A former Rockstar employee reveals the biggest problem in creating GTA III and the trick that helped solve it

Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij continues to share interesting facts from the development of GTA games. This time the specialist https://twitter.com/ObbeVermeij/status/1783484201171321148 about the cunning of the GTA III team.

According to Vermeil, Rockstar could not fit the entire GTA III card into the PS2 memory, so they had to turn to streaming models from DVD – their low loading speed became the biggest technical challenge during the entire development.

The team, led by technical director Adam Fowler, tried everything – from efficiently arranging models on DVD to experimenting with repeating frequently used files – but it wasn’t enough.

Due to the low loading speed of models, players were still faced with low detail of buildings and sometimes missing sections of the road (see screenshot above) – it was no longer possible to make streaming more efficient.

In the absence of other alternatives, the player had to slow down: changing the road layout in Portland to reduce driving speeds and increasing air resistance for cars by 5%. “It was barely noticeable, but it helped.”“Vermeil emphasized.

Due to streaming issues, there was almost no flying in GTA III – except for the Dodo plane (image source: Rockstar Games)

Vermeil recalls that GTA: Vice City received several improvements in this regard, including more efficient compression of models and textures: more detailed versions of buildings were loaded only when the player was not in the air.

Slow loading speeds for DVD models are not the only problem that the GTA developers encountered due to lack of memory on the PS2. In the console version of San Andreas, for example, because of this, the mirrors are a little strange.