San Andreas TOO big my ASS! Heard of compression?

[ViceCity09]

Actually a San Andreas with GTA IV engine graphics would have 6 or 7 different tmospheres rather than one like GTA IV and Vice City.

 

You would have Los Santos,San Fierro,Las Venturas,Mountains,Countryside,Desert etc.

[Reconite]

I'm with mkey82 on this

 

Jcpo, almost everything (if not everything) you just said is really retarded.

[CryptReaperDorian]

Come on realisticially even IVs graphics aren't THAT good.

You sir are my new GTAF hero!

I also agree. The graphics for GTA IV are good I say, but they are for surely not the best. If anybody has ever played MGS4 and watched the opening cutscene you'll see how detailed that game is. Even Mafia 2, another sandbox game under TT that has a map about the same size as GTA IV's map, has graphics on par or possibly better than GTA IV's graphics (it looks like it may be smoother though). In GTA IV if you focus the camera into Niko you'll notice how everything still looks like it was made of paper. I have to say though that the vehicle textures seem better than some other things in GTA IV (like unenterable buildings being chalkish colored or how character models and trees have a paperish look). I say that one of the hardest things though for character animations is muscle movement especially in the face. Not many games get muscle movement in a character's face while they're talking that detailed yet. Let's not even start about the eigth generation of gaming (which is "next generation", seventh generation is "current generation"). Now THAT will have much better graphics than GTA IV and soon we'll be calling GTA IV "unrealistic" and "cartoonish". Back in the day we called GTA III realistic I believe, but now it's "unrealistic" and "cartoonish". Deja vu?

 

Has anybody ever played GTA2 on PC (the one you can download for free anyways)? GTA2 on PC has neat vehicle textures IMO that look a lot like what GTA IV would be from top-down.

[Master Sima Yi]

Haven't you ever noticed that many people are like "San Andreas is too big for next generation consoles" or people acting like or saying that San Andreas is like the biggest sandbox map up to date? You probably do as you may be one of those people. Now this thread isn't really meant to flame those this is directed to, but this should be made clear. Audio takes up usually 80% of games! Unlike graphics and animations, audio can't be compressed down. Does anybody actually know how big SA is? It's only 13.9 square miles (GTA IV's map is then around 10.5 square miles). True Crime: New York City had a full scale replica of Manhattan which was 24 square miles and it still had what can be said some of the best graphics for PS2. Even then that's pretty tiny. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has a map of 107.22 square miles, ArmA 2 has a map of about 139 square miles (about 10 times larger than SA), True Crime: Streets of L.A. has a map of 240 square miles, ArmA: Armed Assault has a map of about 248 square miles, and Just Cause has a map of 391 square miles. Now that's just a handful of games that have massive maps. Eight Days (which was cancelled and just recently announced to only be on hold along with The Getaway 3 ) was supposed to have the largest map up to date taking place in eight states, and that itself seemed like it was going to have pretty good graphics.

 

My point is that San Andreas is completely do-able on seventh generation consoles.

 

Just some input.

The reason why Operation Flashpoint has so much square miles because it is mostly flat areas. GTA games have many height differences and tall buildings too. That too is part of the landscape, not the map which you see in the pause menu.

 

And besides, why do people keep asking for San Andreas? Why not three different games: San Fierro, Las Venturas and Los Santos? Why does it have to be one map? They could make Los Santos as big as Liberty City.

[Ad Rem]

Oh my, there seems to be quite the language barrier here. Thank goodness I'm here to shed some light on this utterly serious business.

 

 

 

ALL GTA maps are square Yeah, go figure. You have some land, some seas and that's that. Square.

 

In San Andreas the landmass itself was a big square. He dislikes that. That's what he's getting at. I can understand it was probably because US states tend to be quite rectangular but, y'know, that's what he was getting at.

 

 

You are utterly deluded. Do you even know the definition of the word "island"? A piece of terrain surrounded from all sides with water. Yeah, SA has that.

 

In San Andreas there were several cities with countryside in between, what he means is that he prefers the maps that are nothing but city terrain.

 

 

What the hell are you talking about? You had safehouses all over the place

 

He doesn't mean safehouses, he means houses in general. Habitation.

 

 

What? So trees are unreal? Riiiiiight. It seems GTAIV redefined the term "realistic".

 

Nowhere did he state that trees are unreal. The realness statement and the tree statement are two separate issues in the sentence.

 

There. You're welcome.

 

Edit: Apparently I cannot quote inside quotes. How awkward.

Edited November 9, 2009 by Ad Rem

[bobgtafan]

 

So there are 3 possibilities. First, next GTA might not come out on 360. I find that unlikely. Second, next GTA might be a single city, about the size of Liberty. That is most likely. Third, they might build something like San Andreas, but they will simply take the same urban area as Liberty and spread it between two or more smaller cities with some countryside in between. This is a possibility.

I find this possible. The map will probably be 15 sq miles at most. Each major city about the size of Broker and Bohan combined. About 2 small towns the size of Bohan and then smaller towns the size of neighborhoods. The rest would be countryside and the game overall would be more detailed than GTA 4. Also the GTA series hasn't had a graphic up date in 18 monthes. Plus they have a whole world to project not just a linear path. So of course the graphics aren't the BEST.

[K^2]

Certainly an option. And if they properly optimize forest generation and increase countryside, they can do a whole lot more than 15 square miles. It's just a question of how big the map needs to be to feel right. As I've mentioned earlier, countryside can be made to take up very little resources, both in terms of memory and in terms of rendering. Cities are where you need a crap load of different textures, and that's where the bottle neck is.

[supermortalhuman]

yes, that bottleneck. It's a major bottleneck in creativity and productivity too because once you're in the city, you're pretty well confined to a uniform environment. The little towns between the cities in san andreas could have been so much better. They could have been much more organic, for lack of a better term since I am talking about the man made aspects of the little towns.

 

If there is something they did wrong in San Andreas... It was the countryside, because the desert really was done well, the uniformity of it all was less noticeable than all those angel pines scattered about. San Fransisco was definitely done wrong compared to Vegas and LA, and correct me if I'm wrong, but San Fierro was in GTA 1, not LA or Vegas. Quite obviously, I'm sure, they wouldn't drop them from the line up, but if any city lacked, as much as I loved it, San Fierro was super lacking in San Andreas.

 

They did a lot of things right, Hoover Damn was done excellently and shrunken perfectly to that GTA scale - but it didn't look like it would have looked today! It still remains, though, that they are obviously sending the message "Reboot!" with Liberty City. "We felt comfortable doing it because we felt we had gotten NYC wrong" - OK, so it's about the MAP with GTA IV (and the whole thing was laced with that on the way up to release - living breathing etc's and such's)

 

What is it about for San Andreas? Not the map, which would obviously be redone, because "we've covered this" in Liberty, that translates to the rest of the reboot. What did they get wrong in San Andreas, that isn't about the location, that should be addressed? Ever crash an airplane slow enough not to explode in water? Those could have been done way better. Jacking trains. These are vehicles that you can't and never could drive in Liberty City with the exception of the Dodo, bikes and heli's were in since LCS.

 

Cars are addressed IMHO. Storytelling? Addressed. Something more ambiguous? Time period? SOmething elSe? What was done so horribly in San Andreas that they would be prone to write PR that says they are comfortable redoing it? Because we know, it's got to be redone, it's got to be. It won't be a rehash, IV is definitely Not a rehash. Vice and San in the style of IV would definitely Not be rehashes.

 

So what will the PR excuse be for the other two locations? I really can't imagine them doing San Andreas and not Vice City, so what did that game do that they could say made them comfortable redoing it? Perhaps they felt like Vice City had an Identity it's own in video gaming, but not globally? Like, maybe they felt that it felt a bit too parody and not so much satire? Constrained by the 80s focus? It was a brilliant game, but did it have an identity outside of that? What about San Andreas could be so lacking that an Epic remake would be called for, on the scale that we saw done with Liberty City.

 

Liberty City was about the map, including the life it bears within it (euphoria, damage models, facial emotion, IK, all of it) what evolves for the other two areas? What was done wrong in those? San Andreas? The countryside and flight, for sure. What else?

[oc student]

Yeah but OP, it's not about what can and can't fit on a disc, it's what fits in their budget. With GTA 4 being smaller but way more detailed, even that has already blown over 100 million dollars of their budget. How much more money do you think San Andreas would cost if they put in that much detail? All this technical bs about what and what not can fit on a crappy disc.

Edited November 10, 2009 by oc student

[Algonquin Bridge]

I can understand the wanton lust for a re-doing of San Andreas State with GTA IV generation software. Yet as said, there are problems with disk space.

 

My suggestion? Perhaps instead of creating one huge state, focus on a city per game. They could be in the same time period; or they could be in different ones. And perhaps one day, when the world is populated by the first communist games console, the "Playbox 720PCii" comes out, perhaps Rockstar could seamlessly link the cities together as one huge GTA.

 

[K^2]

first communist games console, the "Playbox 720PCii"

Thank you very much. I'm going to have nightmares now. Something along the lines of giant workstation/console flashing its lights in a big warehouse-type space. All colors are washed out. I'm trying to run away, but it is sucking me into its vents. And just as it pulls me in completely, I'll wake up screaming.

 

Problem with city-at-a-time is that most people want SA-type game for the countryside between the cities. But maybe some sort of a compromise can be reached. Like releasing city at a time, but with last city including large countryside so that if you do install all 3 on HDD you have the whole state at once. But that would limit options on possible missions, so that would probably have to go as a DLC mission pack as well...

[Algonquin Assassin]

 

I think if they do return to San Andreas, they should only use one city, preferrably Las Venturas, since it had the most potential, yet it was the least used of all the cities in SA.

This. Las Venturas was under utilized in SA, and felt more like an after thought, or R* just added it to fill up the map.

 

A game that's entirely focussed on it I think would be epic.