Story about Obbe Vermeij and his blog that disappeared too quickly

Hello. Today’s story will make you aware of a thing that happened relatively recently. To be brief, what happened is that Obbe Verweij, who was the technical director of Rockstar North from 1995 to 2009, decided to start his own small blog on the blogger platform. This blog was dedicated  to revealing some of the secrets and details of the development of those video games that he had  to deal with during the period while he was the technical director at Rockstar North and fans  of the GTA series of games were very happy about the appearance of such a blog as they expected to  receive answers to many questions that remain unsolved for about twenty years. Obbe began writing his blog on November 7, 2023, and already on November 22 of the same year he received a letter from old friends from Rockstar North, who expressed dissatisfaction with this blog and asked to delete it so as not to reveal possible secrets from the history of video game development to leave them mystery and unknown for players.

From that day on, Obbe began deleting his recent articles and then deleted all other articles except one, in which he informed the reason for the closure of the blog and said goodbye to the readers.

But I guess that it didn’t end there, and perhaps those same developers later asked to remove it and this mention of them and their request to remove information from the blog. Therefore, from November 25, this article was edited, where the entire story was significantly shortened, leaving only a few sentences that the blog was closed of its own free will and without pressure from employees from Rockstar North.  Whether this was actually the case is unknown. But what did this blog contain that could outrage the studio developers so that they demanded its removal?

Did it really contain secret information or was the request to delete it a guarantee to protect yourself from the subsequent leak of some private information? I read all existing articles on this blog before it was closed and reviewed their content when they were available.

I will not quote them verbatim so as not to create trouble for their author, but I think that I have the opportunity to briefly retell the main points that seemed interesting to me, considering that the author of the articles is a game developer and not an unknown source who can create fakes and make up unconfirmed theories. The first article in this blog was an answer to the question – why does the moon change its size  after being shot at with a sniper rifle.

In it, Obbe said that after receiving the moon texture  from the artists for GTA 3, he placed it on the sky, made sure that it was visible at night and  that it had the optimal size.
But a few days later, four artists asked him to change the size of the moon. And it turned out that two of them required a smaller moon to achieve realism, and the other two artists preferred a larger moon to make it more cinematic and noticeable to the player. And without coming to a final decision, the technical director made it possible to change the size of the moon to enable artists to make the right choice in practice.

And since he worked on a sniper rifle, it was precisely this that served as a tool for  changing the size of the moon. But the artists never came to a decision on the size of the moon, so this ability to change the size of the moon in gameplay was not disabled and remained for players.

And this possibility of changing the size of the moon also remained in GTA San Andreas. The next article was about a network game, where Obbe said that since GTA and GTA 2 had a local network game, it was also planned to introduce such an opportunity in GTA 3. About a month was spent on implementing a network game, where such a game was a death match using a standard city, where after death the player could be reborn in an arbitrary place on the game map. But these  systems had too many bugs and the developers decided to abandon it. The same thing happened in GTA Vice City due to too less time for high-quality development of this game mode, despite the fact that two programmers were hired to work on the network game.

And in San Andreas, the developers did not see the point in creating an online game because it was the last game in this hardware cycle. Instead, they implemented a co-op mode. And with the advent of GTA 4,  with the help of four programmers and four level designers, this project got off the ground. There was also an article about why we see duplicate cars in traffic in GTA games? The explanation for this was that the memory on the PlayStation 2 was limited and therefore the number of car models in it was limited at the same time, about seven pieces.

This meant that of the approximately 80 cars in the game’s entire collection, only seven could appear in front of the player in his environment. But the player could feel that he only had two or three types of cars in traffic because the other cars that the memory held at the moment were police cars or ambulances.

The game was always ready to spawn police cars, a helicopter or a special forces vehicle if the player was wanted, and an ambulance was ready to appear after the death of any pedestrian in the city. Mission scripts also requested memory locations for vehicles. The player could not collect many different car models in one place, but saving the car in the garage solved this problem because it completely removed it from memory until the next time the garage was opened.

There was a blog post about how the weather works. From it we can find out that every in-game hour the weather changes to the next one from the special table, which stores about 40 types of weather conditions. Since some types of weather are very similar to each other, if they are next to each other in this list, the player may not notice the transition from one state to another.

Nothing special,  and we initially understood this when we noticed the moment the weather type changed right during  the gameplay, the beginning of rain or storm. Obbe also mentioned that scripts for missions could forcefully change the weather to the special one that was needed during its passage.

For this reason, there are some missions that are sure to start with rain and thunderstorms, and there are also some during which it will never rain. I actually liked the article about streaming more.  According to the author, this was a difficult task for the developers, since starting from GTA3 the  entire map still fit in memory, but due to the limited amount of memory on the Playstation 2,  the artists had to reduce the size of the textures and reuse the textures.

Because of this,  the city looked bland. And so it was decided to develop a streaming system that would load only the area of the map where the player is currently located.

And it turns out that the player always sees high-quality textures around him because when moving to another location, the game loads new textures of the surrounding buildings and deletes old textures from memory after the player moves sufficiently away from them. A similar principle worked for cars, pedestrians, music and scripts, but work with the game world and its map was the most difficult since it required more data. The streaming method was developed by Adam Fowler, and he spent a lot of time grouping on disk those models that are close to each other in the game so that the processing speed of the CD would be faster when loading new textures and models that are now nearby.

This is probably why, having  opened the GTA 3 IMG game archive, we can notice that both textures and models from same area on  the game map are located very close each other. The task was like a race between a fast player and a streaming model loading, which should always be ahead of the player so that he does not end up in an invisible or empty place where all objects will appear in his presence.

In Portland in GTA3, there  used to be a large strip along the entire island and it allowed the player to quickly drive the  distance, provoking the opportunity to overtake the speed of streaming models, so the artists had  to put a building in middle of the strip, which the player had to go around and become slower at  this moment so as not to overtake the speed of the appearance of new objects.

For other areas that turned out to be problematic for the same reason, the developers increased the drag or  air resistance of the vehicles by 5 or 10 percent and this was a good way to solve this problem. The next article was about problems with cheat codes. I think that many people already aware of what will happen in this story because there is an excellent video on the Vadim M YouTube channel, which covers this topic in more detail.

Even Obbe saw it and liked it on Twitter.

But in short, the problem was that previously the system for entering cheat codes looked like capturing the pressing of the current keys and comparing them with the combination in the cheat codes, and if the sequence of all characters matched, the cheat code was activated. But then it would  be very easy for hackers to gain access to these cheat codes in the game files in the first days  after its release, and this was not part of the developers plans. So Obbe used hash codes to store  cheat codes. The hashing algorithm for cheat codes is very complex, but the result is that it looks  like a regular number, which is the sum of the ASCII values of each character entered. The game  always counts the sum of the last 20 keystrokes and checks them for matches with cheat codes.

It  is much more difficult to hack such a cheat and it actually worked, but there were cases when  a person could accidentally enter a cheat code during the game simply because he was lucky enough  to type a set of characters that has the same hash amount as some cheat code.

For this reason, the  first cheats in GTA San Andreas that players were able to discover were sets of random characters  and not readable words like in GTA Vice City and GTA 3. Obbe was also aware that his new system  of cheat codes harmed speedrunners who were forced to abandon their attempt to set a new record after  such an accidental activation of the cheat code. He mentioned this at the end of the article. A note about bugs.

This article talked about how during the development of GTA 3 the game  had errors throughout most of its development due to the fact that the studio developed this  type of game from scratch and also used the new RenderWare engine, which was also quite sufficient  at that time new. During the game’s development, it was rare to complete a mission without crashing, and the map was full of holes. The development company did not have a database with information about errors, so the testers simply printed out each error on paper, and every programmer, level designer or artist had a bunch of sheets of paper on their desk with a description of the problems.

If the developer felt that the bug was easier to fix for someone else, he would put this piece of paper with a description of the bug on his desk. The collision model of an object has a significantly smaller number of polygons than the visualization of such a model.
Therefore,  there may be holes on the map that the developer cannot determine by the appearance of the object.  For this reason, the player may fall under the map in places where it may  seem absolutely impossible.

But it was even more difficult to check the collision in GTA 4. There, characters could fall through the map depending on their animation. Therefore, developer Alexander Roger created a gun that fired character models with active Ragdoll animation and testers could go around the map and shoot such character models at any building or at any uneven surface of the landscape.

The work of the testers was very important as it was necessary to check for bugs repeatedly and using various checking methods before making a report on the found bug. And there were about seventy thousand bugs in San Andreas. For your  information, in GTA 4 there were twice as many of them. When making any changes to the game,  there was a possibility of new bugs appearing, so the testers conducted quick walkthroughs of the  game missions line to make sure that there were no errors that could prevent the completion of the  game. For GTA3, such a passage took 80 minutes.

Not bad, considering that the current speedrun record for GTA 3 is just under 60 minutes. The blog also contained articles that related to the history of video game development from Rockstar during the period Obbe Verweij worked in their team, but I will talk about them later, and if you liked this video, like and subscribe to the channel so as not to miss the release of new videos.

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See you.

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