Written by Citizen Alpha Sunday, 28 February 2010 18:22

I’m not really all that certain where the renewed interest in the Goodfella’s 2.0 script has cropped up from, nevertheless it would appear I’ve got a lot of people asking me for it again. Maybe people are starting to get the GTA bug under their skin again and are looking for a place to play. I can’t say I’ve been active or interested at all with the current San Andreas Multiplayer scene so it’s hard to gauge what’s out there and what’s quality. If you’re interested in the GF2.0 script you can have it however I’ve got a couple things to say about it first. Read on for that information and the download link.

First and foremost, an SAMP server isn’t just about the code. CCNGTA was a success and a great time for a myriad of reasons. Only one of which being the fact that it had a decent code set. Having the GF2.0 is not going to make your server an instant success. When you make a server you have to think of administration, donations, server hardware, collateral services, community management, staff management, and marketing. Coding comes into play but you focus exclusively on that I promise you no one will play if you lack in any other department.


Next, this code isn’t exactly beginner material. Pawn provides a dot syntax scripting language that’s some customized bastard child of C#. While it does provide a lot of things that help achieve what you’re looking to do it’s not a very powerful language and it wasn’t designed with a MMORPG style script in mind. There’s a lot of "there I did it" duct tape moments in the script because to be frank, there was no other way to do it. You really need to be a creative problem solver to work in this script and there are a lot of issues that were inherited from the Godfather code and a few cases of code aspirations exceeding the languages abilities.

That being said, just like I inherited all the problems with the Godfather script, you will be inheriting all the problems with the 2.0 script. When we made the migration to the 3.0 script we cleaned up a lot of backend problems most notably the catastrophic time bomb issue of the individual configuration files. When you create a web application, or any application for that matter, you need to take into account its ability to scale. The fact that each character has his own configuration file means data will snowball, handicap the backup process, drag down the access time, and eventually spell doom for the whole thing.

Success will be synonymous with failure using this script. If I were you guys I’d take the elements of 2.0 you liked, grab the 3.0 script and revert it back to what you want. I hear a lot of "We’re looking for a good foundation script and we’re going to make heavy modifications." This is not it, 2.0 is an upside down pyramid of sorts and all the great things you remember about playing on CCNGTA when it was 2.0 was thanks to community, staff, and had only a little bit to do with the code. CCNGTA had issues at the end while on the 3.0 code not because 3.0 was entirely to blame, there were a lot of other factors in play that caused the server issues. Unsupported security holes in SAMP, soured player disposition, short staffed, and no time for any of the head admins to manage the server.

All that said, I doubt I’ve swayed many people to work with the 3.0 code instead. I can’t really enforce this but I would appreciate a nod back to the Citizens Coup Network website if you should decide to create a server with Goodfellas 2.0. I’m not going to be selfish and not release the game mode and I would appreciate that mentality to be reciprocated. A lot of people put in a lot of hard work on that script and deserve to be recognized. I won’t be naïve though, I know a lot of people will simply rename it, change a few things and claim it as original. Maybe someone will become fickle and not get the help they want from me or someone here at the Coup and disassociate that way. My main objective is that players somewhere have a good experience with my code, that will have to be reward enough.

Without further ado, here it is: Click here to download Goodfellas 2.0