A former Rockstar developer explained how transport worked in the GTA trilogy

Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar Games, once again shared interesting trivia about GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas. This time he released a long post about the work of transport and told which mechanics were canceled by the studio.

First of all, he explained why players could sometimes see only cars of one model on the map. Of course, the reason was that the code was not working correctly, but the reasons for the bug sound interesting:

“Since the PlayStation 2 did not have enough memory for GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas, we had to limit the number of car models to eight. My code chose which model to delete or load when there was nothing left on the map."

Each type of car was assigned to one of the zones. For example, in poor areas there were exclusively old cars, while in business areas there were sports cars. Most often everything worked as it should, but sometimes errors occurred. For example, when the player's wanted level was high, the slots of other cars were occupied by police cars, disrupting the loading order. Or some missions required a specific vehicle, which also clogged slots and broke the order.

According to Obbe Vermeij, garages also played a role in this ecosystem. As soon as the gate was closed, the car disappeared from the game, freeing up space. When the garage was opened, the model was loaded again.

Among other things, in the comments, the developer talked about an interesting mechanic that they were going to add to Vice City. Players could set fire to oil that would leak from damaged cars. The idea looked good on paper, but it was never realized.

Obbe Vermeil recently spoke about the reasons for the cancellation of multiplayer in GTA 3.