It has been approximately 616 days since Las Venturas Playground was started as the Gathering of Tweakers server, which happened on May 15th, 2006, a mere five days after the San Andreas Multiplayer 0.1 release. In this period, alot of things have changed. Ranging from three different server hosts, a huge amount of administrators, the gamemode and of course the player counts: the week in which we were the largest gameserver on the planet.

A couple of minutes ago another milestone has been reached. With the signup of CheekyJem on the website, we have a total of over thirty thousand registered players. This is not only a huge amount, but also far beyond any expectation I ever dreamed of when starting the server. Sadly we have little to celebrate this event with you, however, we can talk about the current happenings around Las Venturas Playground, as well as the future plans we have with the server.

As you probably have noticed, it's not as crowded on the server as it used to be last year. The main reason for this is our removal of the San Andreas Multiplayer Official list, which is used by most new players as an indication which servers are worthy to play on. This has an immediate effect to Las Venturas Playground, being that we won't receive many new people who start to play the multiplayer modification. Nevertheless, on a daily basis there still are an average of 65 players online, which still means enough people to do that single cool minigame with. Although we expect the average to drop some more, it certainly doesn't mean the end of our server: Las Venturas Playground has a steady player base, with the gangs and minigames associated with them.

Next to that, there are a number of plans pending for the future as well. Development of Las Venturas Playground 3.0 has actively started, and a number of new developers have recently been recruited to speed up the actual developing process. The final feature list shows some very unique and entertaining items, including a variety of new minigames, gameplay aspects as well as the introduction of a Role Playing Game part in LVP for the people interested in this. Together with Badeend, I will be leading a team of seven developers to implement everything we need. Betatesting will begin shortly - most likely within the next four weeks, depending on the progress the team has made. The betateam members will be invited based on their post in this topic, without any further notice.

Finally, we also would like to unveil the new Las Venturas Playground logo. It has been used unofficially for the past few months already, however, hereby it has been made official. You will find a number of links under the logo itself, which contain the logo for a black background, as well as a big version and a vector-based version. PSD-files and other formats are available upon request, please contact either Peter of Badeend if you feel you have a reason to receive it.


White background: 150 pixels height - 280 pixels height - vector image
Black background: 150 pixels height - 280 pixels height - vector image

On behalf of the Las Venturas Playground Management,
Peter

Introduction
As you might have seen already, a radio channel for LVP has started up just recently. With a topic on this forum, and information on the Wiki, it's now time for an announcement as well. If you are interested in knowing more how it all started, take a look here. Right now I'm just going to take up what you need to know, trying not to get you bored. First off, I would like to thank everybody who's yet shown interest in this project, especially I would like to credit Wesley and Cave for their work so far. Not to forget, we have Woet (and Peter) who's hosting the stream. And of course, all the listeners who keep the stream alive.
If you want to be a DJ please take a look here and see if there's any time you can stream which is not already taken.

Listen
Here is the information you need to tune in:

Stream:

http://radio.sa-mp.nl:8000

http://midna.nl:8000

If you go to any of these URL's listed above, you should get a page with information about the stream. Click listen in the menu, and you should get to download the stream, and play it in your music player.

Music Players

Winamp:
I recommend that you use Winamp, which plays the stream easily. All you need to do is open the stream in Winamp, and you should be able to listen. Get Winamp here.

Windows Media Player:
With WMP things are a bit different compared to Winamp. Open up WMP, press ctrl + u and a window should pop up that says something like "enter URL here". Simply enter one of the URL's that are listed above, and it should work out!

Summary
We try to be streaming as much as possible, however it should seem fully logical that we cannot be up 24/7. As most DJ's are European's, getting someone to stream week mornings around 6AM isn't too easy.
There should always be live updates in our IRC channel which tells you whether the stream is up. You can also check the schedule, but don't forget that we do stream more often than what it says there.

IRC:
Our IRC channel is located at irc.gtanet.com like all the other LVP related channels.
The channel is #LVP.radio. If you have any questions about the stream, our crew should be happy to answer!

Stay tuned!

Dear Las Venturas Playground players,

Some of you might have seen it coming, others maybe not...
I would hereby like to announce that I have decided to discontinue begin a part of the Las Venturas Playground crew and management.

The reason behind this decision is that I lost total control and grip on LVP during the last three months, mainly because of a very busy life.
I have had a wonderfull time on, and with, Las Venturas Playground and would therefore like to thank everyone who has been involved in this.

I will regularly join the channels #LVP.vip and #LVP(.nl) to avoid missing some of you too much.

Kind regards,
Ricardo