LogInHe also explained how cars behave out of the player's line of sight.
Rockstar
GTA Online is the crown of Rockstar's multiplayer effort for GTA, but the third game in the series once also had a chance to introduce it.
Obbe Vermeij, a former developer at Rockstar who worked on several games in the franchise, said that the company always wanted to add a multiplayer mode to the series, and he even "got a basic deathmatch going" for GTA 3. However, the studio "never found the time to do it properly," so the game was left without the feature.
Vermeij shared this little fact under his post explaining how cars appear and disappear in GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas "to give the appearance of a busy city." His code places vehicles 70m in front of the player and removes them 90m ahead. Those out of the player's line of sight spawn 15m away and vanish at 25m.
The image below shows this clearly: the green lines are where cars appear, and the red ones are where they disappear.
"When the player looks ‘behind’, cars straight ahead would be considered ‘off screen’ and removed. Speedrunners use this to clear the road ahead of them. For SA, I changed the rule so that cars would have to be off-screen for at least 2 seconds to be removed. This fixed it."
Vermeij also noted that cars farther than 20m away have reduced physics/collision and would drive straight through walls. The full physics are switched on when the player gets close. "You can notice this happening as cars drop a little until the suspension settles. Cars don’t switch back to the reduced physics state."
If you want to learn more about GTA secrets, visit Vermeij's X/Twitter where you'll find out how mirrors were made in San Andreas, why planes suddenly crash, why he removed litter in SA, and how the studio had to slow players down in GTA 3.
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