OpenIV's sub-forum should be archived, OpenIV itself seems basically abandoned now since at least like 2-3 years already

[65536]

Since its release in 2008, prior to somewhere in Spring 2020, OpenIV has clearly getting getting maintenance. However, since around Spring 2020, developers mysteriously went inactive. Then for a brief period - around December 2021 and January 2022, OpenIV developers's - both GooD-TNS and OpenIV Team was temporary active again, however since at least March-April 2022, OpenIV's appears to be completely dead now! I clearly just cannot even see any kind of OpenIV's maintenance anymore, there're aren't any developer's responses neither:

 

OpenIV Team's - profile appears to be inactive since at least January 2022, the other dev - GooD-TNS, appears to was last active around January 2023, but seems he's completely vanished since.

People's reports about problems with OpenIV are getting no replies, and just goes down completely unresolved.

OpenIV's Bug Tracker on their website appear to be basically abandoned! Majority of the bug reports there, probably over 90% since a least April 2022, are still sitting for 1.5-2 years already with no single assignment, no answers and completely untouched by OpenIV's team, and with exception of 1-2 bug reports posted around March 2023, all other newer stills unanswered and basically abandoned.

Separately, all reports about an errors related to OpenIV posted here on GTAForums from like the last 2-3 years, are not even getting any replies by OpenIV's team anymore, whatsoever!

On OpenIV website, their forums are also toast - they only shows an error 503 and aren't even working anymore.

 

Because of this, I think the OpenIV subforum here should be locked and probably archived, because it's clear that OpenIV is basically dead, now at least 1-2 full years passed (2023-2024) since and now in 2025 there doesn't even appear to be any activity from OpenIV's devs anymore. Unfortunately this modding tool for GTA HD Universe seems totally abandoned.

 

Please, if this isn't correct forum for this thread for a some reason, feel free do move it to the correct one. Thanks!

Edited March 11 by 65536

[Abraham Denver]

Completely agree.

 

This project was once promising, but as for 2025, it is not respected the same way in the community anymore. Unfortunately, OpenIV's team policy of keeping private all their research data (not only source code of their tool, but even structures/docs/headers/etc) has led to the expected results. After the team's 'creative burnout' and project abandonment, their program is left as a glitchy executable and no one can continue it's development and utilize the research that goes into it. And we have to give GooD-NTS and others a credit, those research results were impressive.

 

Today, the community is forced to re-explore things that were already explored by the OpenIV team. Even up to the point of reverse engineering of OpenIV's executable which is kind of black humor since reverse engineering used to refer the games being studied, not the fan community software. And through this, a number of facts have come to light. Hope community will give a fair assessment of how OpenIV's team is collecting user data with their tool (and they're collecting a HUGE volume in violation of GDPR and other regulatory laws, but who cares).

 

Perhaps I'm not quite on the subject of closing the section, but I wanted to say a few words about this project itself.

[BrynnaDaRosa]

I wish OpenIV wasn't forced into abandonment by the war, presumably, but i wish we had a touch more transparency. its discord server is an unmoderated hovel filled with dangerous spam links. i just wish they could invite some outside help. All I use Codex/Walker for is exporting/importing XMLs, because you can't beat the navigation or viewing in OpenIV. Especially when I mostly mod IV anyways. (But i will say, I'd love a flat lighting/shadowless setting and a much closer nearclip!)

 

I don't think archiving the entire subforum is the thing to do though, people still need help with OIV all the time.

[bigboy944]

Don't people know how to rename the GTA V Enhanced exe to the regular GTA V exe's file name? I did it and I was able to use OpenIV with the Enhanced executable. But I don't know if it's able to read Enhanced's RPF files.

[bigboy944]

The main developer is still active looks like and he has to be aware of the situation with Enhanced, check his GitHub here: https://github.com/GooD-NTS?tab=repositories Maybe somebody can message him on GitHub and find out what's going on?

Edited March 20 by bigboy944

[Spider-Vice]

While OpenIV indeed seems to be abandoned, archiving/closing the subforum isn't the solution here as people will still have questions, and there's the off-chance that someone in the team will post a status update again. The only section we've actively archived in the Featured Mods section was GTA Underground, under explicit request of the mod creators during the original Trilogy modding takedowns.

[65536]

On 3/20/2025 at 1:55 PM, Spider-Vice said:

While OpenIV indeed seems to be abandoned, archiving/closing the subforum isn't the solution here as people will still have questions, and there's the off-chance that someone in the team will post a status update again. The only section we've actively archived in the Featured Mods section was GTA Underground, under explicit request of the mod creators during the original Trilogy modding takedowns.

OK. I wasn't aware about this. 

[BrynnaDaRosa]

On 3/20/2025 at 6:11 AM, bigboy944 said:

Don't people know how to rename the GTA V Enhanced exe to the regular GTA V exe's file name? I did it and I was able to use OpenIV with the Enhanced executable. But I don't know if it's able to read Enhanced's RPF files.

 

I did this within minutes of launch. You can open up RPFs just fine, but you can't read anything inside, rendered useless.

 

On 3/20/2025 at 6:17 AM, bigboy944 said:

The main developer is still active looks like and he has to be aware of the situation with Enhanced, check his GitHub here: https://github.com/GooD-NTS?tab=repositories Maybe somebody can message him on GitHub and find out what's going on?

 

His last contribution was on Feb 1st. Bothering him with messages he surely has dozens of already isn't going to help.