Thread: Close to perfect

Been playing GTA: Vice City and have realized that these guys at Rockstar almost created the perfect game. Gameplay, storyline, graphics, and overall it's just plain fun - over and over and over. The radio stations are unbelievable and you can add more music as well. But the commercials and public radio stations are just about insane - very well done.

Now if only other companies can capture some of this goodness and stick it in other games we will have a lot to look forward to.
Mafia was sort of the same thing as GTA series except set in the 1920's era and it's a bit diff but still an accomplishment as well.

I know not everyone likes GTA and it caused a lot of controversy, but seriously the GTA 3 and Vice City games are just amazing leaps in gaming goodness - and I'm not just talking about graphics because there are lots of games with better graphics.

Comments?

I rented San Andreas, it was pretty sweet. The part I like the most is how vast the city is, you can drive forever and it never stops to load a damn thing. They must have pretty cool paging system for that.

The only thing i dislike about the whole series is that you basically do the same things over and over. Its like, go chase that guy and shoot him... mission 2: go chase some other guy.. but this time he's on a bike instead of in a car. Or you go steal stuff once and a while. Im not sure what else id expect but, i started to feel the repition after playing for a few days.

This is a game programming discussion. So it belongs here.

There is a lesson to be learned from games like this and from others who simply took the genre and re-defined it in one release.

And if you want to make it more game programming oriented, how do you suspect they created the lighting for the game. Not all of those 'lights' you see there are actual lights.

Well my guess is, instead of using the native lighting system (DX or whatever was used) they could have made a dumbed down lighting system to use on the smaller things. So they look decent not have a lot of functionality and don't use up all the system resources.

Yeah they probably used lightmaps for their static object lighting system. I don't see dynamic shadows in the pic or in the game so I don't think the lighting system is all that complex. If you look at the road you can even see where a triangle border is so they might be using DirectX's default dot3 vertex lighting.