Grand Theft Auto (Feb 2, 1995 prototype)

A small proof of concept showing the game from a top-down perspective, containing only basic graphics and controls to zoom in and out.
==Notes==
* Formerly hosted on Mike Dailly's website (Archive).
* Contains debug symbols within DINO.EXE.
==Readme==
GTA ProtoType 2 By Mike Dailly
 Written on a 486DX66
 (2/2/95)
 (email: mike@dailly.org)
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 comp.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....
Being a prototype, its buggy as hell, so it will crash :)
q Zoom in (not too far!!)
A Zoom out (as far as you like!)
W S pan up/down
< > pan left/right
1 2 change camera field of view (press 2 for a while, then zoom in a bit for taller buildings)
3 4 change height of buildings (down to street level)
- + Change window size
Z X offset origin - used to test perspective at the extremes (up/down)
[ ] offset origin - used to test perspective at the extremes (left/right)
SPACE Shows timing bars, and perspective point array.
==See also==
* BetaArchive entry