gta
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Development of San Andreas (2003-2004)
Vice City was a mad dash to get done in time. Everybody was worn down and it was clear another one year game was not an option. In addition; it was obvious that Vice City hadn't innovated that much and another 're-skin' wasn't going to fly. This is why San Andreas got 2 years of development time. Our confidence as a team was sky-high and with the...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 87The development of Manhunt (1999 - 2003)
In 1999 two teams moved from Dundee (dma-design) to Edinburgh. The team that had made Space Station Silicon Valley went on to make gta3. The team that previously made 'Body Harvest' for the Nintendo 64 went on to work on Manhunt. I was not directly involved with the game until the very end but here are some observations: The design was mostly do...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 34The development of Gta & Gta 2 (1994 - 1999)
I joined the company (then dma-design) in 1995. I worked on a game called 'Space Station Silicon Valley' (SV) for the Nintendo 64. At the time we worked in a larger open office that housed 4 teams. SV, Tanktics, the test department and Gta. The company was very open, there was even a thing called Friday afternoon R&D where you were encouraged...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 46Development of Vice City (2002)
There was a 6 weeks gap between finishing gta3 and the release. This was needed for burning the cd and distribution. In those days you couldn't patch so there was no point hanging around. The company gave the team some time off and most people took some extra time also. After the release, we started on Vice City. It was RockStar New York's idea to...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 69Development of Gta3 (1999-2001)
The first prototype of gta3 ran on a Dreamcast. We all had Dreamcasts and all played Phantasy Star Online. This didn't last long as the Dreamcast lost out to Playstation 2 and we switched. Rockstar New York had only just been founded. As the people in New York had to get set up and get to grips with a lot of games, they hadn't given us any project...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 42GTA: Bugs bugs bugs
During gta3 the game was buggy during most of its development. This happened because we started the game from scratch and also used a new rendering engine (RenderWare) that was also not all that mature at the time. Through most of development, it was rare to play through a mission without a crash happening. The frame rate was below 10 for most of...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 41999 The beginnings of gta3
Between when I joined dma-design in 1995 and 1999 there were several titles in development. Gta & gta2 Body Harvest for the N64 Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 Tanktics Covert which became Wild Metal Country Attack which was canceled Clanwars which was canceled In 1999 the company went through a series of changes. It had been sold...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 12Distractions: Agent & Z - GTA
Making games is hard word and after a while you really want a change. After Vice City there was a sense within North that it would be nice to do something else. Something that wasn't gta. Some of the artists wanted to do a zombie survival game. Programmers like fantasy. Artists like zombies. Not sure why that is. We pursued the zombie idea for a...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 2GTA: The trouble with cheats
(Warning: techy) The cheats in the trilogy were activated by simply typing a sequence of characters. On PC the sequence would be something like ILOVESCOTLAND to make it rain or GUNSGUNSGUNS to give the player loads of weapons. The game remembers the last 20 or so keypresses and every time a new key is pressed, these keypresses are compared wit...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 4GTA: Streaming
The hardest technical challenge to solve during the development of gta3 was the streaming. Streaming involves loading and un-loading models as the player moves over the map. The streaming was coded by Adam Fowler. When we started out with gta3 the hope was that the entire map would fit in memory. The map would simply be loaded at the start of the...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 11GTA: Why so many cars of the same type?
Memory in the Playstation2 was limited. This is why we could only have a limited number of vehicles in memory at the same time. I think there was only room for about 7 of them. This meant the game could load a selection of 7 vehicles out of the total of around 80. It seems this would result in enough variety. So how come it seems sometimes there w...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 2Is gta3 network game?
Since gta and gta2 had a LAN (network) game, we felt gta3 should have one too. I spent around a month implementing the network game. At this point there was a basic death match. Players could drag each other out of cars and players could kill each other. When a player died, the killer would get a point and the deceased would respawn throughout the...
May I · 24 November 2023 · 2