interesting stuff:
.Car system: I know you can buy / sell cars trough Hot Wheels faction, but you can also use your car as storage to store weapons, armor, drugs and I think even more than that. If I remember well, cars have 5 slots. Cars are loaded from MySQL, so I don't have a way to show this feature right now since I don't setted up the database the time that I took the screenshots (during pandemic). We'll need to review and check the whole system and make all the necessary tests (like add/remove cars and so on, we had always issues with IDs and so on I remember xD). Cars for buy / sell are loaded from MySQL BEFORE (idk) static vehicles (like faction vehicles) to not alter IDs and stuff I guess. Of course you can close/open your car, tunning it in the Car workshop I guess (but I don't remember if changes made to the car are saved in SQL after a server restart), Refuel the vehicle in Gas Stations and more (like steal them and sell it to Hot Wheels with certain tools). A very nice and complete system. This is extended to boats.
.On-sell property system: One of the best, if not the biggest / best one. We loaded the houses through MySQL as well and they have coords for the external doors, internal doors, storage like the vehicles (for weapons, fishes, drugs, etc) and I think you can also cook your fishes to eat it and restore life. You can also rent the house to others BUT I don't remember well about this feature lol. We'll need to review this system as well in deep and make necessary changes, we'll also need to create a quick command like /createonsellproperty to create houses IG quickly in each door lol. Houses has the ability to have a garage as well, to park the car inside.
.On-sell business system: Same as before but to have business, a good one but I think we need to rework it to generate a system that can create profits eventually and a more interesting engagement. I think mafia can extort these businesses.
.Guns system: you can carry your weapon in your back, throw it to the floor and take it again, and more.
.More systems like drug system, cellphone (calls and sms), etc.
I still need to set up the server again and make an in-deep walkthrough through it. This time with all the MySQL stuff running (cars, boats, houses and businesses)
.Language system: Learn chinese, italian, portuguese and german, to speak in private in front of others. This system needs a fresh rework in LS (I think university is located in San Fierro)
8. What we need to do: corrections and systems
.Section under development (I'm writing it, be patient!)
Server is full spanish (100%) so we need to copy the gamemode and translate everything to english, but that is not hard to do, it only takes time.
First of all, we need to put old Zonerol in GitHub as v1, running OK with everything and adapted to OpenMP.
I have this idea of rethink the roleplay in mind and this comes with a lot of useful ideas. Mainly, the idea to make that everything in the game has to have a sense. If not, we are playing for "nothing". For example, take drugs in this server is useless if I remember well, because you only got a crazy camera and colours for a while. But... what if drugs can "heal" you? like 5 grams of marihuana for 100% of health. This makes the roleplaying so much interesting since you will want to carry drugs to heal yourself sometimes (roleplaying it, of course, not taking marihuana in the middle of gun shots lol).
This way, other stuff can be related to this idea of playing around the player life. For example, what if you can eat a burguer for 5$ and that heals you 5%? what if I take a combo for 15-20 usd and that heals me 15-20%? Sounds interesting... at first sight at least.
9. What can I do?
Nowadays, as I said, I don't have too much time. But as you can see, I can put almost 80% of the server code working and adapted to OpenMP. Apart from that, I can put some money to keep the server hosted on AWS and a website/forum. I also know how to administrate the forum and how to make graphic design so I can spend some time over that, but that's it. I'll need a lead scripter and, probably, one or two helpers plus. I can take the lead deciding with the lead scripter which reworks to do and maybe giving a hand to them. I'll also need designers, at least one or two. Same for mappers, but we can have 0 mappers for now, thank God we have a lot of mapping from old times, did it by myself and the community.
I can't spend time programming for this project, that's the bad one, but I did it ten years ago and thank to that we have an exclusive gamemode never released to the community to start playing very soon!! So we only need to create a teams and put hands on!
10. Join the team / community!
Even if you are not a scripter, mapper or whatever, only a person that want to share your life experiences / samp experiences and be part of a community, you are welcome and we neeed you! because every person, every comment from now on, every active player will have an impact in a community born.
Help me and we can create a very good one together! Let me your comment here and we can start talking.