Dataminers are finding developer comments and unlicensed songs in GTA Trilogy (opens in new tab)

This is why I'm still a PC user. Whenever nostalgia hits and I want to play some old games, I don't need to keep around or source some vintage console hardware and games on the 2nd hand market or rely on some low quality ports that were most likely outsourced with poor QA, but I can just get away with installing the original game build off Steam/GOG or from two decades old cracked .iso files, and it will most likely work as Microsoft has done an amazing job with Windows backwards compatibility. And even when it doesn't work out of the box, there are enough resources out there from the community, with tweaks and patches, on how to get it running on a modern OS like Win 10 or even on Linux.

Rockstar is infamous for milking GTA 5 while not spending a dime on doing anything about harassment/trolling/hackers.

I stopped playing GTA 5 after some rando found me in one of the more isolated parts of the map and just decided to kill me over and over and over again. There was nothing I could do to get away from him; I'd respawn close enough to him, and nowhere near a vehicle, so I couldn't escape.

They could easily grant temporary immunity or kick players who kill another player more than once in, say, half an hour....and instantly end the problem of harassment and trolling in-game.

One thing I really wonder if what codebase they worked off of. Seems like they worked off the mobile port codebase a few years ago, I've seen a few people mention that many of the bugs they saw in the Definitive Edition was also present in the mobile ports.

To it seems like their big mistake wasn't necessarily the fact they outsourced everything, is they started in the wrong place.

Codebase evolution seems to be: Original -> Mobile Port(s) -> Definitive Edition.

They should have scrapped any changes made in the mobile ports and worked straight off the original versions.

Vice City used adf, a custom container for (horrible quality) mp3 files. PS2 still used ADPCM. Most PC cutscene files are mp3 (twice encoded btw, so extra terrible quality), on PS2 they're also ADPCM.

SA was the first 3d GTA game to use ogg for the radio, and also doesn't use miles sound system anymore.

It should be noted that the GTA3 Definitive Edition ogg encodes are just encodes from the original PC ADPCM files, NOT from lossless masters. The cutscenes are also the same quality the PC version had, so a mix of mp3 and PCM sources.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2246626-grand-theft-auto-the...

I'll go further, why is it punishing customers allowed? What authority does a company hold to punish anyone?

The whole notion that if I install that game in five years time and half the music is gone due to licensing issues is just absurd. I have no expectations that I'll be able to (legally) play such games five or ten years down the road when I buy them today.

I'm looking forward to playing Hitman 3 eventually (if the previous two instalments are anything to go buy it will work flawlessly on Linux too), but I'm not getting it until its on sale (I guess Christmas 2022?); it seems like a game that is way too dependant on the parent company's servers to run as well, even though I only play the single player content.

I miss the days when even the big titles just booted up without phoning home for permission to run.

I wouldnr have so much of an issue wirh online DRM if I got a guarantee of X years to play it. Some of these devs could just drop support or Windows messes with it that ita unplayable. So at that point I just want support.

They actually published everything except the main.sc for GTA3 in the iOS release, years ago btw. Same studio ... but now they included all the source script files for all 3 games (probably not untouched, I haven't checked). One can probably get a gist of what they changed by diffing the iOS scripts against the new versions.

They also included the script compiler, the gxt (text files) compiler ... War Drum/Grove Street Games really doesn't seem to know how to keep private tools/assets from being included in published versions. They also included alpha multiplayer maps in the iOS GTA3 release ...

You should add your email in your "about" field ...