Chris

Rockstar have today released 9 new screenshots which were shown at E3 yesterday during Sony's conference.

During Sony's conference at E3 tonight, a GTAV console bundle exclusively for the PS3 was announced. The bundle contains a 500GB PS3 console, a copy of GTAV, a GTAV branded headset with a dedicated GTA sound scheme, and 30 days of PlayStation Plus. This package will be available on the same day the game is released, September 17th, and will cost $ 299 in the US. We'll let you know if any further details come through such as international availability and pricing. We're not sure how many people are still in the market for a current-gen console, especially with the PS4 and Xbox One releases imminent, and $ 299 does seem a lot for an old console, but nevertheless this will be available for those who want it.

Social media, namely Facebook and Twitter, has been the death of forums. Only the massive ones survive today (GTAForums is pretty much the only active one left in our community). There are other reasons too, MrLlamaLlama summed them up quite well in a similar topic that was made last year.

Rockstar have today released a much needed update to Grand Theft Auto III for iOS. Version 1.30 of the game adds features that many players have hoped would be added, myself included. The full change log is as follows. iPhone 5 support and iCloud save games and sync support are an extremely welcome additions which we're sure many players will be happy about. Two other noticeable yet unmentioned fixes include a slightly refreshed app icon, as well as this they have finally fixed the name of the app, which now correctly says "GTA III". Lovely stuff. You can update GTA III right now from the App Store on your devices, or from iTunes. If you don't already own a copy, here's a link to the iTunes store page, it'll currently set you back just $ 4.99 (£2.99 / 3,99 €).

Rockstar have just announced two special edition versions of GTA V that are now available for pre-order, and unlike other games (such as CoD) which bundle stupid, pointless crap with their game, Rockstar have included some pretty nice stuff with theirs. All pre-orders will additionally get access to pilot the Atomic Blimp (pictured above), "hawking Los Santos’ finest tire company (whose products are available in any LS Customs garage)." First up, the Special Edition, this includes: Click the image above for full details The Grand Theft Auto V Collector’s Edition includes all the contents of Grand Theft Auto V Special Edition as described above plus: Click the image above for full details. via Rockstar Newswire

Remember those three new screenshots we saw from EDGE Magazine last week? Well Rockstar have added high res digital versions of them on the official website now, along with a brand new one too. See all the GTAV screenshots in our gallery.

Rockstar have released some official wallpapers featuring artwork of the three characters that were originally seen recently after the release of the latest trailer. These artworks are expanded a little offering more detail, and are of course available in a multitude of resolutions to suit any device you might use. Check them out below in full size, or head over to the Rockstar Downloads page to grab them in different resolutions. You can also check out our own GTAV artwork page to see all the stuff released so far. According to Rockstar we'll be seeing more artwork in the forthcoming weeks. via: Rockstar Newswire

We use a RAID 10 setup in our server, so it's both striped and mirrored. We can afford one of the hard drives to completely fail and still be ok, possibly two if the other failure is in the opposite hard drive of the other array.

I thought Sleeping Dogs was a great game actually but yeah the handling of the vehicles took some getting used to, surprisingly different from GTA. But yeah I thought GTA IV's vehicle handling was pretty decent and don't understand why so many people have a problem with it. Perhaps it's because I play a lot of racing games so I tend to find vehicles easier than others. I much preferred it to the older style, but found both really easy to pick up and get used to. The fact that GTAV's is described as friendlier (not sure what that actually means... more arcadey?) surprises me just because I didn't think there was anything that needed fixing about it. Glad they've said it's not dumbed down.

We're at RapidSwitch now. And yeah I'm familiar with Hostgator. I got into the hosting game back in 2005 which I ran alongside TGTAP, but I didn't have any budget outside of advertising revenue brought in by this site, which was only enough to cover the cost of a cheap server back then. Struggled with that and couldn't dedicate enough time to it to take it seriously so it was never something I pursued, but I still gained useful knowledge through doing it. Over the years I've managed a total of 11 servers (8 dedicated, 3 VPS) at a total of 8 different hosts around the world. I don't claim to be an expert on server management, I'm far from it, but I know everything that I need to know to get it optimised, secured, kept stable, and fix any problems that might crop up. And yeah a 600K post forum shouldn't have too much of a problem running off a decent VPS. But this forum is one of the least intensive parts of this site as it's not particularly active right now, it's our downloads database that sees a massive amount of traffic compared to the rest of the site. When you're transferring that much data so quickly you need decent hardware and bandwidth. Also, bear in mind I also host GrandTheftWiki on the server, as well as a couple of other projects I have unrelated to GTA. So the server gets decent usage even if the whole thing isn't being used by TGTAP - it's not wasted if that's what you're thinking, and we've plenty of room to grow and expand

You think a site a site as big as this can fit on a VPS? You're severely underestimating our size, a dedicated server is a minimum requirement, and we've been on several high-end ones since 2007. Also, Cloudflare is good but it wouldn't have helped in this case. We were not under attack so their DDoS mitigation wouldn't have been of any use. The downtime was simply due to two consecutive hard drive failures. As for their caching methods, Cloudflare only shows cached pages in the event of an unreachable server, and for a limited time. Since the site was down for a whole week this would only have been effective in the first day. Anyway, we actually silently migrated to a brand new server a couple of weeks ago and everything has been running smoothly since then. I've also taken extra measures to ensure we have nightly backups stored off-site in two separate locations. In the event of any future downtime due to hard drive failure, the most data we'd be at risk of losing is an absolute maximum of 24 hours. Unless this coincided with a big news/content update, this won't even be much of an issue. Point is, while we can't guarantee against hardware failure, we can now be extremely optimistic about recovery should anything untoward ever happen again, and we certainly don't expect downtime as long as that ever again.

The latest issue of EDGE magazine is out with their GTA V preview, and in it are three new screenshots not seen in previews from earlier this week. The magazine pages have been uploaded in this GTAForums thread and we've included the new screenshots below. There doesn't actually appear to be any substantial new information in the preview, though there are a couple of interesting points mentioned, including the fact that Franklin's descent from helicopter to ground took around 3 minutes to complete when Rockstar started the demo. We haven't done any maths around this but that should give you some idea of just how massive the game is. One other point that mag makes is that it claims a lot of character switching happens automatically, which is contrary to what other previews wrote, saying we would get quite a lot of freedom around when we choose to (or not to) do this. That said, they may just have been referring the particular mission Rockstar were demoing. We'll update this post if we can get our hands on high res digital copies of these new shots.

No new info. Rockstar themselves have now posted these shots on the Newswire too, no additional info, just keeping fans happy I suppose

GameInformer has come up with the goods once again in the latest issue of their mag, with twelve beautiful new screenshots, which you can see in all their glory below. UPDATE: Rockstar later posted these screenshots on the official website and Newswire. All these and more can be seen in our complete screenshot gallery.

While the recent GTA V trailers, previews and screenshots have overshadowed pretty much every other announcement in the GTA scene this week (and quite rightly so), that's not to say there's nothing worth reporting on. A couple of popular modifications and tools received updates over the past couple of days too. MTASA 1.3.2 Released First up is a new version of MTASA. That's the popular multiplayer modification for GTA: San Andreas for those of you who might be new to the franchise. MTASA 1.3.2 fixes a substantial amount of bugs, and also introduces useful new functions for those of you who make maps and create mods for the game. You can read more about that in their announcement post, or check their wiki for a complete list of changes. The MTA team also announced that they will be switching to a rapid release cycle. The team currently pushes a new release every 3-6 months, this change basically means the team will aim to release an update every month, rather like the release cycles users of Chrome and Firefox web browsers will now be used to. The more frequent updates will mean less major changes in each iteration, but will allow for fixes and small feature updates to be pushed out a lot faster than before. In general this is pretty good news, the only downside can be the ridiculous version numbers we end up with. Download MTASA 1.3.2 OpenIV 1.4 Released Good news for those of you who make mods for Grand Theft Auto IV. GooD-NTS has released another update to his OpenIV tool, five years after the project originally started, and an update which will apparently be the last at least in terms of adding major new features. The new features in this release are quite big indeed, though. The first is the ability to create your own unique animations for peds and objects, the second is the ability to create completely new custom cut-scenes. Other new features include an animation viewer for peds and objects, cutscene viewer, package installer (to make installing and distributing mods for GTAIV easier), new UI for the texture editor, and finally the ability to set file associations in Windows Explorer so you can open files directly in OpenIV. Download OpenIV 1.4

Actually I think regenerative health is ok if done well, I think MP3 did it well and from the sounds of this I think GTAV will too, so I think 50% is fine. I am sure they will have done a lot of testing between 10% and 100% to see what worked best and settled on 50.

Assholes for bringing back stuff you wanted? When are you going to kill yourself? This is the first semi-positive thing you've ever said on this forum about R*/GTA. Then you end it immediately. What is actually your problem? You're getting banned after your response btw so make it accurate.