This is really interesting. I remember that the GTA 5 build log file was leaked back in the day. It contained a lot of interesting information too (e.g., something along the lines of an "auto play bot" which failed at a certain mission).
I'm looking forward to some summary of this soon in a blog/Youtube video :-).
That being said, it's a shame T2/R* is taking down/suing mods for this type of bad port. Despite being way ahead of any other game company in terms of R&D and innovation, they sadly decided to outsource these "definitive"versions and pay little attention to QA.
In any case, imho, the best way to play any of these original games is on a PS2 (probably even with a CRT TV) as that is the way the original developers really built it for.
>In any case, imho, the best way to play any of these original games is on a PS2
This is why I'm still a PC user. Whenever nostalgia hits and I want to play some old games, I don't need to keep around or source some vintage console hardware and games on the 2nd hand market or rely on some low quality ports that were most likely outsourced with poor QA, but I can just get away with installing the original game build off Steam/GOG or from two decades old cracked .iso files, and it will most likely work as Microsoft has done an amazing job with Windows backwards compatibility. And even when it doesn't work out of the box, there are enough resources out there from the community, with tweaks and patches, on how to get it running on a modern OS like Win 10 or even on Linux.
Is there a mature discussion on the history of 'consolization' anywhere online, first examples I am aware of are 2003: Deus-ex Invisible War and 2004: Thief - Deadly Shadows, where the PC port is deliberately gimped due to being developed for console. GTA VC/San Andreas were worth at least waiting for at the time, due to proper mouse support and higher resolution.
Previously the Doom/Quake version that was on console would be months/years late and cut down, but these 2003/2004 titles reversed the trend. There are probably earlier examples that I am unaware of.
Between this effect, subscription MMORPGs and the inevitability of microtransactions I lost interest around that time.
I have worked on console games since the 360/PS3 era, (which was 10 years ago, so my info is probably a little rusty)
> the PC port is deliberately gimped due to being developed for console.
If you want to have a mature discussion on the topic don't start out with this attitude. Timelines are finite, and plans change. Remember that the games you're talking about existed before licensing ue4/unity was the default option for AAA games. The games were likely only ever planned to exist on console and the request for PC cones in way later, however at that time the game just barely runs on PC (it doesn't need to be performant or representative, just play), and relies on an engine architecture based on having cell SPEs or an (almost) unified memory architecture.
The game is likely unplayable for anything other than "test you can do X and Y" on PC, and all development of the look and feel is done on the console itself. Naturally as consoles have moved towards x86 these differences have been reduced, and now it's common to develop the game on PC and test occasionally on console.
The differences do still exist though; PS5 having hardware decompression, dualsense controllers, both consoles having raytracung hardware and super fast SSDs as a guarantee.
> Between this effect, subscription MMORPGs and the inevitability of microtransactions I lost interest around that time.
You've missed 2 decades of excellent games that don't suffer from this, don't have subscritions and don't have microtransaction by doing that!
I was actually hoping to avoid starting a debate here and hoping to find a broadly scoped long form discussion written by a journalist.
Please do not take my opinion as a personal affront to your career, and I sympathise with the difficulties in the industry.
Don't worry about my missing out, I had plenty of other things to do during that time. I have since regained a temporary interest and caught up on the offline single player PC games of interest to me over the course of lockdown restrictions, but console games are not for me. Invisible-War stands out as an abomination, prompting my comment.
The Ion storm games I mention ran poorly on an unreal 2 engine compared to their predecessors and the GTA ones were developed in parallel, there was no change of plan, it's a statement of fact in those cases rather than an attitude.
The reason why PC gamers have this attitude is very clear from OP's comment: it used to be that PC was the primary platform, and thus e.g. keyboard/mouse controls would be designed properly at least. When that changed to worse, it was glaringly obvious.
>Is there a mature discussion on the history of 'consolization' anywhere online
The console market is huge as not everyone is tech savvy enough to maintain a gaming PC and bother with all the OS updates, driver updates, patches, HW upgrades and such. Lots of people just want to hop on the couch after school/work, pick up the controller and start playing.
And since the console market is so big, it made financial sense for the game studios to use them as the lowest common denominator during development. More sales on more platforms = more $$$, despite the PC ports ending up sub-par.
The dark ages ware during the PS3 and Xbox 360 days since those consoles used custom CPU/GPU architectures, radically different than PCs, which coupled with the low quality of the SW tooling and SDKs of the era made cross-platform game development a nightmare at the time so more often than not games made for both console and PCs turned out janky AF.
But thankfully, since the last couple of console generations are basically x64 AMD APU powered PCs, and SW tooling is way simpler and more efficient and of higher quality so game devs can scale their engines and visuals much easier between console and PC reducing the quality discriminations.
However, I have noticed that console gaming experience has gotten a lot more janky in the last few generations as their HW and SW have reached PC levels of complexity, with long waiting times, errors and crashes being more common than in the days of ROM cartridges. The new and powerful SSD-only, generation of consoles seem to reverse that trend though and bring back a snappy and more responsive UX.
Although I gave up on modern gaming for the most part, especially the over-hyped AAA titles, the progress on the tech side pleases me (baring the chip shortage scalpocalypse we live in)
> first examples I am aware of are 2003: Deus-ex Invisible War and 2004: Thief - Deadly Shadows, where the PC port is deliberately gimped due to being developed for console
IIRC the first "Watch Dogs" game had deliberately downgraded graphics on PC compared to the previews and it was later found that changing a value in some config file would not only return the better looks but also lead to a boost in performance.
I am probably PC gamer and I do not use controller and do not plan to do. Aiming with mouse vs aiming with controller will always differ - tbf, even when shooter games(Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, even Descent) used keyboard for aiming that had a lot more options than modern controllers, which I personally think is a big step down from PC joystics. What you are mostly seeing are console players, who are playing games on PC and they might use controller - some of the platform games(that are also available on PC) might benefit use of controllers instead of keyboards, but then again - PC gamers have reached virtuoso level with using keyboards, so pleas stap this nonsense of inciting PC vs consoles hatred.
Clearly, consoles have bigger income from gaming than PC, but then again - mobile games dwarf all of these combined, but that is not really an argument about what is better, but where is bigger income.
The hardware survey is going to catch machines that aren't even attempting to be in the same class as consoles though.
Combine that with the availability issues that plagued the current-gen console launch, and the actual comparison of PCs used as gaming machine and consoles in people's houses is much closer.
Average PC or average Steam PC? Because I can't imagine anything but the average Steam PC being a lot better than the average PC people have in their house.
I think just as much as that budgets are a big driver. If a game costs a bazillion dollars to make, and making it cross-platform is relatively straightforward, making it an exclusive doesn't make a lot of sense unless the platform holder is handing you a bag of money.
Emulation often has an easier setup: no need to install, for instance. If on Windows, no trouble with incompatibilities with old versions of Windows; if on Linux, no trouble with Wine setup and winetricks. Also, no worries with malware.
Emulators also comes with "save states" (RAM dumps that save/restore at any point of time) and other features. It's really more convenient.
Nobody should be surprised Rockstar went as cheap as possible and suckered everyone.
Rockstar is infamous for milking GTA 5 while not spending a dime on doing anything about harassment/trolling/hackers.
I stopped playing GTA 5 after some rando found me in one of the more isolated parts of the map and just decided to kill me over and over and over again. There was nothing I could do to get away from him; I'd respawn close enough to him, and nowhere near a vehicle, so I couldn't escape.
They could easily grant temporary immunity or kick players who kill another player more than once in, say, half an hour....and instantly end the problem of harassment and trolling in-game.
Passive Mode + You can just jump into another server. Heck on PC I know there were ways you can modify your network settings to ensure you're always dropped in an empty room. Great for CEO work.
The problem isn't player killing here, it's that you get repeatedly killed by the same person immediately when you respawn. That's just broken game design.
> Despite being way ahead of any other game company in terms of R&D and innovation, they sadly decided to outsource these "definitive"versions and pay little attention to QA.
One thing I really wonder if what codebase they worked off of. Seems like they worked off the mobile port codebase a few years ago, I've seen a few people mention that many of the bugs they saw in the Definitive Edition was also present in the mobile ports.
To it seems like their big mistake wasn't necessarily the fact they outsourced everything, is they started in the wrong place.
Codebase evolution seems to be: Original -> Mobile Port(s) -> Definitive Edition.
They should have scrapped any changes made in the mobile ports and worked straight off the original versions.
main.sc is just one of the files the main.scm is compiled from.
They actually published everything except the main.sc for GTA3 in the iOS release, years ago btw. Same studio ... but now they included all the source script files for all 3 games (probably not untouched, I haven't checked). One can probably get a gist of what they changed by diffing the iOS scripts against the new versions.
They also included the script compiler, the gxt (text files) compiler ... War Drum/Grove Street Games really doesn't seem to know how to keep private tools/assets from being included in published versions. They also included alpha multiplayer maps in the iOS GTA3 release ...
You should add your email in your "about" field ...
A friend of mine called me late last night and told me some people were saying the entire game source code was leaked on PC, which was why Rockstar took down their servers for over 24 hours (and then brought it back up without the GTA Trilogy)
I know that a lot of dev notes and other stuff have been leaked, but nothing to confirm the entire source code was leaked. Though I remain hopeful
Question - I don't have the new DE version. There is a sign next to the bridge in GTA:SA which has stats on the front. What is on the back of it now? Did the developers keep the back of the sign or erase it because they didn't understand its true meaning?
That's the front of the sign. The back of the sign is the real secret :) I'm trying to find out if they kept the back of the sign. See the Reddit link I posted.
Many of the game's textures were seemingly upscaled with machine learning (or very poor human work) because a lot of the assets now have details removed. A lot of text is even misspelled in the "definitive" release.
> At the time of writing the Rockstar Games Launcher has been down for 24 hours.
I wondered why I couldn’t start GTA 5 yesterday after finally finding some time to play PC again. So yeah not only fuck DRM, but ban it. Why is punishing honest customers allowed?
Companies are not forced to provide service, even if the customer """bought""" something that requires that service to function. If it weren't "honest customers" being punished, but rather people being banned from accessing an online game for hacking or racism, we wouldn't see nearly as much concern for this being allowed.
The problem is that the only reason that something requires the service to function is so that the company can control how you use it. So, they are effectively stopping you from using a product you bought, because they can't keep tabs on you at that particular time. Some people consider that abusive.
My point is that there's nuance in it, given this same "feature" of licenses (remember, you generally don't "buy" these games, you're granted an indefinite license to use them) allows game developers to even operate online PvP games at all. Without it, developers would legally be unable to ban people, even if they're vulgarly racist against other players, or if they're cheating and auto-snapping to people's heads to achieve high-kill count games unfairly.
That is not true. They can have an EULA governing their online services, while allowing you to play offline to your heart's content. There is no nuance.
With those big titles I always treat them as something I can only reliably play for a while after I get them on Steam. This is also why I won't ever buy them at anywhere near the full price. I think I got GTA 5 for €15 in a sale.
The whole notion that if I install that game in five years time and half the music is gone due to licensing issues is just absurd. I have no expectations that I'll be able to (legally) play such games five or ten years down the road when I buy them today.
I'm looking forward to playing Hitman 3 eventually (if the previous two instalments are anything to go buy it will work flawlessly on Linux too), but I'm not getting it until its on sale (I guess Christmas 2022?); it seems like a game that is way too dependant on the parent company's servers to run as well, even though I only play the single player content.
I miss the days when even the big titles just booted up without phoning home for permission to run.
I some wargames like indie game but required an online ping to even play. Their previous title they did the same but not required a connection for it. They said just for their other title, over 90% of them were pirated copies. So that is why they mandated DRM.
I wouldnr have so much of an issue wirh online DRM if I got a guarantee of X years to play it. Some of these devs could just drop support or Windows messes with it that ita unplayable. So at that point I just want support.
GTA3 for the radios was using IMA ADPCM on both PS2 and PC. Some cutscene files were PCM, some files were mp3.
Vice City used adf, a custom container for (horrible quality) mp3 files. PS2 still used ADPCM. Most PC cutscene files are mp3 (twice encoded btw, so extra terrible quality), on PS2 they're also ADPCM.
SA was the first 3d GTA game to use ogg for the radio, and also doesn't use miles sound system anymore.
It should be noted that the GTA3 Definitive Edition ogg encodes are just encodes from the original PC ADPCM files, NOT from lossless masters. The cutscenes are also the same quality the PC version had, so a mix of mp3 and PCM sources.
Well I'm kind of an audio nerd, and the radios are great to listen to in the background, so I guess that explains it.
You probably can't find it, but it's relatively easy to figure out by just browsing the original game files, since the audio files (except for SFX.RAW/DAT) are all unpacked.
The most damning piece of evidence is that they have twice the encoder delay (mp3 encoders add a few samples at the beginning and end) that the file would have if encoded once (from VC PS2 for example).
They were especially doing that back then to avoid having to pay for a patent license for the MP3 codec. You could only play mp3s in the user playlist channel if the OS supplied the mp3 codec.
Another reason many games use Ogg Vorbis is for seamless looping and zero delay sound effects. Gapless MP3 is a bit of a mess because encoders insert priming samples but there is no standard way to signal it in the bitstream. (it also compresses better than MP3)
Tough call to make. Microsoft somehow decided very close to the release to not market win2k to consumers, which was initially planned. Instead that inexplicable abomination called Me was cobbled together as a stop-gap solution, and a decision was made to add more polish and "fun stuff" to 2k and release it as xp.
Win2k was in fact already very suited for home users just from a technical standpoint. DOS compatibility was obviously lacking and indeed slightly improved for xp, but even that didn't run a lot of games. But it ran pretty much every win9x game I threw at it.
Allright, so I looked into it and found that while GTA3 did have an mp3 codec, GTA San Andreas did not and could not play mp3s unless you installed the codec yourself, which was easily done by downloading Windows Media Player.
I’m sure you can look up yourself what the consumer Windows was when that game came out, but clearly it did not come with an mp3 codec by default and the game definitely didn’t.