Hey all, friends and I are organizing and working on a new game engine intended to answer all the hassles one is faced with GTA Modding (i.e. NO, you can't make spiderman, it's hard coded! etc - you can with Grit).
It is really early in development now, however the main inspiration for this engine was San Andreas Modding and more importantly SAMP/MTA.
Grit uses Ogre to render and EVERYTHING that can be done in Lua is done in Lua to make sure EVERYTHING is constantly open to the user, save for data intensive code that really MUST be done in C++.
Grit game engine is found there and we have a small dedicated game engine forum as well.
There is also a wiki and more planned.
SVN is open and on SourceForge - you can go in and get your hands dirty if you want! You can see [very old] videos on the site currently, and while there are no public builds currently, we do share the private build with cool folks who are ready to succeed GTA modding into the next generation since there really isn't much in the future of IV and SA is starting to look haggard.
The idea here is that no help is too small, and that this is the new engine of choice since the people who made tools for these games prefer left 4 dead now.
I'm sure I could add more, but I'll leave room for any questions fellow DRuGclansmen and affiliates, and let you take a peek yourself instead of talk your eyes out in this post.
We already have working planes, cars, advanced render techniques like parallax normal mapping and specular channels and more with an utmost emphasis that GTA was too closed and too hard to mod with crap tools that never matured - we will only really be successful by keeping that in focus, so be assured that we are open to suggestions and also hope to end up providing the most modder friendly and game dev friendly open world streaming game engine of all time.
What do you think? Let us know, and join in. I told Nik about it already and while he's really busy right now it sounds like he'll enjoy this technology if we can pull it off. We aim to impress, and 'We' includes all people involved. Be it a logo artist to a texture artist to a modeler to a coder to a physicist - we is Grit, Grit is us. The people who DIDN'T forget GTA Modding and wouldn't accept "Hard Coded"
Posted here because while we intend to be similar to it, this is not a GTA Modding thing, and though it is an engine this is not programming discussion. Etc.