Grand Theft Auto III (2003)

[stuck pine]

Game hooks to remix and somewhat playable, but highly need api lights conversion patch (game engine is RenderWare)

Current issues: no lights present at all, sky rendering doesnt work ( just a black sky, fixable with installing sky mod tho, link below )

What’s done:
Anticull patch✅
Car colors✅

To get gta 3 to work you need to have:

1. 1.1 version of the game
2. install 1.0 exe version from moddb: https://www.moddb.com/downloads/grand-theft-auto-3-original-10-exe-for-steam
3. install ultimate asi loader, gta 3 modloader, silentpatch, widescreen fix, limitadjuster (oldest version), Crosire DX8 Wrapper and for working sky this: https://www.patreon.com/posts/animated-skydome-97371012
4. grab the latest rtx remix from actions, x86 version

such a hidden gem, but no one ever created compat patch for this🙏

ah and my conf

[daring stump]

@stuck pine ping or DM me when you have the pack

i'll at least do the anti culling

[stuck pine]

yeah sure

will do it rn

[stuck pine]

@daring stump here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rvMjpKRll6PPXxIdQShiC_HlVsXLXP-q/view?usp=sharing

should work

drop it to gta 3 main folder replacing files

sky look broken not sure how to fix it

[daring stump]

i can prob fix the sky

i'd fix the original skybox though, not the modded one

[stuck pine]

this would be rlly nice if so🙏

[stuck pine]

yeah thats a better idea

[daring stump]

to clarify, what type of culling is the issue? there are many levels of things going on here, and i believe the game has 3 diff types of culling (one which is zone based, one for objects based on distance, then frustum culling)

in addition to an LOD system

[stuck pine]

i guess frustum culling is the most aggressive one, cuz it removes everything that not fitting in the camera

[daring stump]

i've disabled zone based culling. working on frustum + lod

[stuck pine]

wow nice

[daring stump]

LOD won't be removed entirely, but it will have adjustable limits

[stuck pine]

maybe there a way to make game to force lod0 models for objects that are not fitting in the camera

like xoxor did in gta 4

[daring stump]

@stuck pine try pls

i can't get it to work but it seems that things on my PC in particular are cursed not to work

had chatgpt, opus, and sonnet all check the code vs the exe and it should be correct lol

put in root folder

[stuck pine]

seems like it doesnt work(

what should it do? disable all culling?

i got the log tho

but there not that much info

[daring stump]

yes

😖 fuck

[stuck pine]

but does it work for you?

[daring stump]

.

i have no idea why it's not working

[stuck pine]

ah

does your plugin require ultimate asi loader, right?

maybe we dont have it installed

i downloaded it from github, but there was just one file

is ultimate asi loader just a dinput8.dll file if you know?

[daring stump]

yeah

it's that

[stuck pine]

😭

[daring stump]

lets hope

🤞

[stuck pine]

🙏

[stuck pine]

how is it?

[daring stump]

i'm suffering

[stuck pine]

so this doesnt work?😭

[daring stump]

😖 no

i have a potential solution though

i came up with it, not claude. so it has to be good! 🤣

[stuck pine]

i will wait for it then

[daring stump]

@stuck pine progress

✨

things immediately behind the player are still culled, but everything past it shows up now

also LODs have been fixed, though objects too far away are still being culled rn. trying to fix that

[stuck pine]

wow some good news

[stuck pine]

cant wait

[daring stump]

car there is the player

[daring stump]

IT'S DONE

only thing that culls is the water now

everything else is constantly rendered

@stuck pine

now, as expected because it's a lot to render for remix, the game is running at ~15 FPS rn

buildings still have LODs that i need to fix

but objects like light posts no longer cull or have LODs

to mess with

[stuck pine]

any ideas for optimization tho?

[daring stump]

a custom frustum culling implementation that renders infinitely in front of the player, and a large circle around the player to make sure mirrors work properly while still improving performance

should be relatively easy to implement after NOPing the original culling implementation (which we just did)

[stuck pine]

never seen game that stable before

[stuck pine]

hope it will work

[daring stump]

the one i proposed for FNV

though i can optimize it a bit more now

[stuck pine]

love it

[daring stump]

it only took 3 hours and ~10% of my monthly credits

(lots of sarcasm there)

but i'm really glad it paid off

and the logic behind it could probably be used for VC and SA

[stuck pine]

this project can finally go somewhere, huge thanks to you

[daring stump]

do you know if car colors were originally vertex colors?

[stuck pine]

now we need this big three sky rendering, optimization and api lights and its good to go. Im waiting for response from @robust river for the api lights, will see what he says

[stuck pine]

not sure, but xoxor found workaround for the colors

[daring stump]

@bronze berry maybe you know? for SA how were colors for cars handled

[daring stump]

🤔 ah really?

what was it

[stuck pine]

for gta 4 yeah

[daring stump]

oh lol

yeah that's too different

but SA would be useful

having claude look into it at least

[stuck pine]

i guess the topic starter of gta 3 found a fix, but he left a server lol

[daring stump]

Grand Theft Auto III (2003)

[daring stump]

🤔 buildings aren't doing the pop in thing for you

[stuck pine]

i dont think so

[daring stump]

then i won't worry about that

[stuck pine]

this game is so stable for the remixing

[daring stump]

car pop in needs to be fixed too, along with smaller objects like the newspapers

[stuck pine]

thats not a big problem tbh, but yeah will be better if its fixed ofc

[daring stump]

just final touches for sure

rn i don't have anything else i feel like working on (though i will do another game soon) so i'll finish up this mod

• we're finally making progress so i feel less annoyed rn

i spent the last ~10 hours trying to patch games and they all failed so i was getting very upset lol

[stuck pine]

i remember playing this game when was much younger, rlly loved it, and when i heard of rtx remix at the release my first thought was for gta 3, but it wasnt stable back then. and now the dreams coming true

[daring stump]

how i feel with #1106420949257044061 😆

[stuck pine]

would be nice if this thing can be fixed too, happens almost everywhere where 2 different textures connecting

[daring stump]

can't fix that unfortunately

if the plane used has a consistent instance you could just attach a small secondary mesh to the edge to fix it, and it'll show up everywhere

[stuck pine]

thats probably just messed up mesh placing from rockstar

[daring stump]

ya

easiest solution by far would just be to anchor a flat black mesh to claude and place it under the map (very far under)

any gaps like that wouldn't be visible with that solution

[stuck pine]

ah yeah that a good idea👍

will try that

[stuck pine]

works

[daring stump]

@stuck pine the sky isn't detected by remix because it's just a 2d gradient 😭

when i implement the customized frustum culling, i'm going to have it create a cube under the world that will never be culled and assign a texture to it. you can then use that for the skybox

[stuck pine]

make sense because its an old game

[naive orbit]

[daring stump]

@stuck pine

[stuck pine]

daymn you got them working

nice

[naive orbit]

Why is the skybox dark and why don't the cars have the window texture?

[daring stump]

because the game has no skybox lol. i'm going to implement an easy way for kapibos to add one

and windows need to be fixed manually in remix

@stuck pine the custom culling solution is almost finished

just trying to implement a better distance based culling solution for the forward view. right now it has a set cutoff limit which is good, but it also means that a TON of things are rendered that aren't not needed which causes lag

like this for example. the car is facing a wall and can't see anything behind it, but all of those buildings are being rendered

[stuck pine]

crazy stuff

[daring stump]

it runs at 40+ FPS all the time now at least

[stuck pine]

with fg?

[daring stump]

without

i don't use FG usually

[stuck pine]

oh thats nice then

[daring stump]

hm. 30 i guess

there's clearly a cpu bottleneck of some kind. gpu only sits at ~50% util

but it was always like this 🤔 so i don't think it's my patch atp

all of the culling options are adjustable in the ini file though, so even if it is related you'll be able to tweak it and find the best values

[stuck pine]

bottleneck exist yeah, but other stuff works great so far

[stuck pine]

this video is with dlss perf

and this with dlss Q

fps is almost the same cuz of bottleneck

[daring stump]

yup that's the cpu bottleneck

it's because there's so much being rendered in the distance

working on an occlusion culling system for it

this is one big patch lol

after it found the initial addresses it needed for the culling stuff, it was much easier for it to do the rest

[stuck pine]

alright im going to sleep😴

hope to see some crazy results when wake up lol

[daring stump]

sleep well

[daring stump]

@stuck pine it works ✨

50+ FPS now

GPU 90%+ util

there's a bit of weirdness, but just play with the settings and it can easily be fixed

[daring stump]

skybox isn't doable. you'll have to mod it in with something else

sorry 😔

[stuck pine]

yep that works perfect

[stuck pine]

will look into it

what ai do you use to do all this tho?

and can u just tell me a quick setup for this?

[daring stump]

claude sonnet or opus with #1481706093976621277

[daring stump]

isn't it amazing ✨

i'm really happy with the results

and i wasn't sure that my idea for this custom culling solution would work, but it did and pretty much perfectly

saving the demonstration image here for anyone else to use

this requires a custom culling implementation. the forward view uses a combination of frustum and occlusion culling, and the circle around the player is a completely custom culling solution. nothing vertically is culled with the one around the player to ensure reflections work perfectly

[stuck pine]

I will look into it when home

But I hope we can get api lights + sky without ai with 351papapa code

[stuck pine]

One of the best culling patches fr

Great job

[stuck pine]

Btw for this stuff do you need to have any coding knowledge?

Because I have none

[daring stump]

you really should have some + understand how games work + the technical terms for what you need done

you can try it without that but you'll probably get stuck pretty fast

[stuck pine]

Aight, will still try to make something I guess

[daring stump]

like for example, if you were to attempt api lights, you can't just say "okay, add Remix API lights". it won't know how

you'll have to provide it with xoxor's comp base repo so it can figure out how API lights work & how to control them.

[stuck pine]

Sounds complicated..

[daring stump]

here's the source code for the patch

i won't be putting this on github because rockstar is scary

[stuck pine]

True lol

[daring stump]

🤔 well ig it won't be that bad

[stuck pine]

Will be helpful for the VC

But I mean, 351papapa already got the plugins for the sky and api lights to work on VC and this both games are very similar, so it won’t be that hard like starting from nothing ( at least I hope so🤞 )

Updated first message for what’s done

Dang you fixed car rendering?

Did it fix flying trash rendering too?

[daring stump]

i didn't manage to fix either of them 😔

i was working on a patch for them but neither would work

and it turns out that the car distance despawning is actually not just a rendering thing, but ACTUAL despawning. and interfering with that 100% will break mission scripts

[robust river]

Hey kapibosRU, do you have a github account? I can share my github project with you. @stuck pine

[stuck pine]

Hi, I will be available in a hour srry

Will text you then

[stuck pine]

Sad😕

[stuck pine]

sent my github to dm

[stuck pine]

@daring stump i joined the 351papapa github for the fixes files, hes good with me to share the fixes files with you, maybe you want to continue working on gta 3 then or you switched to another game?

you are just way more talented in coding than me

[daring stump]

go ahead. i'm using GTA 3 to test out claude code to see if it will work well

[stuck pine]

sick🥳

in the dm then

[robust river]

@daring stump Hi Kim. I’m trying to port your GTA III Anti-culling logic to VC, but I can't get it to work in-game. Could you help me check if any of my codes' logic are off? Here is the code i wrote with AI.

[fallow wyvern]

Hmm i can see here
that these 5 functions are patched
GetIsOnscreen and GetIsonScreencomplex which is might be for Vice City LODs

getisonscreen maybe check that which entites are on screen and if any entities out side the game camera frustum and they get culled and shadows disappear

[robust river]

The code you are referring to is outdate. I implemented a partial fix back in March. While the current version is functional for my RTX Remix project, it remains experimental and unstable. It currently only works under specific parameters and contains several known bugs. I haven't had the time to properly fix the plugin lately, so if you want to dive in, here is the code and my proxy.ini.