Anthony817 wrote:Ok, the gears in my head just started turning. Why not try using the assets from GTA LCS and ONLY the stuff from it that was ALSO in GTA 3, and port those assets to the open source port on PC? Start from there and work your way back.Then when you have that working on the PC port start making it for DC with the PSP content. The PSP quality assets should surely give anybody who wants to seriously look at porting a 3D era GTA game to the DC a big leg up. Any other stuff that is too high poly or would be too hard on the memory could be recreated either from scratch, or likewise run the models through a 3D modeling program and trim the hell out of them until similar to the LCS content. But only to the remaining content not already edited for PSP version from the original.
A hell of a lot of work for sure, but that makes it sound much more feasible in my honest opinion. After all the LCS map and vehicles were largely similar if not the same or slightly edited. Obviously they had more stuff in it like bikes and some different character models, but I think the NPC's from GTA 3 may be ok, granted already low enough quality. Just pedestrian and vehicle density as well as a few other tweaks would need to be adjusted, but would be a lot more close to what we might have actually seen from a leaked beta, just more complete.
It should be totally possible. Its not like dreamcast didnt already stream huge amount of assets, its no slouch despite what ppl think. Tapmn had recently extracted the full crazy taxi maps and they are huge, heres a quote:
The polygon count of both Crazy Taxi maps are around 202K triangles. Crazy Taxi 2's maps have lower polygon counts, at 123K tris for the first map (the one with the bridges), and 166K for the second map. Most buildings don't have roofs, but some of Crazy Taxi 2's buildings do in one area of the second map, even though the camera never goes that high. Maybe the dev team split the map work between people, and someone didn't delete the roofs on their part?
Heres the forest map from dc version shenmue 2 map extracted by me using the shenmue tools. Almost 200k triangles. Its definitely possible, just unlikely with the huge amount of work for assets and programming.
