GTA 3 is being ported to the Sega Dreamcast | Hacker News Reader

GTA 3 is being ported to the Sega Dreamcast

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As soon as I seen the headline I thought, "Falco?"

Nice to see, but people still want you to complete Elysian Shadows or give them their money back.

For the uninitiated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nvf55t/video_ga...

Luckily, i didn't back that project back then.

Also, the comments on the Kickstarter page [0] make for an interesting, if sad, read.

Linked on [1] is where he comes out of the woods again, the following comments and his replies also shed some lights on what he feels he is owing the people, that pledged $185000 on Kickstarter....

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1945059142/elysian-shad... [1] https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=182356#...

Honestly, anyone who says they’ll be creating an engine and sharing it for general use, is someone who’ll likely never make a game themselves.

It’s definitely possible, but incredibly difficult to make something generic out Of the gate.

Unfortunately, it’s all too common among indie dev projects seeking backing, because it sounds like a cooler idea and people seem to like the purity of the idea.

Pretty much true. Not only that, but if you look at the Kickstarter page, what exactly was my job? Engine programmer. Not gameplay. Th engine is pretty much complete, as are all of the tools. Problem is it taxed me so hard and left me with so little extra time and cognitive resources that I could not properly lead the rest of the project or the team-mates whose job it was to do the gameplay aspect... Which is absolutely a leadership failure on my part, and I'll happily own up to that.

It’s classic scope creep. They should’ve released the game as a base and made the engine and tools kickstarter bonus goals to be delivered later. They should’ve also constrained the scope to “2.5D top-down action RPG engine”. What happened in practice was that they went on constant tangents like writing emulators for the memory card. I can imagine that a lot of team drama came from this mismanagement impeding progress and making everyone’s job harder.

I do totally agree that I should've just made an engine and the toolkit and just released it as that, but it wouldn't have been "THEY should've constrainted the scope" -- as there would've been no "they." It would've been all me without a team I had to support by splitting that Kickstarter so many ways that we made under minimum wage in the end... lol.

Falco, I have watched your DC work since you first started on YouTube. When I say „they“ it is out of politeness to not name you directly and also because I think some of the blame lies with others. I used to be a well-known member of the DC community and defended you for years. I had a lot of respect for your efforts. I am however embarrassed to have defended you not because you failed, but because of how you handled the failure even to this day.

Half fake news, half true.

I was king of scope creep, but I was also the engine and tools developer... Does it LOOK LIKE the engine and tools were the ones bottlenecking progress, or does it look like a lack of ACTUAL GAME CONTENT was the problem with Elysian Shadows? The engine and tools (which were my job) are probably easily at 90% done.

What I do own up to is being so bogged down with coding up a whole cross-platform engine and toolkit that I was an absolutely horrible manager who just relied on the rest of the team to know what needed to get done and take care of it, which obviously never actually happened. I was not as involved in the rest of the actual game aspect of ES independent of the tech than I should've been, and I own up to that...

But if you actually think THAT is what caused this game to never get done, you aren't seeing clearly. That's the one aspect of the game (other than audio, which was never a problem) which was actually where it should've been in terms of progress.

Also, for the record, LOL, ElysianVMU caused "drama" and extra work for the team? Funny, not one person other than me wrote a line of code for EVMU or even implemented the single line of Lua code it takes to display a VMU icon in-game... and as far as I ever knew, Patryk enjoyed getting to take a few hours to get away from killing himself being overworked on terrain and character assets to get to draw VMU icons, or so I'm assuming based on the fact half of what he drew were penises and jokes, initially. ;)

Also, for the record, LOL, ElysianVMU caused "drama" and extra work for the team?

The constant tangents did, that project being one of them. The VMU emulator did not kill anybody’s firstborn, but like the other many tangents it ate away at your time, which was required elsewhere.

I see you haven’t changed and still try to misinterpret people’s comments rather than really owning up to the past.

It would seem the best way to put an end to the ES fiasco is to simply release what you have (and post the update to Kickstarter)?

If the engine and tools are 90% complete, it's better to release 90% of something than nothing at all. The backers would no longer be able to call it a scam. It's probably the only way to put it all to rest.

Uh, for the record, like... I've been more than open about my past history with ES, and have spent the last 2+ years straight giving back to the Dreamcast community, supporting every game and project I've been able to find time for, fixing many bugs that have plagued this scene for decades and becoming the developer with the second-most commits to the KallistiOS repo in just 2 years, beaten only by the lead maintainer with over a decade of work...

But yes, way to take the spotlight away from the developers who are pouring their hearts and souls into this project, of which I'm only an insignificant part of, to bring up some irrelevant shit from my past which I have owned up to and am literally working to correct by supporting projects like this... total douche bag move. Makes me feel sorry for the rest of the team, tbh.

This will be a fascinating port to watch take shape. There are many DC to PS2 ports which show the PS2 unfavourably. But GTA 3 is a game which utilises some of the PS2's strengths like faster vector performance and more RAM. A PS2 to DC port then might shed more light on how the consoles compare more generally.

This is apparently ported from the PC not PS2. I can’t think of any particular features that would be challenging due to platform differences, except for streaming open world data from disc instead of harddisk.

I hope this is a joke, considering I literally mentioned in the post: Save files sizes are substantially larger, world draw distances are greater, textures tend to be higher resolution, etc.

It was in the same sentence as it being a port from PC :>

My reply was to a post that talked about PS2‘s strengths.

I was a die hard Dreamcast supporter back in the day. While the Dreamcast had already been discontinued by the time GTA3 came out, let me tell you it really was the nail in the coffin.

It's been 23 years and there is some part of my brain that still holds on to my childhood belief that Sega would realize their folly and Dreamcast would make a comeback.

I frankly think a big part of it was that the Dreamcast was the first system I purchased with my own money, and it being so quickly discontinued was almost traumatic in a way.

I had found near $300 shoved into a book in the library at my middle school - I was 12 or around there and, being young, didn't tell anyone and just kept the cash.

I went out and bought my first self-bought console, a Dreamcast, and a boatload of Pokemon cards.

It's a good memory.

Thanks so much for the shout-out and support! If you want more updates, make sure to also follow the lead developer, https://x.com/poiitidis, and another rock-star from our community who is supporting him, https://x.com/Frogbull55.

This is presumably based on a project that reconstructed C++ from the disassembly.

https://github.com/halpz/re3

Censored by Rockstar/Take-Two no less. With presumably an ultimatum to discontinue the project as part of a settlement of a protracted legal case [1].

[1] https://www.gamesradar.com/gta-owner-settles-lawsuit-against...

"...helping us stick it to the PS2..."

Cool project, but what an inane concept.

Jokes do tend to be inane...

This is so awesome! I cannot wait for it to be finished. The DC is still my all time favorite console and having all these projects pop up the past few years has been great.

Now we need someone to cross compile all the N64 games for the DC :D

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