Site Rollout Press Kit

The GTA Ideas Pages are among the oldest GTA sites, online since December 17^th, 1997. While there has been an apparent lack of updates lately, the owner of the site, Michael Mendelsohn, has for two months been busy quietly redoing the site, redecorating and writing new material, expanding the material until it now fills 50 pages of HTML.

While the old favourites such as "ThingsToDo" with the famous Liberty City Sewer Mission and "Projects for GTA-crazy gamers" have been kept and enlarged, much new material has been added, including two pages of map ideas, two (!) GTA reviews, a behind-the-scenes peek at a GTA roleplay and a new GTA Utility, Gman. The old and famous Unofficial Reference Handbook adds another 30 pages to the site as well, but is not affected by the redesign.

This press kit contains offline copies of the central Contents page of the site, the Impressum page with browsing tips and a the Copyright statement. All of these pages can be reached in their "live" online versions by following the links in the Navbar of this (Press Kit) page you're reading now since the site is competely up except for its title page. It is presently undergoing "beta-testing" and debugging (your input is appreciated); while you can review it now, it will be opened to the public on Sunday Sep 13^th 1998 at the old Grand Theft Auto Ideas Pages URL. If you want a button to adorn the link, here it is:

If you've seen the old site, you know mendel is heavy on text, so expect a thought-provoking reading, but don't expect to read all of it in half an hour. This is a site you can come back to more than once.

The new Utility Gman is now in the final stages of beta testing. Gman has two ancestors. One is the famous first GTA utilty ever, fxt2txt. Many people have reported problems using the fxt2txt from the unfamiliar DOS command line. Gman has been programmed in Delphi and runs under Windows95, and you can easily call up any fxt file, edit and save it. The speed has been greatly improved as well. The other ancestor of Gman was never publicly released. It has been used to generate the map images on MandMs, which are quite small (256x256, about 11kB GIF files) and show the logical properties of the terrain clearly. If a map has set all of greens to play as sidewalks, Gman will show it as sidewalk, and you will rightly see pedestrians walk there in the game. It is great when you want to advertise your map on the web or want to know the layout of a level you're set to play.

Well, that's about it; if you want to know more, look at the site yourself or feel free to send me an email. I'll certainly be online Sunday for the VCTA competition described in the accompanying press release so you can reach me then as well.

If nothing else, GTA Ideas goes to show that the Grand Theft Auto web scene, proclaimed dying for months now by some, still has some surprises in store.

Have fun with GTA!

Michael "mendel" Mendelsohn

Created by Michael Mendelsohn 10. Sep 98