How Rockstar fit an entire city into PlayStation 2 memory

Go back 5 years and you would not have seen anything like this on GMTK. It's impressive how much Mark has continued to push himself to learn, improve and not rest on the same presentation style

A few years ago, Mark had barely written any code. Now he has recompiled the source of GTA3 with several changes. Kudos!

One of my favourite things about GMTK is getting to spend ages figuring out the answer to some random question I have about game development. Like, "How do Sims think"? "How does the Nemesis System work", and "How did GTA work on a PS2?". Any questions you think I should answer? Always looking for new rabbit holes to go down!

20:59 "Speed of the streaming technology is entirely dependent on the surface of this disk" Drops the disk on the table surface down...

15:50 CD and DVD reads from the inside out to the edge. When we made DVDs for PS2 games, we only used the first 3.5GB of the disc because the chance of read errors was much higher on the outer 1GB. This was because the disc moves faster under the read head on the outer tracks.

Well, maybe Mondays aren't really that bad.

the Dodo being a flightless bird is a great touch actually

12:55 and here I always thought the devs were trolling me. I’d spend forever trying to find a certain car, and when I finally tracked it down, suddenly everyone was driving one 😂

"The disc is a little bit scratched" > proceeds to put it bottom down on the table I wonder why.

Three mainline GTAs on one console - we didn't know how good we had it.

When I got into game dev, I learned about all these different techniques that studios used to run games on incredibly limited hardware. But now making the connection between that knowledge and the "why can't I find this car? Why is this car EVERYWHERE now that I found it??" feels so satisfying! Man, I love games tech so much!

CPUs nowadays have more cache than the PS2 had RAM.

I clicked on this video and was immediately terrified by the irl Mark jumpscare

And nowadays devs just put everything in memory and we need 500gb ram to play lego batman

Reminds me of the time we worked on Gangstar. The team had to fit a "GTA-like" on the first iPhone. I think it was the first 3D open-world on iPhone. The challenge wasn't as much the memory as it was the rendering. We actually use some tricks similar to GTA: if you had a car, others would be those using the same atlas of textures (so they could be batched together). The view frustum would be super aggressive so stuff would depop behind so it could pop in front of you. No flight so there could be islands of void in some areas. And the most important: no straight roads. Not for long anyway. That wasn't because of speed but because we wanted to make the city feel larger, and make it so you couldn't see too far ahead. And so if you go in a straight line and take the most obvious turn, you pass through pretty much every road out there, rather than driving in circle on the same street again and again. And since we really couldn't display much ahead, we made one big imposter city (atrociously low-res) drawn behind the real one. As for streaming? No time to make such tech, so it was just one very long loading at the start of the game!

The delivery on "My car is on fire. Help." is absolutely perfect

Absolute magic. I really wish more people got to appreciate how impressive video games as a technical art form are.

The fact that the game is running on 32megabitea of ram is almost unbelievable considering how much ram games use nowadays

21:24 until San andreas released with jet aircraft. I had a mental map of where all the trees in the hills around los santos were because I would always crash into invisible trees when flying the jet.

The Dodo is indeed hard to fly, but it's capable of flying around the entire city with enough practice. I remember flying it out to the edge of the map where there are these weird green hills with absolutely nothing on them