After a GTA: Vice City speedrunner had their world record attempt derailed by a super-fast cop, one of the game’s original devs explained what happened before swiftly washing their hands of the whole business.
Earlier this week, speedrunner Joshimuz shared a clip of “an old speedrunning legend.” Nearly 100 minutes into their ‘No Major Glitches’ Vice City Any% run, Joshimuz was aiming to complete the Cherry Popper ice cream factory missions when they ended up on the wrong side of the law. Normally, any speedrunner worth their salt would be able to evade the one-star wanted level that Joshimuz picked up here, but these weren’t normal circumstances. One of Vice City’s finest sees this minor traffic infraction and zips across the ground to Joshimuz’s ice cream truck, arresting him and giving his run a serious setback.
I encountered an old speedrunning legend during Josh Done Quick Six’s Vice City Any% (NMG) run… pic.twitter.com/3pHDyvSrKXSeptember 9, 2024
Joshimuz is clearly pretty incensed by the fact that Barry Allen appears to be moonlighting as a Vice City police officer, noting his misfortune at having come across this “old speedrunning legend.” Their video, however, summoned veteran Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij, to explain how this legend came about.
“This is a bug with the ‘getting into vehicles’ AI,” Vermeij explains, explaining that the cop “should walk towards the car but for some reason (and this is the bug) doesn’t think he has any viable options to get to the door.” That triggers some “panic code,” which is what sees the cop “warp” to the vehicle.
Vermeij goes on to explain that “the code to navigate to the door of vehicles is very complicated” because it has to account for a lot of what’s going on in the world around the NPC. Other characters, vehicles, the map itself, and even whether or not a car door is already open all have the capacity to affect the decision making. Vermeij, however, made clear that this particular run-ruining moment wasn’t anything to do with him, proclaiming that he “didn’t write any” of that complex code.
That seems a relative rarity for this particular dev, who’s been offering a peek at the inner workings of the many GTA games he contributed on for a while now. Earlier this year, for instance, he explained why the infamous San Andreas plane crashes were such an “embarrassing” problem for Rockstar to overcome, as well as why GTA 3’s moon changes size when you shoot at it.
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