Why do so many planes crash in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? 20 years later, we find out

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is infamous for its planes crashing everywhere, and now we know the reason behind this peculiar occurrence.

Video games work thanks to an arcane power called programming. That’s something we all know, but sometimes we forget. Everything is written to work in a certain way, and even when it doesn’t, it’s also because of what it’s written. That’s why it’s surprising to hear people delving into the inner workings of any video game. Because they reveal things we didn’t know about the games. Even 20 years after their release.

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Planes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have always behaved strangely. Particularly because many of them crash or explode in mid-air for no apparent reason. Something that has been a mystery to the community for years, debating whether it is intentional or not. Now Obber Vermeij, former developer at Rockstar Games, has clarified why these hilarious accidents occurred. And, of course, it was a programming problem.

According to Vermeij’s code, he created planes out of thin air in the sky when they were visible to the player, looking for obstacles before doing so. Because this scanning was slow, and we understand that it could compromise game performance, the absolute minimum was used to do it. This would explain why small objects are not detected, causing planes to ignore them. In addition, the plane could be generated without enough speed, causing it to fall much lower than it should, and the map would not load until after the plane had been generated, causing obstacles to appear after they could be detected. That explains the high number of air accidents in San Andreas.

But that’s not all. Because it turns out that, even if aviation problems were already many by themselves, a bug ended up finishing off the dramatic black hole that San Andreas represents for aeronautics. Because according to a modder named Silent, there is also a bug in the collision detection of airplanes. This bug causes a false positive, giving the plane the impression that there is no obstacle in front of it, when in reality there is. Something that further increases the chances of accidents. Which continue to occur, even in the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy version.

Does all this surprise us? The truth is, not really. How dangerous San Andreas is for airplanes has been a meme for 20 years. What’s interesting is discovering the reasons behind this and how a series of unforeseen problems has created this hilarious narrative of San Andreas as a kind of miniature Bermuda Triangle. Because in the end, even the greatest mysteries have a reasonable explanation if we look in the right place.

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GTA fans are trying to figure out its release date by studying the phases of the Moon

GTA 6 is the most anticipated game for a long time and that is why fans are looking to find out when it will be announced… in the phases of the moon?!

We never tire of repeating that few games are as anticipated as GTA 6. Probably none. GTA 5 continues to break records, selling as if it were new, with GTA Online not only refusing to die but proving to have more life than ever with each passing month. At Rockstar Games, they have few or no reasons to hasten the process, but that doesn’t make their fans any less restless. They’ve reached the point of speculating about things that seem closer to divination than anything else.

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That’s what happened on September 29th. Rockstar Games announced that to celebrate the Happy Moon Festival, they would distribute special shirts to all users who logged into their servers during that week. Something completely innocuous until a Twitter user, named Dirty_Worka, decided to read into it further.

According to this person, the Moon depicted in the screenshot they shared was a Waxing Gibbous Moon. The next time the Moon would be in this phase was on Monday, October 2nd, which could mean that it was a spoiler that not only a GTA 6 teaser would be released that day but also a major new game announcement. As it’s now October 4th, we know that divination through Moon phases didn’t work out. Except for one obvious detail. Moon phases are regular.

As Dirty_Worka pointed out in their tweet, the next Waxing Gibbous Moon phase is on Wednesday, November 1st, 2023. That means they could still be right, and in a little less than a month, we might learn more about the new GTA. However, it’s also possible that Moon phases don’t mean anything, and we might all just be losing our minds a little. And if that’s the case, who’s to say we didn’t have fun along the way?

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