It’s a day like any other in Anywhere City, the top-down, retrofuturistic setting of GTA 2. “And remember,” booms the faceless narrator’s voice as I start a new playthrough. “Respect is everything.” In my mind, I know that heading left and then down leads me into the sandbox in earnest, past the church and the phonebox, to a parked Schmidt four-door sedan.
But, hang on. The phonebox is on the other side. And so is the church. And so is the sedan. And now my brain is in bits because everything is familiar—this is a game I’ve played on and off for over 25 years—but at the same time totally unrecognisable. Location flipping mods are nothing new in the grand pantheon of hobbyist video game modifications, but having just discovered Valps’ Grand Theft Auto 2 project, GTA 2 Map Rotator, it’s already my favourite by a distance.
“Rotating a GTA 2 map was an idea I had a long time ago, but I didn’t know how to do it,” says Valps. "Before doing this project, I was trying to extract the textures of the PSX version of GTA 2. After trying to do that using many tools I found on the internet which extracts raw textures from files and not reaching my goal, I decided to create my own tool to get the PSX textures. I used Python language to read the files and, after understanding how the images are stored on the game files, I got it.
"This gave me experience to read other GTA2 files and, with the help of the official documents of DMA Design about technical details about the map files, I started to create a tool which I called ‘GMP rotator’ (.GMP is the extension of GTA 2 map files). When doing big projects like this one, I always start with the easiest thing. In this case, I started reading the map on Python, like putting a xyz coordinate and getting the block properties at this coordinate, in order to know if I was getting the data correct.
“By the way, if you don’t know, the GTA 2 maps are composed of blocks, much similar to Minecraft (besides having special ‘blocks’ such as diagonal walls and slopes).”
Valps says that what seemed straightforward at first became steadily more complicated. Like peeling an onion, every small tweak appeared to have a knock-on effect, whereby rotating blocks meant rotating textures, rotating slopes, and rotating seemingly innocuous set dressing such as traffic lane arrows.
Here’s a look at one such rotated map:
(Image credit: Rockstar/Valps)
Valps explains that while the above looks nice, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, the landscape of the map is rotated (Valps’ project is three-pronged at 90°, 180° and 270°), with buildings and roads all facing different directions, but, of course, the scripts aren’t.
“This means that all objects will be in the wrong place: all phones, all parked cars, all mission objectives etc,” Valps adds. “So I then created a ‘script rotator’, a Python code which reads the source code of a map, gets all coordinates therein and rotates them. It was very laborious, but the code became one of the most beautiful, organized and neat Python codes I’ve ever written in my life.”
The code became one of the most beautiful, organized and neat Python codes I’ve ever written in my life.
Valps
The complications run deeper still when road-flipping, meaning all traffic winds up driving UK-style in the left-hand lane. Again, from the outside looking in, this may not seem like a big deal, but Valps says it rendered some missions totally unplayable, and introduced a suite of unexpected bugs such as EMT vehicles failing to respawn and enemy hitmen designed to track the player simply wandering off in the opposite direction.
(Image credit: Rockstar/Valps)
Deep in the throes of a masters degree in physics in the real world, Valps was often time-poor and therefore spent his weekends ironing out each defect, block-by-block and mission-by-mission. The fact that developer DMA Design (prior to the Dundee-based studio’s full Rockstar acquisition) published a lot of their own tools shortly after launch, including a map editor and script compiler, made this process more straightforward to a point—but when Valps begins to dig into the minutiae of his work, it certainly doesn’t sound like what you’d call easy work.
“The most challenging and frustrating part of developing the mod was rotating and flipping the slopes of the map,” he says. "The gradients, ramps, and diagonal walls are all considered ‘slopes’ by DMA design, and there are 63 of them. For example, for the 45° gradient blocks there are four: those which point to north, west, east and south. But for 26° and 7°, there are much more of them. Each slope has a number (between 0 and 63), and they follow different patterns, so I had to treat each group of slopes individually.
“I then had to do this for 90° and 270° rotations as well, which became even more challenging. I spent an entire day just to get those ones working.”
And here I am complaining about my brain being broken by the relocation of a GTA 2 phonebox. Removed from Steam way back in 2013, the GTA 2 multiplayer community uses a modified version of the game (version 11.44), which includes a whole host of bug fixes for what is easily the most overlooked and underrated Grand Theft Auto game of the lot. With super-creative endeavours such as this one, we’ve even more reasons to return to Anywhere City more than a quarter of century down the line. Indeed, respect is everything. But, like, just give me a wee minute to get my bearings, yeah?
You can read more about Valps’ GTA 2 Map Rotator project on the GTA forums.
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