Is it possible to port GTA 3 to the Dreamcast?

[Anthony817]

Im not sure someone is porting it to 3ds even so people have been porting GTA 3

Interesting notes on Dreamcast comparison

“ While the PS2's CPU–GPU transmission bus for transferring polygons and textures is 50% faster than the Dreamcast's CPU–GPU transmission bus, the DC has textures loaded directly to VRAM (freeing up the CPU–GPU transmission bus for polygons) and texture compression gives it higher effective texture bandwidth.”

“ Dreamcast games were effectively using 20–30 MB of texture data[1] (compressed to around 5–6 MB),[10] while PS2 games up until 2003 peaked at 5.5 MB of texture data (average 1.5 MB). PS2 games up until 2003 rendered up to 7.5 million polygons/sec (145,000 polygons per scene), with most rendering 2–5 million polygons/sec (average 52,000 polygons per scene);[11] in comparison, Dreamcast game engines rendered up to 5 million polygons/sec (160,000 polygons per scene),[4] with most games rendering 2–4 million polygons/sec (average 50,000 polygons per scene).”

Which is not a totally fair comparison as Dreamcast development ended 2001. How many per scene on PS2 games in the first 2 years? Either way including games 2 years after Dreamcast death still have essentially the same polygons per scene

I wonder if someone can contact the team porting to 3ds and figure out how they are doing it

We are not just talking about VRAM, but also normal RAM. The max size of any given scene is limited by the RAM. Just look at how short the levels had to be broken up into for Half-Life and Soldier of Fortune to even work. Sure you could solve some of this with streaming data but not all of it if you wanted to do a homebrew port made by only a few developers. They have simply too complex scenes in many areas of the game. I mean I am going to take the developers word for it. They simply could not get it working in 3p camera view and the canceled version never could break free from that perspective with what they had running. There were some very early images of the evolution of the main character Claude, and almost certainly one of those images shows the Dreamcast version but we just do not know which one.



I am one of the biggest GTA fans, and I do hope to be proven wrong but I also know computer and console hardware pretty well to know that normal RAM can make many things nearly impossible. Obviously we do know they did have it working in some form, so that is fact. What is improbable is thinking we are going to see some hobby developers get the PS2 decompiled source port for PC working on DC from KOS with only a handful of developers. Now I am not saying it is impossible, just unlikely. I have repeatedly been shocked and awed by really talented programmers over the years going beyond what myself and others thought was possible on dated hardware. So I am all for it happening but I tend to be a realist and maybe a cynical pessimist lol. But make no mistake I do absolutely want to see it on the console.

I did even think that Driver 2 would be a better fit, but I think it was recently moved from SDL 3.1 to SDL 2.0.16 so might be even more possible now?

[Cass]

It's theoretically possible but it's not going to happen. Think about how much work would be involved for a few people to invest so much time and effort to prove a point that's already demonstrable. The game worlds created in Crazy Taxi, Shenmue 2, Omikron (a PC port) show the DC could technically pull off a sand box style game. They're very different to the likes of GTA3 on the PS2 but I think they make the point. A left field take but for me Crazy Taxi is the most direct comparison on Dreamcast to GTA3 .For a second just imagine your character in Crazy Taxi had the option to walk around the city or drive any of the other cars/trucks even the helicopter in the game - how far would that be from the core concept GTA style game. Look at how vibrant the city is the number of vehicles on screen, NPC's, geometry and the size of the map.

[cast128dreams]

also you guys just look super run about san francisco.personally i believe it can be done 100%

[Ryo_Hazuki]

Tokyo Bus also has a big city!

[dkrazor]

I've been a game developer for 10 years, but I only work with Mobile, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Steam. I would like to learn something about OpenGL and try something for DC.

I will say what I think according to my experience. I follow the GTA series from PS1, GBA, PS2 etc... to the present day with PS5 and its "Definitive" version.

Even though one of the producers said that "it was not possible to run the game in third person view", due to the big problem of "Scenery Streaming". I believe it is due to lack of interest and costs. GTA 3 as it is... will never work on Dreamcast. It needs adjustments and modifications to the 3D models, better organized textures (Atlas), less detail: dirt, garbage cans... vehicles, pedestrians, among others.

"We did some prototypes on the Dreamcast, and through that, got the greenlight to start GTA 3. So as the original team finished GTA 2, we formed a new team around the development of GTA 3." - Gamesradar.com




In one of the interviews, one of the producers himself said that they "pushed" the PS2 to the limit. Also in the IGN videos, you can notice FPS drops in scenes with lots of tire smoke.

“The main difficulty was the ‘streaming’,” Vermeij explains. “The PS2 only had enough memory for a couple of city blocks around the player. As they moved through the city, the new graphics had to be loaded from the DVD. Unfortunately, the DVD drive was very slow and this caused the city to not be loaded in time and buildings to be invisible until they popped in.

“We actually had to slow the player down to minimize the issues. [The island of] Portland initially had a main drag all the way down it. This allowed the player to go too fast so the streaming would ‘lag’. We had to break it up with a building. This slowed the player down just enough. The limited memory is also the reason you would see so many of the same cars. There was only enough memory to load a few types at a time.” - techradar.com

I think the gameplay and 3D in the beginning was very Midtown Madness 2 style, according to images at the time.




See this interview about GTA Liberty City Stories (PSP)

Gordon Hall from Rockstar Leeds:

"Lots of hard work and attention to detail. Every asset in the game had to be trimmed to the bare essentials. The team at Rockstar North has been involved every step of the way and they had some very clever compression techniques they'd used in Vice city and San Andreas that the team here heavily optimized for PSP in order to get all the various assets onto the disc.

There were some fundamental changes to the way streaming is accomplished to minimise the reliance on the disk. With the help of Rockstar North, we painstakingly organized data on the disk such that the game can pull off information in chunks. The actual streams are pulled in bursts, allowing us to only spin up the disc occasionally.

The engineers here and in Scotland spent a lot of time rewriting a brand new engine specifically for the PSP. While that was going on we had an entire team working on creating all new assets for Liberty City. The secret seems to be not just retooling assets from another version of a game, you have to really get in there and start over from the ground floor. Combining a brand new engine with PSP specific assets allowed us to keep console style Grand Theft Auto action playable at around 30 frames per second with full draw-distance and ped/traffic density."

Font: https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/10/14 ... -interview

Yes it would be possible!!!
If there was an effort like the one made by GTA LCS. A team to remodel buildings, vehicles and reorganize + compress textures and audio files, and a nice transcode of source code and stuff.


Fonts:
https://www.gamesradar.com/20-years-lat ... -possible/
https://www.techradar.com/news/gta-3d-h ... open-world
https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/23 ... w-with-dma
https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/10/14 ... -interview

[MastaG]

Nice one dkrazor.
The Dreamcast has half the memory of the PS2 and 1/4th of the PSP.
However it has twice the amount of video memory compared to the PS2 (8megs) vs 4megs for the PS2 and 2megs for the PSP.

Furthermore it features the same limited disc reading speed and as a bonus Sega didn't decide to equip it with some (optional) fast storage solution such as a HDD.

I think they must have considered it at some point as the mainboard does have the points to solder an IDE cable for a HDD/CF-Card.

If only Sega didn't cut the memory in half compared to the Naomi and made an optional HDD slot and sell the disk separately to safe on costs.
Then they could give game studios the option to require the optional disk "addon" for caching game assets.

If these two things happened (and perhaps no support for regular discs at all (= no easy way to do piracy)).
Then we might have seen a GTA 3

But hey it didn't happen.
So based on dkrazor's post... unless we find a way to finance multiple teams working on a GTA port (for the most part from the ground up) made specifically for the Dreamcast (probably requiring some GDEmu/IDE solution for fast loading).
It will never happen.

[fafadou]

@dkrazor's if you want there is the simulant discord with opengl dreamsdk subjects etc... And fabulous men:)

[DarkSynbios]

As said the fellow Fafadou above, maybe can you help Kazade with new game Driving Strikers which is very promising game.

[dubcity]

Dreamcast games with large cities. How did they stream/work?











So in my opinion it is possible. But it will take a lot of work to scale it down. Many months.

*Adding Crazy Taxi 2 in agreement with Cass

[Cass]

I think Crazy Taxi should be on your list dubcity. Its got lots of cars, lots of NPC's, a reasonably sized city. It's a little bit of s stretch but in my head at least if you could walk around the city as well as drive you'd have the basics of a GTA3 sandbox environment on Dreamcast.