Using GTA CTW assets for a proof of concept 3D roaming game?

Recently while discussing porting GTA Chinatown Wars to GTA Vice City & San Andreas, an idea hit me.

what if someone were to use the assets for a test of how much the dreamcast could handle in terms of a Free roaming GTA based game?

the assets themselves are small enough that space would not be an issue, and low quality enough that im pretty sure the Dreamcast could handle it.

according to NTAuthority, all missions were coded in C++ too, so in terms of mission scripting, that would be a fairly easy task.

another inspiration for this Idea would be a video that was posted on youtube that shows off how 3D looks on the PSP version of the game when the camera is hacked. it looks like something the Dreamcast could easily pull off.



I was able to also convert and import the GTA 1, 2, London maps into 3DS Max myself and I have also done so for some of the Fan Made GTA 2 Multiplayer Cities which could be used in place of the CTW map assets.

GTA 1 maps

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GTA London 1969/1961 maps

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GTA2 maps

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User Made GTA maps

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Very cool idea. Btw, I'm fairly certain that the Dreamcast could've handled a proper GTAIII port too but it would've taken some professional effort.

 

Well, what is a better idea since the source code will never be released for one to be ported to Dreamcast, is to make a camera hack to the GTA 2 game, and hack in 3D car models. That part might be relatively easy, since the Dreamcast version can apparently handle PC mods with tweaking. The guy modding Re-Volt was discussing porting some stuff to it, and I am fairly certain the maps could maybe be ported from the other top down GTA games as well.



Also, Driver 2 KINDA works with Bleem, and it looks pretty nice, there is a premade bleemed release out there if you know where to look.

 

For sake of discussion there's also OpenRW
https://github.com/rwengine/openrw

Uses SDL 2.0, I think KOS only supports SDL 1.2. But I'm not sure
But most of these engine recreations are developed for new hardware and assuming there's no hardware limitation

 

OpenRW is definitely targeted at recent hardware. It doesn't run all that great even on my notebook, so good luck with that on a DC.
Also, it's not even remotely close to being complete yet - like, alpha status at best. The intro cutscene has major rendering issues and doesn't even finish correctly, iirc (gotta use debug mode to go into the game). The city renders and you get a parking lot full of vehicles and some pedestriants, but there's no missions to do or even any AI traffic.

But if you decde to play around with it anways, try changing the renderer to have an infinite drawing distance and always use the greatest detail geometry. Makes for some great vistas.

 

well the original idea that I had was creating an engine around whatever assets could be pulled from CTW and then replacing them with original assets once the engine starts to take shape.

as far as CTW goes, keep in mind it was originally made for the Nintendo DS, which is far weaker than a Dreamcast if I recall correctly. so a similar game running on the dreamcast would not be entirely out of the question

 

At the time there were a LOT of rumours that there was going to be a port for the DC, it deffo could have handled it. In the end all we got was GTA II tho.