Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Q&A
New at GameSpot is this Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Q&A, asking the people at Rockstar North about the engine technology powering the game.
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FlatlineDixay
replyThe Rockstar guys sure are good at blowing smoke about their ports. $10 says the PC version of San Andreas has all the same failings as the Vice City one.
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Well, to be fair, it was A LOT better than the port of GTA3, which was basically unplayable on the machine I first played it on (which was pretty fast for its day).
However, it had some things which just struck me as lazy. First of all, the frame limiter was basically necessary, since it made things act up in weird ways if it was turned off. You shouldn't need a frame limiter, especially not one locked to a low number like 30fps. Secondly, there's no mip-mapping in the game, which means that there's no bilinear/trilinear/anisotropic filtering. I mean, come on, games have had that since GLQuake. I understand that it's a little more bandwidth when you need to stream texture data, but we should at least get the option to use if it we want to, because the image quality hit is severe. Then there were some other things like analog control precision being borked (basically analog controls were treated like digital ones, and you had to download a third party hack to fix it), not being able to auto-aim if you were using a gamepad (meaning you HAD to switch back to your keyboard and mouse if you wanted to shoot anything), etc.
There weren't major stability issues, which is good, but it was just mediocre overall.
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