Weekend diversion: This fun video (25 mins) by Game Maker’s Toolkit explains how Rockstar Games, for their game Grand Theft Auto III, managed to fit a 4 km wide city into the memory chip of the PlayStation 2, sized a mere 32 megabytes:
Make sure to watch this fascinating dive into video game lore. What made Rockstar’s task much harder than in earlier video game titles was the fact that GTA III is a truly open-world game.
The video shows many of the constraints that also showed (and, sometimes, show) up in 3D geospatial applications and explains the solutions the team at Rockstar Games applied at the time, for example, streaming (loading and unloading) around a movable viewport, low-quality (low-polygon and low-resolution texture) models for distant objects, limiting the number of vehicle assets at runtime, avoiding memory fragmentation, harmonising assets’ memory footprint (allowing hot-swapping of assets in memory), optimising assets’ location on disk (!), and more. Fascinating stuff.