GTA San Andreas is full of small details, but things didn't always go according to plan Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games is famous for its game design. GTA San Andreas was no exception; even today it is capable of surprising with its small details.
However, the remarkable moments in GTA San Andreas were not always provided by the developers themselves. Sometimes technical features of the implementation led to situations that players subsequently began to consider as a “feature” of the game, although in fact it was more of a bug.
Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar North, has solved the mystery of falling planes in GTA San Andreas.
The developers wanted to create the impression of regular air traffic. To do this, Rockstar made sure that small planes were periodically created in the game, which, according to the idea, were supposed to fly over the player – but sometimes it ends in a plane crash and the plane crashes.
It turns out that this is the case in optimizing the code, which as a result stopped “noticing” some objects, and sometimes the plane simply did not have enough speed:
“…Before creating an airplane, my code checks for the presence of obstacles on it ways. It scans a number of directions [along the motion path]. Scanning was slow, so I used the absolute minimum (only the fuselage and “tips” of the wings), so small obstacles were sometimes not detected…
Also, planes sometimes lost altitude immediately after creations because their initial speed might not provide enough lift.
Another problem arose when the models on the map were not yet loaded. [Collisions were calculated] after the plane was created.
These problems sometimes resulted in aircraft being created on doomed flight paths. I knew about these plane crashes and even briefly thought about removing the spans altogether.”