Hi I was browsing the Rockstar website today, for information on the upcoming game GTA V, and one page failed and came up with a Guru Meditation error

It seems some of the folks at Rockstar still admire the Amiga.

The original Grand Theft Auto [1997] started life as an Amiga game in 1996, but development was moved over to PC due to its better performance and increasing popularity.

@Reptile

The original design documents for Race 'n' Chase from 1995, which later became Grand Theft Auto states the target platforms as PC DOS, Windows 95, Playstation, Saturn and Ultra 64 and it looks like the development is planned to be made on PC's in the document.

Where have you heard about it being made originally as an Amiga game?

Here are the design documents:
Race 'n' Chase

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@Reptile
yes very cool
imagine that if come out on amiga first

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@Bezzen

+1

afaik rockstar (north?) was dma design, dunno what was them latest game for the amiga, but never heard of gta with any name was planned for the amiga. at that time there was really a very few amiga that could handle 3d gfx like gta1 (if original version wasnt 3d but bitmap then it should possible). remember that payback came yrs later when upgraded amigas were not so uncommon at least among remained amigans.

btw i would love to collect all the famous sw houses today who start with amiga in a list, but this subject should deserved an own topic i guess..:)

Last edited by $adddam on 30-Oct-2011 at 10:31 PM.

@$adddam

Digital illusions is dice today. I think it was dma design that became rockstar.

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@Bezzen

It has been mentioned a few times before such as here: http://www.gamesradar.com/the-complete-history-of-grand-theft-auto/

Not sure how official the rumour was however. Maybe it was indeed just that - rumour!

It's not too hard to see how a simple version could have worked on the A1200 - might have been a bit cramped but not impossible. Originally it may have lacked the scaling 3D - like a big Supercars perhaps. This would have made it possible. Indeed the Amiga hardware scrolling would have been a good home for such a version.

Last edited by -Sam- on 30-Oct-2011 at 10:39 PM.

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Sam

@Reptile

Haha, nice.

Also read the article from gametraders, double nice.

Shame that they decided not to atleast release the first one on various systems and consoles, as it may not have been that impossible to do.

Cheers

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@$adddam

Quote:

$adddam wrote: @Bezzen +1 afaik rockstar (north?) was dma design

+1

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@Bezzen

In several magazines and at games shows (TV) they (DMA DESIGN) showed early concept stuff on the A1200 , they mentioned the decline of the Amiga market and how many developers left The Amiga around the time because of it.
That said, it looked nothing like GTA or whatever back then, but wasn't GTA a 1997 title ? , lots can change in 3 years or so....

GTA/Race And Chase was one of thoose things they talked about, or rather a top down vectorized game ala Hunter in type of gameplay, i am not sure when game master and thoose other gamer shows stopped supporting Amiga but i guess it was around the time when Commodore went bust.
Not sure who it was (DMA Design was quite a lot of people really) but he said that HUNTER was one of his favorite games of all time.)

Lemmings 3 was their last Amiga game, it didnt sell that much so that was one of the reasons they left Amiga.

Their last orginal IP on the Amiga was the fantastic game Hired Guns.

DMA Design was bought up by rockstar and later renamed to Rockstar North.

playstation magazine (PS1) had several articles/intervies of the various people in the company over time (97 and up iirc) and they always talked about how wonderfull the Amiga was and how much they missed it.

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ps:

Martin Edmonson in Reflections mentioned Amiga and them pioneering the late 80's with Amiga games at E3 this year (on the Driver SF stand for UBI SOFT)
and they also mentioned how DMA/Rockstar north inspired them to create Open games. Driver was the first 3d open world game but how Rockstar north champions with GTA 3.
As far as i remeber Martin was a graphician for Reflections but theese days i think he's the owner (not sure), he just returned a few years back.
Martin and dave jones and co seem to know each other very well and funnily their teams was the best teams in the late 80's to mid 90's on the Amiga)

was cool to meet both of the teams at E3 :)

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@spotUP

Quote:

spotUP wrote: @$adddam Digital illusions is dice today. I think it was dma design that became rockstar.

Digital Illusions has always been DICE.

just have a look at pinball Illusions, it says DIGITAL ILLUSIONS C.E.

i guess they just decided to use something shorter over time as credits and so on would be too long :p

it's also worth noting that DICE is really not the same anymore(it is but its not..), lots of the core developers from the Amiga days are gone(or moved into studio positions that has little to do with todays games), lots of their stuff is beeing produced in other countries (not Sweden anymore), Liquid Designs,UDS and many other dev teams was taken under the wing of DICE but also quite a few has left over time and started companies like Starbreeze and other excellent game studios.

DICE has always pioneered the gaming world, their latest shocker was/is the wonderfull online design called Autolog. a feature that will most likely stay forever after.

Digital Illusions was a group of sceners from various groups but mainly a group called The Silents and up until the ps2 era they spoke quite often about The Amiga in interviews (that said, i know you know tons about the Scene so i didnt really direct that part at you but for others instead ;))
---

Now i have a triva quiz for you, which ex.demo crew/Amiga team is the guys behind the fantastic game series called Killzone ?
Hint, they went PC in 1998 :(

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@Toaks

Ah, nice to know. I never heard of that. (new of course about the DMA Design history)

If you look at the design documents from -95 about the development system (page 8) it says:

"Race 'n' Chase will use the overhead perspective engine developed by Mike Dailly"

Perhaps that part originated from Amiga code? :)

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@Bezzen

Did a bit more research and it does seem that the graphics engine for GTA was developed in DOS.

From Mike Dailly's page:

Grand Theft Auto
Task: 8, 16, 32bit Graphics Engine
Platform: DOS
Language: C, x86
Year: 1994

Grand Theft Auto prototype
Task: Whole demo
Platform: DOS
Language: Pascal, x86
Year: 1994

Grand Theft Auto Prototype 2
Task: Whole demo
Platform: DOS
Language: Pascal, x86
Year: 1994

Source: About me (Mike Dailly)

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@Reptile

Isn't Guru Meditation a common error seen across the internet as part of the Varnish Backend?

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@Bezzen

More stuff! From Mike Dailly.

GTAPrototype1
"I did this back in 94 (11/11/94 was the date on the CD), and it was going to be GTA (or "race and chase" as it was then - cops and robbers was the other name considered). However, after the initial code was implemented ion the game, syndicate wars appeared in a magazine. It was a little too close for our liking, on top of this, Keith was also having some problems his version of the engine, since mine was written in pascal+assembler, Keith had to rewrite it in "C", and speed wasnt holding. (See GTA prototype 2)

This engine is fairly simple, it has 4 "basic" points on the gound. These are placed on an elipse and rotated; this forms the corners for the world. I then draw lines from each corner and build a "grid". So, now I have a rotating GRID, I then build points vertically to make a rotating CUBE array.

Using a 3D map array Map[x][y][z] I set a a cube type and then render these cubes in the correct place in the rotating cube array - follow that? :)

Each map section can also have an offset, the idea being that whole buildings could be destroyed
easily, and smoothly."

"GTA ProtoType 2 By Mike Dailly
Written on a 486DX66

After seeing a Sega Saturn game called "Clockwork knight", I started toying with side on perspective stuff on the PC. CLOCK.LBM shows my original thoughts on doing this, I didn't intend to scale the front block initially. Once I had this running, I was speaking to John Whyte (then doing Body harvest for the N64), and he had been trying to get an overhead racing game past Dave Jones for a while. Dave (Jones) however, wasn’t interested. it occurred to me that although I had a side on engine, all I needed to do was add a floor, and it "could" be an above engine. So, with sad programmer graphics (although the car was done by Stuart Graham I think...), I set about using the previous GTA prototype engine as a base. Using "cubes" I built an array of perspective points, then with a simple 3D array, attached faces to each active cube. I then removed interior faces (since they couldn’t be seen), and rendered the resulting "city".

The demo is called DINO, since the code base was taken from another prototype, ATTACK!, which was a dinosaur game (hence DINO). Funnily, this .EXE name stayed with the project for a LONG time.... and if you look in \gta\gtados DINO.BAT was even shipped! :)

I also had to add "slopes" to prove they could work, and although the sorting is wrong, I had figured out the way to render this correctly. But it was Keith who actually implemented this first. This involved doing a shrinking circle system. The outer blocks were drawn, and as we circled into the center of the screen the inner ones were done. This was a little bit complicated, but Keith understood my erratic rambelings and pulled it off.

After this demo was written, I showed Keith, OZ (David Ozbourn) and Dave Jones. Looking at it, they decided to restart "Race and Chase" using the new engine, since it allowed far more freedom, and "true" perspective. Well, almost true; perspective is only calculated at each block, rather than each line, but you never really notice.

I hope Ive mentioned everyone that was actually involved in this, and while the "game-play" was a real team effort, and had input from every team member, this was how it all started. It also shows how important true R&D is, without it several DMA games would never have been started.

Another little sideline... the 24bit engine, came about with me speaking to the SCITECH guys. There was a message from someone at i-Glasses, after 320x200 hi colour mode, on omp.graphics.algorithms, I joined in saying this would be great for games, and a stepping stone to hires, since lowres 24bit is faster than hires 8 bit (less pixels to draw). Someone pointed out univbe gave these modes on some cards, then a programmer from sitech said that they had a new version coming out with much wider support. So, we quickly did some tests, and got one section of GTA running in 24bit. after looking, Dave decided we needed this. Believe it or not, this added almost a year to the project, all the graphics needed redoing, along with a new multi palette system (Each tile was only 256 colours, but we had any number of palettes). This was shown at a trade show, and I believe there were lots of programmers hovering around, asking how it was done.. :)

Also...I was told by Dave, that the SimCity guys got quite interested, since it allowed you to drive around a city in realtime. Shortly after, they came out with the awful "Streets of SimCity" (I think it was called) - should have bought our engine if you ask me. :)

And lastly.... The 3DFX version... This was, in my opinion, the BEST version, hires, smooth, and fast as hell. We had received a card from 3DFX months ago, and then Dave told me they were coming up for a visit. "Oh dear" we though, free cards, and nothing to show... so I very quickly (took a week!) did a new LIB for GTA using the 3DFX to render the game. The GTA graphics system was a LIB supplied by me (in the end), and so it was simple to rewrite this. After a the weeks work, the 3DFX demo was running, it turned out to be so good, it was maintained, and added to the final release. Believe it or not, BMG never even had to pay for it...

Remember this was written on a 486, and as such optimised for that machine - it had no cache to speak of. because of this, it wont speed up "that" much. It ran in a frame on a 486DX100(just), and on my 2.4Gig AMD, its only around 4 times faster. (1/4 frame) The final GTA code was Pentium optimised, and runs MUCH quicker...."

Last edited by Bezzen on 31-Oct-2011 at 08:16 AM.

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@Bezzen

Sorry for ranting about the Amiga roots of GTA, but it's been fun researching this and I thought we need to go to the bottom of this once and for all. I found Mike Bailly (who wrote the original graphics engine and the two GTA/Race'n'Chase prototypes for DMA Design) on twitter and asked him if there were any Amigas involved in making of GTA/Race 'n' Chase.

Here's his reply:

"nope. By 95, we were pretty much all pc based. I did the prototype in turbo pascal 7 on the pc as well."

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@Bezzen

just some dates .. in his story

something not making sense to me here, Syndicate Wars info came 2 years after the decline of Amiga and only a year before GTA..
Syndicate 1 came out in 1993.


Also i knew mike developed GTA (ofcourse) but he was never on the tv shows nor really involved in any of the DMA games before GTA , pretty sure it was Dave Jones.

Clockwork knight did not appear in Europe in 1994 (chipped saturn ? :D) :p
Body Harvest came out way after GTA, not sure when it was but i do remeber the controversy around it and i have a feeling it might have been late 98 or early 99.
But yes, it might be that he developed the game before GTA but damn, thats a long time line.
-------

thanks for posting the info btw, found the stuff quite interesting really but somewhat confusing too.



Edit: gonna check around a bit, might be a diffrent game they talked about and that prototype they showed on the tv shows etc.

Last edited by Toaks on 31-Oct-2011 at 10:32 AM.

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@Bezzen

Quote:

Bezzen wrote: Here's his reply: "nope. By 95, we were pretty much all pc based. I did the prototype in turbo pascal 7 on the pc as well."

that settles it for sure, he should know :).

cheers

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@Toaks

Found a bit more info in an "old" Edge article via Waybackmachine:

The Making of Grand Theft Auto

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Hello all, long-time lurker of the News page here! For what it's worth, I attended an interview with Gary Penn @ DMA in Dundee around 1997/1998 (GTA 2 had recently come out), as a games tester, though I didn't get the job!

We specifically talked about Amigas (since I didn't move to PC until 2000) and he said they still had a few around the building at that time. I'm almost sure he said they were still very occasionally used for drawing graphics, but I could be wrong. My impression was that they had moved on for the most part.

I don't know if this Google Streetview URL will work, but this is the building they were in at the time (the dark green one):

DMA Design on Google Streetview

Most of the pictures on the walls, memorabilia, etc, at that time related to their various Lemmings releases!

@DruggedBunny/All

Stupid me -- just checked and GTA 2 came out in October 1999, so my interview may in fact have been some time in 1999, BEFORE the release. There was either GTA 2 stuff lying around or I was aware of its existence at the time anyway!