If you happen to weren’t there on the time, it’s actually tough to place into phrases simply how spectacular GTA 3 was on the PS2.
Positive, there’d been open world video games earlier than – Shenmue pre-dated it by a couple of years in Japan – however nothing on the size of Liberty City, a dwelling respiration sandbox the place you possibly can do something and go anyplace.
However how on earth did Rockstar squeeze the world into the PS2’s 32MB RAM? This video digs into the dev’s wizardry.
Whereas a lot of you could already be aware of the ideas defined by the Sport Maker’s Device Equipment right here, we thought it was price sharing simply due to how brilliantly assembled it’s.
Mark Brown does a wonderful job taking fairly difficult concepts and demonstrating them in a approach that’s very easy to digest.
We’ll let him do the explaining, however successfully the dev divided Liberty City into a sequence of squares, pulling within the belongings required when you get near them. This permits it to continually repopulate the RAM with no matter info it wants, flushing the data when you get additional away.
The video delves into all types of frequent complications, like pop-in and texture streaming. It additionally explains how Rockstar overcame the comparatively sluggish learn pace of the PS2’s DVD drive.
A variety of these strategies are nonetheless used right now, after all, albeit in far more difficult style. However this video is not going to solely enable you perceive how open world video games work, but in addition the sort of magic the developer was in a position to obtain on the PS2.
Ultimately, GTA 3 and its superior successors Vice City and San Andreas would go on to turn into two of the best-selling PS2 video games of all time.
And Rockstar’s continued to push the envelope ever since, most just lately with Purple Useless Redemption 2 – and presumably with the upcoming GTA 6 as nicely.
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