GTA Four.com - Grand Theft Auto 4

First of all, a happy new year to all our visitors, hope 2009 is a great year for you ignoring all the economic problems and whatnot!If you're reading this, you're now viewing version 4 of The GTA Place. At the moment the changes you'll see are purely aesthetic ones. We will be adding numerous new features and content over the coming weeks. We hope you like the new design. It should be working perfectly on the vast majority of modern browsers we were able to test, though if you spot any issues or bugs with any part of the site then let us know in the forums.

Modders in the community will be happy to know that texture file editing has now been made possible with the latest update aru has made to his excellent SparkIV tool. This latest update also includes the following features and fixes:QUOTE - Support for Texture File editing with Import (replace only) functionality- Support for viewing Texture mipmaps and viewing colour channels separately- Support for showing most of the filenames in Audio RPF (v3) files.- Support for launching external registered editors based on extension- Fixed some bugs with IMG file savingYou can Download SparkIV here which will take you to the GTAF thread (download link in first post).

In my last news post regarding the state of the GTA IV modding scene I talked about various tools currently in development by members of the community. Today we have another to add to the list. I mentioned OpenIV in the first mod round-up here, and since then it has gone through a number of versions in closed beta testing. Today they have just released the first public beta version of 0.8, and the tool is now a very powerful piece of software, and is comparable to SparkIV for those of you who have already used that.OpenIV's already extensive feature list includes the following (download links at end of post):

TGTAP would like to wish all our visitors a Merry Christmas and happy new year! Hope you're all enjoying the holiday season, I would do one of the infamous "don't drink and drive" safety speeches but this is a GTA fansite, none of us even care do we!? Plus it's not my style ;).Rockstar are also celebrating the Christmas period with the release of some cool new wallpapers and screensavers, Celestial Deities and Rockstar Monolith, check them out over at their 2008 winter wallpaper collection.Have a good one!Psst. Look out for our brand new design going live on new year's day!

A lot of progress is being made in terms of where we're getting in modding GTA IV on a large scale. Numerous talented programmers in the community are busy creating some excellent tools to aid us in modifying the game to our heart's content. This post is essentially a round up of some of the recent developments.SparkIVSparkIV is a very promising IMG/RPF archive viewer and editor being created by aru. It's still heavily in public beta stages but already very powerful. Not all features are finished yet and there may be bugs, but it's looking like this is going to be the main successor to the GTA3 era's famous IMG Tool. Download SparkIV.Alice

Gunner over at GTA4Mods has just given me the heads up that his mod manager, 4 Mod Installer, the first mod manager to be released for GTA IV is now online. Gunner, who has been working on the tool for over 6 months now, has created this tool to simplify the mod installing process for GTA IV.Similar to Vice City's VCM mods and San Andreas' SAMI, 4MI has both a mod packager and a mod installer. The packager creates .4mi files which can then be distributed online, allowing other GTA IV players to download and, using the installer, add into their game. 4MI also enables modding of GTA IV without the use of a patch, which is so far what users wanting to mod the game have had to use.QUOTE How does this work?Simply extract all contents of the zip somewhere and then run the exe of your choice.To add mods to the list simply drag the .4mi files in the /mods/ folder.

Rockstar have released 8 brand new screenshots showing off scenes from episode one of the Xbox 360's downloadable content, The Lost and Damned. Click the thumbnails below for the high res versions.

Earlier tonight the first trailer for The Lost and Damned premiered at the 2008 Spike TV Video Game Awards. Grand Theft Auto IV won three of the seven awards it was nominated for, "Game Of The Year", "Best Action Adventure Game", and "Best Performance By A Human Male" for Michael Hollick as Niko Bellic.The action-packed trailer gives us an insight in what to expect from the DLC. Watch below via YouTube.

The patch promised by Rockstar for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV has now been released. Start up GTA IV and connect to LIVE to initiate the download. The patch is 32.6MB and will take a few minutes to install. It should fix the following issues:

• A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
• Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays.
• Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice.
• Fix for ATI 1900 shadows.
• Overall savings to memory.
• Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors.
• Multiplayer character settings are preserved.
• Support for DirectInput controllers.

Let us know if it's helped improve things for you in our forums.Thanks to gamerzworld for the heads up.

Microsoft launched a mini-site for Grand Theft Auto IV's downloadable content for the Xbox 360 last night. On it they included three screenshots of The Lost and Damned which we haven't seen before. Unfortunately they aren't high resolution but we'll update them if get some better versions.

Just a short note to inform anybody here looking one of Switch's many mods. Switch has decided to leave The GTA Place for personal reasons. Many users will be sad that his mods are no longer here, but he has informed me that he does plan on starting up his own website for distributing his mods from now on, so best of luck to him with that.To end this short post on a more positive note, I just want to let everyone know that the changes we're planning on making to TGTAP are still on track, we hope to get everything done ready for new year, so look out for exciting new things including a new layout after the Christmas period.

With GTA IV out now for PC and with modifications to the game already hitting the community, I have been extremely excited about all of the modding possibility's that will be available with this version of the game that are just not possible on the console versions. It has caused me want to be involved more than ever in making mods for everyone looking for something new and exciting to experience in their PC version of GTA IV. As one of the biggest GTA modders on the scene with millions of downloads, my mods on almost every GTA fan site out there, modifications in at least 3 major magazines that I know of and my GTA mods being used in every country in the world, I have come to the point in my career that I must ask you the GTA community that I love for some support.

As promised by Rockstar and ATi last week, ATi have today released updated Catalyst drivers (version 8.12) that should give gamers with ATi graphics cards improved performance when playing Grand Theft Auto IV.Head over to ATi Catalyst drivers to download the latest version. It's recommended all ATi users upgrade. For those of you with nVidia cards who might have missed last weeks update, nVidia put out some beta drivers which many gamers report improves the framerate when playing GTA IV, you can get those at nZone.com.Let us know if these new ATi drivers improve your game performance.

TIME magazine has named Grand Theft Auto IV as the number one video game of the year 2008. The well known magazine has a "Top 10 of Everything" each year, and I think it comes as no surprise to many people that GTA IV topped the video game list. Well done to Rockstar Games and all the studios that worked on the game. Here's the full list:

1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Braid
3. LittleBigPlanet
4. Rock Band 2
5. Gears of War 2
6. Dead Space
7. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
8. Hunted Forever
9. Fieldrunners
10. Spore

Source: TIME

Less than one week after it's release, some people have already been successful in modding Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC. Some files in GTA IV are hash protected - a tactic employed by many games companies to prevent people from modifying the games, this probably has something to do with the Hot Coffee fiasco, but there are some workarounds already out there.First GTA IV mods

IGN have recently participated in a conference call with several Rockstar Games employees; including Lead QA Arthur Chiang, Technical Director Kevin Hoare, and VP of Development Jeronimo Barrera. There's 3 pages of questions and answers to graphics and community related questions. Here's one quote I think sums up a lot of forum users:QUOTE IGN: Then why do you think this has reached the level of proliferation through the online gaming media as it has because a lot of games are released for the PC and they all have technical issues with various hardware setups but this one seems to be more prominent than most. If it is just an expected volume of user problems, as you say, then why the furor?

It seems the outraging gamers have got to Rockstar Games, and they've finally put a public face on things and made a post over at GTAForums. The Rockstar Toronto 'spokesperson', who by the way is still adamant that only "several users" are experiencing problems despite all GTA forums being full of complaining users, assures us that a patch will be coming in the next few days that sorts out some of the issues players are having. Additionally, nVidia and ATi appear to be preparing updated driver releases which supposedly help the game run better.QUOTE We are working on making a patch available in the next few days. Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a Games For Windows – Live game the patch must be certified by Microsoft before release. The patch is already at Microsoft and we expect a speedy approval.The patch contains a variety of fixes including:

Today, Rockstar Games and Spike TV announced that the downloadable content for Xbox 360 users of GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, will premiere at the 2008 Video Game Awards, live Sunday December 14 at 9:00pm on Spike TV.No further details were given in the press release, however we can be pretty sure we'll be seeing previews of some of the new content the DLC has to offer. This episode is due to be released on February 17th.Source: PRNewsWire

Rockstar have sent us a message regarding the issues some people are experiencing on their installations of Grand Theft Auto IV. They are advising people having problems to contact their local technical support helpline, or use Rockstar's online support page.QUOTE Hey guys,We are aware that a small number of fans are having problems running GTA IV on their PC’s and we would like to assure them we are working to help solve these as quickly as possible. We would ask anyone that is encountering difficulties to contact their local technical support helpline for advice and recommendations. These telephone numbers can be found in the game’s manual.

Having problems getting GTA IV to run on your PC? Rockstar have uploaded a few documents to their GTA IV support page.This GTA IV error codes document explains all the common errors such as the MMA10 error, and how to fix them. To get rid of MMA10, you can sign out of Social Club as a temporary fix.Another document explains each graphics setting in GTA IV, you may wish to read about this if you want to make the game look better, or if it's running too jerky, reduce some of the settings that will help it run smoother.