On today's exciting episode of physics engine optimization fuck-ups, featuring the Sega Dreamcast port of Grand Theft Auto 3, we have achieved... LIFTOFF!!!

I have to ask, is part of the reason you're motivated to work on this is how pretty it looks? I went back and looked at the ps2 version, and something about the raw pixelness of this makes it so cosy.

Well, to be honest there's a lot going on here with this port. Firstly, it's part of our lore and history of the Dreamcast's demise, that Grand Theft Auto 3 was supposed to be the first "true" 6th gen title that wasn't supposed to be possible on the Dreamcast's hardware. It was literally said by people in the tech industry that the DC didn't have enough RAM or enough disc streaming bandwidth or enough polygon pushing power to handle this title, which was one of the big reasons to buy the PS2. One aspect of my motivation is definitely that "correct the timeline of gaming history" goal, and I think that in particular resonates with a LOT of players, who were avid Dreamcast fans and happy owners who were told back in the day their favorite console just couldn't handle this game... It's very rewarding to be a part of making the impossible possible and rewriting part of the DC's history. Then beyond that, honestly, the game has a LOT going for it that appeals to me as a tech nerd. It's the first really big-ass open-world mainstream game that didn't have segmented levels and loadscreens and was streaming the world in real-time. Then it also was one of the first games to really incorporate rigid body physics into the game, which is really cool and another nice challenge for porting at good speeds. Then finally, yes. It's "pretty." I find it extremely pretty in some ways that fascinate me... Firstly, it's "faking" a lot of incredible effects which wouldn't happen in real-time until the Xbox 360 generation with shaders, but it fakes these effects so well that it almost fooled me into thinking some of it wouldn't even work on DC... I'm talking about things like the "bloom" coronas of light around light sources, the per-vertex dynamic lighting, the lens flares, the rain, fog, and other environmental effects, the reflections of of light on the ground when it rains... Such an incredible amount of visual information to detail combined with some super super clever usages of simple textures to achieve what modern HW needs a bajillion clock cycles in shader programs to achieve. lol. Oh, then lastly, tbh, this is a really good game which I do thoroughly enjoy.

Grand Jump Auto

GTAIV level of physics here folfs

Ok, where’s the liftof— Oh, wow! 😮

Looks perfect to me, I've always wanted a flying car.

Then it be - Stunt bonus: $2 😂

How do you do this port? Does rockstar give you access to the source? Or are you adapting it from re3?

We are essentially a highly DC optimized port of the RE3 decomp, with a build process which takes the asset bundle from LEGALLY PURCHASED copies of GTA3 for the PC and converts it to use DC-optimized formats and packages it all up into a burnable/bootable disc image for the DC.