STUDIOS // ROCKSTAR NORTH | BETA
the newer GTAs, and it is important “everyone at the company understands how it’s structured,” says Fowler. But the volume of assets and material has changed over time. “On GTA III the game was just streaming geometry and textures from the disc. World descriptions, collisions and animations would be in system memory.” Hooker, who joined Rockstar North in 2005 as an AI programmer before leaping up the ranks to a more senior role, adds: “The assets now are so big that pretty much everything is in a streaming state. When the game is running, it has loaded in the immediate area around the player, plus mission objects and so on, and the nav mesh for AI.” Streaming is used to really stretch the
systems in the game, and contribute to the realism and detail in the game world. “The time between IV and V has really
allowed us to stretch the consoles and within that time work out how each of our systems can be made optimal,” says Hooker. “So it’s not just running faster, but making each system better too.” The results are clear on-screen in GTA V.
ENGINES OF CHANGE Aside from keeping up with the scale of the projects, the other major change at Rockstar North has been implementing a whole new proprietary engine. The team switched from Renderware to building an engine on Rockstar San Diego’s RAGE suite. North took this collection of components and turned it into a general engine which all the studios use, adding its proprietary audio engine too. As part of the vast 1,000-strong trans-
Atlantic effort that is a Rockstar Games title, the technology plays an important part bringing it all together. Max Payne 3 actually beat GTA V to market with the latest version of the engine on show. “As we moved onto V it was decided that our framework would be a basis for all the studios’ projects,” says Fowler. That was a decision driven by North, which was already
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acting as Mr Fix-It on games like Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire, and understood intimately how the open world oeuvre works. “One of the major challenges has been the
growth of the team, and the growth of the team across multiple studios – and we’re pretty much using all the studios, and they are in different timezones,” says Fowler. “It’s taken some getting used to, but has
given us some excellent results.” Hooker actually thinks the global
collaboration has greatly improved Rockstar Games’ thinking power.
Streaming is the backbone of
everything we do. Everyone at the company understands how it’s structured.
Adam Fowler, Technical Director “We have a real Rockstar Games
programming community now. We feel like one big virtual studio.” And what’s so surprising here is that
they’ve cracked it. Rockstar North just doesn’t know how to make the most immersive game, or the most lucrative, or the most praised – but the one that makes good of the most expansive production scale. The “The truth is that this is a requirement of
the project,” says Fowler. “There is no way you can snap off part of the game, hand it to a studio in another country and say ‘OK, you guys go do that part, see you in six months’. “We need daily or weekly communication,
we need to be talking, because everything interacts with everything else.” This again leads back to the point that it’s the games that Rockstar wants to make
which dictate its set-up, not the other way around: “We make technology to make a game, not for the sake of making a technology,” says Fowler. Hooker adds: “Our games demand a certain
kind of technology. We’ve looked at third-party tech, but we would only pick something that can do more than what we think we can achieve. Plus, we have very specific requirements, from the amount of memory use to the level of control we can have.” Fowler points out how this leads back into
the original GTA III streaming innovation: “A lot of these engines aren’t designed with large streaming worlds. Back in the day we were rewriting chunks of Renderware to get that working.” The technology in GTA is almost the least visible part of the production, yet the most crucial. Critics are dazzled by the environment, and praise the content – few mention the rendering, or overall slick performance. “Good,” says Fowler. “It’s our job to make that not visible,” adds Hooker. Both have a beaming pride that their
achievements play the ultimate part in completing the GTA illusion – that it is real.
THE NEXT GENERATION With lots of speculation about what Rockstar’s games would look like on PS4 and Xbox One, we ask Hooker and Fowler what they make of the new machines. But Fowler says he’s only been thinking about the current gen, and after that will be focusing on GTA Online, which to him is “almost a separate GTA game”. It feels as if the technical thrill for them isn’t
advanced computational power to make GTA look nicer, but the chance to add more to the GTAworld, which is what Online promises. Says Fowler: “The main technical
requirement from Online has been in terms of back-end. That, plus the idea that you are creating your own character: everything
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