OBBE VERMEIJ AND THE 32 MEGABYTES OF FREEDOM

Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut took the step to go 3D with gta. There was no doubt the 3d part was possible. It was more memory/streaming considerations. It's a little known fact that the original gta1&2 team went on to work on gta2.5. It was called 2.5 because it was isometric (2.5 dimensional). I guess they weren't confident going full 3d. I've never seen this game and it could cancelled during the big reorganization. (It was set in Miami)

It didn't feel like a sequel. gta2 had failed and the franchise had lost steam. The step from 2d to 3d was a big one and we decided to re-write the entire code base with an entirely new team. Even though the design of gta3 was largely based on gta1; it felt like a new game.

We were forward thinking. It was more important to make a good game in it's own right rather than preserving the spirit of the original games. For the city, the artists took inspiration from the look and feel of gta1 but this could easily have been different.

6 months before release there was a real buzz around the company. Everybody was enjoying work and working together to make the best possible game. Even during crunch time most people worked no more than 10 hours a day and during the weekend the office was usually empty. There was a chef making dinner for people working late. People from work would often socialize together. Often going drinking on Fridays or meeting up in the pub to watch football.

Even at the height of crunch time I think a work week for me was somewhere around 50 hours. We never did the crazy hours other companies were known for at the time.

The key to programming is concentration and it is very difficult for people to concentrate more than 8 hours a day. I think it is more important for people to be focussed on work when they are in the office, rather than spending more time in the office.

It was more the memory/streaming limitations. Had we been able to load models from the DVD more quickly then we could have had higher resolution textures.

Adam had developed some tools to find textures that were used unnecessarily. Textures that were in an overall bank as opposed to an area specific back for instance. We started without streaming. The artists tried to texture the whole map with a limited texture budget. When streaming was introduced they were able to do a lot more. Other games (ie The Getaway) at the time took the opposite approach. Start big and then try to cut it down to fit. I think our approach worked better.

The Fog was purely cosmetic. A particular scene had to be rendered during fog as well as on a clear day so there was no advantage to pulling in the fog further other than the look. I coded the glow around light to fade and grow in size during fog. That made a big difference. I think the narrow streets were also more of an esthetic/gameplay choice and not for speed. We didn't have any culling behind building until 4 weeks before the end so making alleys narrower wouldn't have helped much for speed.

Apart from the breaking up the long straight on the first island I can't think of any other places. No wait, I think a subway line was moved away from a busy area once.