Inside Rockstar North - Backup

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 longer development cycle we felt we could be ambitious with the new features for SA. And ambitious we were. Gta1 had 3 cities and we wanted to do the same. There was one particular meeting that I still have nightmares about. In R*N we would usually make the big game decisions with 5 people. We had a meeting where 3 people wanted the cities to be on different maps. This would save memory as the models for the skylines of the cities wouldn't need to be in memory at the same time. Gta1 had 3 cities on different maps. The player would take planes/buses/trains to travel between maps. I wanted the cities to be on the same ma...

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 done by the team itself. The dark undertone was there from the start. Initially there were some very ambitious ideas for the AI. The hunters were to be organized in groups of 4. The hunters would have a leader (sergeant) and the leaders would communicate with each other. The player would have a radio and be able to follow the conversations. If a hunter spotted the player, or something out-of-place, he would report this to his superior. Then the superior would make a decision on the course of action and give orders to his men as well as inform the other hunter groups. The AI could, for example, do a sweep of the room where the player wa...

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 to talk to other teams to cross pollinate ideas. So I was able to follow the development of gta1&2 fairly closely. By the time I got there, the game had already gone through a number of changes. The game originally started from a tech demo made by Mike Dailly. It was a top down view with 3d buildings on top. This was before 3D cards and it was hard to get 3D to run at a decent frame rate. Mike's demo used code similar to Doom to draw the 3D effect. The downside of this code was that the camera could not tilt. The upside was that the game ran on a pc without hardware acceleration at a good frame rate. The team took this engi...

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 set the game in the 80s in Miami. Originally it was supposed to be a mission pack to gta3. Only once gta3 did as well as it did and Vice City started to look sufficiently different from gta3 was the decision made to make it a standalone game. This was quite far into the project. (maybe 6 months or so) We did the PC conversion of gta3 ourselves. This took the programmers about 6 months. In the mean time the artists and level designers were able to get straight onto Vice City. This worked well as there aren't that many code changes from gta3 to Vice whereas it did involve building a whole new city and new missions. The artists and...

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 projects to work on. We had started on gta3 because that seemed like a good idea. It wasn't until months later they gave us the green light. R*NY were pretty hands off during gta3. They managed the voice actors and did all the commercial stuff. They made suggestions though and towards the end they were involved with Quality Control. Our team was made up of the core of the Space Station Silicon Valley team in addition to new hires. Only 2 people on Gta3 were also on the original games (Ian McQue and Alan Campbell) The game took 2.5 years to develop. Even with games being a lot less complicated in those days, that's still pretty q...

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 the time and the map was full of holes. Later we developed a bug database but during gta3, the testers would simply print out every bug. Every programmer, level designer and artist had a physical pile of sheets on their desk. If you felt the bug was more easily fixed by someone else you would simply put it on that persons pile. The collision in a game is usually different from the visual polygons. This is because collision detection is relatively slow. A building with 10,000 visual polygons may have only 1,000 collision polygons. As a consequence, the map may have holes that you cannot see. This is what's going on when you fall through ...

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 to Gremlin earlier. Gremlin sold dma-design to BMG. BMG sold dma-design to Take2-Interactive. Take2 set up the label 'Rockstar Games' and place dma-design underneath it. Dma-design (based in Dundee, Scotland) opened a satellite studio in Edinburgh. Members of two teams that had just finished their games (Body Harvest and Silicon Valley) were given the option to move to Edinburgh. The majority went. Months later the main office in Dundee was closed altogether. At this point there were 2 teams sitting in Edinburgh but no projects to work on. There wasn't much in terms of direction from Rockstar New York so everybody starte...

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 while. Working title for the game was Z (Pronounced Zed not Zee). The idea was to use the Vice code as is. The game was to take place on a windswept foggy Scottish island. The player would be under constant attack from zombies. The player would need to use vehicles to get around but vehicles would need fuel. Acquiring the fuel would be a big part of the game. I can't quite remember how long we worked on Z. Maybe a month or so. The idea seemed depressing and quickly ran out of steam. Even the people who originally coined the idea lost faith. We dropped the idea and got on with San Andreas. After San Andreas we REALLY wanted to...

(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 with the cheats. If there is a match, the cheat will activate. The straightforward way of doing this would be to compare the string "ILOVESCOTLAND" with the string of keypresses. This approach would mean that the strings for the cheats would be in memory as readable text. Any hacker could easily find the cheats and they would all be discovered on the day of release. This is why I used 'hash codes' to store the cheats. A hash code is a number that is calculated from a string. As an example; a simple hash algorithm could add up the ASCII values of each character of the string. The hash code for ILOVESCOTLAND would be 983. For...

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 game. Memory was limited on the PS2 and the artists were forced to reduce the texture sizes and to re-use textures everywhere. This resulted in the city looking bland. They eventually asked Adam whether he could develop a streaming system. The idea of streaming is to load the map only around the player. As the player moves, the models for nearby models are loaded from the CD into memory and buildings that are now far away are removed. Streaming is also used for vehicle models, pedestrian models, sound effects, music and scripts but the map posed the greatest difficulty as this involved more data than everything else combined. Unfortunat...

Every in-game hour, the next weather type is picked from a table. The table is 40 (or maybe 34, can't quite remember) entries long. If it is raining now, it will be raining again in 40 in-game hours. The visual effects for the weather type will transition over the hour. For instance: At 2:00 it would be 100% sunny. At 2:15 it would be 75% sunny and 25% overcast At 2:30 it would be 50/50 etc The table frequently has the same weather type for several hours so the weather isn't always in-flux. There are script commands to override the weather type. This allows the level designers to force the weather type for a particular mission or cut-scene.

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 were only 2 models being used? Often the game was simply forced to load certain vehicles. For instance; if the player has a 6 star wanted level, the game would load the fbi car and the helicopter. There may still be police cars and swat vans around from when the player had a lower wanted level. If there are any injured pedestrians, the game had to load the ambulance. Before you know it, the game only has 1 or 2 models left for regular civilian cars. Even without the wanted level, the game was often forced to load certain car models. A mission script could request a number of vehicles. The player could collect a number of different ve...

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 city. (Not at the hospital, to avoid camping) It all worked but it was glitchy. We evaluated and it was clear there still was a lot to do. We would need more interesting game modes using scripts. We would have to tackle bandwidth & matchmaking issues. The network game was also going to generate an avalanche of new bugs. At this point we were running out of time and decided to scrap the idea. For Vice we actually hired 2 programmers to work on a network game. Again it didn't work out. Mostly because there wasn't enough time between gta3 and Vice. It didn't make sense to introduce a network game in SA as it was likely th...

The artists gave me a texture for the moon in III. I placed the moon in the sky, made sure it was visible at night and that it was a reasonable size. A few days later 4 artists were at my desk asking me to change the size of the moon. "No problem" I said. It turned out they couldn't decide what the size of the moon should be. 2 of them wanted it smaller to be more realistic. The other 2 wanted it larger to be more cinematic. This went on a bit and I suggested to make the size of the moon changeable in the game. This way they could decide in their own time and let me know the conclusion. Since I was working on the sniper rifle, I made it so that the moon toggled through 3 sizes (small, medium, large) as the player sniped it. The artists never got back to me so I just left it in. It was still there in SA.