When we played GTA San Andreas back in 2004, it was perfectly possible that a plane fell on top of our heads or that it crashed a few meters from CJ. Aerial vehicles with the sole purpose of crashing, which is an absurd idea that has never made sense… until now.
He has been the former developer of Rockstar Games, Obbe Vermeij, in charge of explaining what causes this erratic behavior. Obviously, it was not intentional and a series of accumulated errors caused these unexpected scares throughout the map.
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In GTA San Andreas, planes are periodically created near the player to fly over them. Sometimes they crash.
Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path. Analyze a series of lines in the direction of travel of the plane. These scans are slow, so I used the absolute minimum (I think just the fuselage and wingtips). Therefore, fine obstacles are sometimes not detected.
Additionally, planes sometimes lost some altitude right after being created because their initial speed might not have generated enough lift.
There was an additional problem when the map models were not loaded yet. Its collisions were loaded after the plane had already been created.
These problems occasionally allowed aircraft to be created on a doomed flight path.
I was aware of the accidents and briefly considered eliminating these flights.
As we can read, it is all about a fateful concatenation of failures that lead to kamikaze planes. According to Vermeij, he knew of the existence of this problem and considered ending the flights just above the protagonist of GTA San Andreas, but that idea was discarded. On the other hand, he also wanted to clarify that the luck statistic in the sandbox did not in any way determine the accidents.
On the other hand, the developer Silent provided the detail that “these planes also crash more than they should due to an error in collision detection when the planes appear. This can lead to a false positive where the planes appear thinking the path ahead is clear, when in fact it is not,” which Vermeij later noted. The surprising thing is that the creator himself was unaware of this particularity.
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