Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar Games, often shares little-known details about the older Grand Theft Auto games. Yesterday, the developer posted a fresh update on X (Twitter), where he talked about trash in the third installment. During development, Liberty City was a very clean city, but Vermeij wanted to make it a bit dirtier. To achieve this, the studio created several different textures and made them fly around the city. This technology was also used in GTA Vice City and Manhunt.
"The streets of gta3 looked too clean so I added litter. It is a single rectangle that occasionally moves with the wind. It can also be dragged along by passing cars. The artists created 4 textures for it. 2 newspapers and 2 leaves.
In Vice City there is a mission (Dildo Dodo) where the player drops flyers for Candy Suxx’s show. From that point onwards, 1 of the 4 litter textures is replaced with the flyer.
For each ‘hop’ the animation consist of:
Movement along the ground. Further if it’s windy.
Movement up and down along a sinus function.
Rotation of the rectangle.
More hops occur when it’s windy.
Because line-scans were slow, it only detects the height of the ground at the landing location. (not in between) This is why it can go through the map in some cases. Not everyone on the team liked the litter. I removed it for San Andreas because I eventually lost the argument. In the last months of Manhunt development, some gta-ers helped out. I added the same litter code to Manhunt." Previously, Obbe Vermeij revealed many other details. For example, he talked about the workings of vehicles and weather, issues with slow model loading, and a canceled zombie game.