Gerard

Its possible... in the way that it could physically be done, but that would defeat the object of having completely new gameplay and storylines. Lots of people are asking for LC/VC/SA combined, or to bring back the main characters, so if Rockstar changed based on demand then its possible, but I reckon they'll be able to do something actually better. Come on, you see all those jokes and ironies and innuendos and references in the existing GTA games? They don't happen overnight - Rockstar put a lot of time and effort into creating this sort of thing. I trust them not to make that mistake.

When it says "your computer might be in danger" that means you have the firewall turned off (or something like that). Click on it and it'll take you to the Windows Security Centre to fix that problem. If your desktop theme has gone, just go and try turning it on again.

First of all, Windows Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are two separate things. WLM is the good one you're using now. If the install failed, reinstalling is the only hope. When it fails to sign in, click "troubleshoot" and go through that wizard to see if there's a problem with the settings on your PC. You may have a firewall blocking it, or your router might not be set to allow it, or IE may be set to "work offline" - that wizard should help. Otherwise, you'll have to check those things yourself, and try again.

Once you've mastered the very basics of HTML (how it works) then its a good idea to start looking at the source of existing sites to see how they do things. Bear in mind that you should probably learn xHTML, which is simply the new version of what everybody uses instead of old HTML 4.1 - the differences are small (such as <br /> instead of <br>) but its what you should use. CSS is the next logical step (see my tutorials here) in web design - enabling you to make much more powerful design changes than color or cellpadding in the HTML itself. Progressing onto scripting, whether client-side (Javascript) or server-side (PHP or ASP), is quite a big jump. It goes beyond web design, and into programming. The simplest way to describe PHP is as a way to manipulate your HTML before its sent to the user - you could add in things like the date, or extract stuff from a database, or include another html file into one - and the end user will never know its being used. Good fun to play with though.

What is your favourite song of the moment? Maybe tell us a bit about why you like it or something. Feel free to post again in a few days/weeks when it changes Mine is: When You Were Young - The Killers Trying to persuade my mates to let us play that for the upcoming talent show. Its either that, The Automatic, lostprophets or RHCP. You'll see my playlist reflects that.

oo yeah I like the idea of secret tunnels and the like. The one just next to the Big Ear in SA has been useful a few times. Having secrets that stay secret for more than a few day would be nice. Having the entire environment open to interference is one of the biggest ideas for GTA4 - being able to scratch, burn, pick up, throw, chop down anything in the game would be great. I dont agree with tracing cars though - you usually wouldn't have one vehicle of your own throughout the game, you just go up and jack one whenever you need a ride. Having the police chasing you for every time you jacked a car kinda defeats the object of most of the game. Same goes for speeding. Playing dead is an idea I suppose, but the ability to sit down (and perhaps even regain health whilst sitting) is more important. I'm in favour of better AI, even if its just little things like you mentioned, but many people say they enjoy seeing cops running against brick walls and tanks driving into rivers.

Thats a simple problem to fix. At the top of this page, above the first post, you'll see an options box on the right. Click on that and choose the "standard" display mode.

Hehe thats cool, but no big deal. Search google for Gerard Boyers and all the sites it lists are me - I own some of them but places like The GTA Place, Engadget and Wikipedia list me too.

Is your mouse working at all? In Windows and in the ingame menu but just not when playing? If so then its probably just a setting rather than the mouse not working.

BUMP - anybody got anything we can add to this? Vice City Mod Manager is okay so long as you install the DMagic1 Wheel Mod which loads of people forget to do. Also making the gta3.img file not read-only is a step often forgotten.

BUMP - lets see if we can finish this thing off - its still useful. Okay, so changing lines won't stop it working, but most main.scm script mods are pretty heavy - eg new missions - which is a lot more than simply changing words. The idea behind it I suppose is that if you made totally new missions, an original-version savegame would be useless. Perhaps it is even to stop you using savegames from previous games (eg GTAVC)

Or write our own How to install a car mod in GTAVC SA Modding Guide

They're real for those sceptics out there - the SA80 L98A1 CGP

There are thousands of sites with tutorials, but I use W3Schools for reference - when I know exactly what I need to do but can't remember the exact word.

Windows XP Media Centre can do everything normal XP pro can, but it comes with Media Centre (the software) and usually a remote.

Yeah they're awesome - went to see the a couple of months ago too. That was awesome fun.

Why then? What is the advantage?

Generally speaking, watercooled cases (or other extreme cooling methods) are entirely unneccessary. Home PCs are fine with a couple of fans, and servers in datacentres generally have massive aircon units anyway. IMO, it all comes down to how hot your server gets. The dust protection and heavy cooling will help prevent nasty accidents, but whether it is worth the initial outlay depends on how much you value your uptime, and if you've had any cooling problems with it so far. If the current system is adequate, don't waste your money.

OMG Ceiling Cat is watching me masturbate!!

I dont think gangs should be included since the system isnt even running yet. Even if that happened soon it would be a mad dash and not show any real detail or quality. Save that for next time methinks, or even just award it to the winner of the first gang war. I also don't think "most annoying" would be good. I do see the point of giving funny non-awards (our plays had 'best food' and 'longest speech in a rehearsal' awards) but do we really want to encourage members to be annoying, or pseudo-reward those who win? If you were going to do some stupid awards, I think they should be decided on the day by the staff rather than voted on, since they shouldn't be taken too seriously and should be just something fun to warm the audience up. Best sig is good, although that perhaps should run as a separate competition in Creativity and have it announced in this ceremony. So yeah I think what I'm trying to say is that some of the bigger awards there should run as separate competitions, with the winners announced at this ceremony. Its boring if we're voting in a topic and can see who's won really early on, so a custom voting system should be good.

Sexiest member happens separately since its so popular, but these awards will have things like "best newcomer" or "most helpful member" or "most active female" and other such things.

The elites will decide which awards will be up for grabs, but every single member on the forum will have their vote in saying who wins.

That's them, and a perfect example of a good use for the report button. You read that post, realise its spam, click report, type "i think this is a bot" and click OK. A mod reads it, deals with it, and everybody's happy.

The bots we're on about are ones set up by hackers to post spam and usually links to sites. In some ways they are worse than hackers because they can work much faster and work 24/7.

We can ban individual IP addresses from the server, but its not hard to use another one. We can't ban "bots" altogether because they look and act exactly the same as web browsers. Unless they request thousands of pages a second, because we can detect and prevent that.