Dataminers are finding developer comments and unlicensed songs in GTA Trilogy
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
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.
emulate and enjoy the games at 4k upscaled running at 60fps with everything the original had. it's the best way to enjoy these older titles.
even shadow of the colossus for ps2 upscaled is better than the ps4 remaster - the "tone" has changed in the remaster. check out some youtube videos.
Emulators also comes with "save states" (RAM dumps that save/restore at any point of time) and other features. It's really more convenient.
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.
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)
Consoles and PC have influenced eachother- how many PC gamers today use controllers? The distinction has blurred somewhere in the 2010s.
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.
I switched to PC. I play what once would be exclusive console games with a dualshock on a TV. Consoles and PC have converged.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
It's like people being pissed off about PKers in Ultima Online 20-something years ago. It's literally what you signed up for. It's part of the world.
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.
https://twitter.com/nationalpepper/status/145929488113902387...
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 ...
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
Seeing how it is treated is just sad. This industry doesn't care about art.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/a_staggering...
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2246626-grand-theft-auto-the...
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?
I'll go further, why is it punishing customers allowed? What authority does a company hold to punish anyone?
Because it isn't disallowed.
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.
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.
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.
http://en.m.wikigta.org/wiki/User_Track_Player_(GTA_San_Andr...
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.
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.
It's such obscure/trivial stuff (but interesting).
Seems like info you probably couldn't find. Neat to see it documented somewhere.
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.