Rockstar Games
GTA developer's clever trick to manage big city traffic
A programming trick has made it possible to give Grand Theft Auto’s traffic the realism of the various cities we know and love on PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC.
Beyond the violence, humor, and action, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has always been filled with an attention to detail that makes it feel like a living ecosystem. Each release from Rockstar Games has always strived to go the extra mile to deliver titles that feel realistic. And as we await the release of GTA VI in the fall of 2025, we continue to revisit details from previous titles.
This is how traffic worked in GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas
One element that is an essential part of a franchise like GTA is the vehicles and how they behave on the streets. Once again, Obbe Vermeij, the former Rockstar Games technical director at Rockstar North from 1995 to 2009, who has revealed some behind-the-scenes details about the game, took to his X account (formerly Twitter) to briefly explain how traffic works in the trilogy that came out on PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC, giving the illusion that traffic is alive in the cities.
“As the player moves around, cars are constantly created and deleted to give the appearance of a busy city,” he wrote on his account. “For gta3, Vice & SA, my code places cars at about 70m from the player if they would be in view of the camera. They get removed at around 90m. Cars that are ‘off screen’ get placed at around 15m and removed at 25m.”
However, as Vermeij details in his paper, the code did not always work as expected when searching for nearby car nodes, resulting in us sometimes having “empty or unusually busy streets.”
Something the former Rockstar Games employee mentions in a later tweet is that the same code applies to pedestrians in those games, with the main difference being that “distances are much closer to the player compared to cars.”
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