Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mashimo | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible that you can click a button and within 3 seconds see the entire map of GTA III in your browser :0 And fly around in it.

View on HN

THERE'S GTA?! And here I was smiling because I clicked around Smash Bros stages.

There's San Andreas, even. TIL there's a vast cellar below the army base...

Do you mean the one you go to in the mission where you get the jetpack?

https://www.ign.com/wikis/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas/Black...

Is that because of the game loading a lot more than just the map, or because of advances in tech (SSD's, CPUs)?

I tried it with Vice City, it took a bit longer to load for me. That said, it looks a lot smaller than I remember it being.

Vice City is under "Experimental" so maybe it has more issues?

But in those old games even distant LODs weren't rendered and were hidden by fog. These days you can disable that fog without any issues.

GTA Vice City was made for the PlayStation 2. The PS2 has a 300MHz CPU with 32MB RAM, and a GPU with 6.2 GFLOPS (slightly simplifying, it wasn't a standard PC architecture). The game was read from DVD, and the DVD drive could push 5.28 MB/s (if everything was sequential on the disk).

So it's safe to assume that the difference is mostly due to advances in tech, though advances in compression algorithms likely also helped (not that the PS2 had a lot of spare CPU cycles to decompress content).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com