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That's the reason why you couldn't fly in that game.
Technology improves unbelievably fast, and this fun story will give you a glimpse of what tricks developers had to employ to get games to work.
Obbe Vermeij, the programmer behind several Grand Theft Auto games, shared that he and his colleague Adam Fowler had to come up with workarounds to make GTA 3 work on PlayStation 2. If you wondered why you couldn't fly in the game (except the Dodo), you'll find the answer here.
"There was no way we could fit the whole map of GTA 3 in PS2 memory," Vermeij said. "Streaming involves loading models from the DVD as the player moves around. This was the hardest technical challenge during the development of GTA 3 and was coded by Adam Fowler."
The problem was players could see low-detailed buildings and missing roads as the game couldn't load them in time with the movement. Models load faster the closer they are on the DVD because the DVD needs to accelerate and decelerate as the head moves to a different track, Vermeij explained. Fowler tried to place models closer on the DVD and repeat commonly used files, but it was still not enough, so the programmers had no choice but to slow the player down.
"Portland initially had a big drag running all along the island. This was a worst case scenario. The player could go fast and there were loads of buildings to load. The artists changed the road layout to slow the player down.
"In other problem areas, we increased the drag (air resistance) on the vehicles 5% or so. Hardly noticeable but it helped."
These streaming issues were exactly why you couldn't fly in GTA 3 – if walking is too fast, imagine what you'd (not) see from a helicopter.
As models got loaded into memory and then removed, the memory would fragment into smaller blocks, Vermeij continued. So Fowler's code moved models around all the time to fix this. "This was tricky as models sometimes had to be moved while they could be rendered."
Vice City, the following title in the series, didn't have the same issue as the code was improved, providing better compression of models and textures: "Smarter code that would load the detailed versions of buildings only if the player was not flying."
Then San Andreas arrived in even better shape. The abundance of low-detail countryside between parts of the city helped the streaming a lot. It had its own peculiarities, though. You could see small planes flying (or crashing) around to perform a fly-by. Vermeij explained their existence as well along with how mirrors worked in SA. We might have seen more GTA secrets in Vermeij's blog, but Rockstar didn't like him talking about the development there, so X/Twitter is our only chance to know more now.
Interesting game development decisions don't stop at old games. Dragon Age Inquisition Creative Director John Epler admitted that horse sprint only looks faster but doesn't actually make you move quicker. "I've carried the guilt of this for years. Guilt is an ocean, and I'm tired of drowning."
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