After outselling Halo 2 to become last year's hottest video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is heading to the PC next week. And don't be surprised that the PC version looks a lot better than the PS2 version, as the game has been modified to take advantage of the PC's strengths, such as larger memory capacity, higher-resolution graphics, and more-powerful hardware. This means that you'll be able to play as CJ, the protagonist in San Andreas, in sharper detail than before, as you explore the different cities of the game and live the '90s gang life in high style. To give us the lowdown on some of the new modifications in San Andreas as well as those made for the PC version, we caught up with several of Rockstar North's development team. Also, take note that we'll have the second part of our Q&A this Friday.

It's San Andreas like you haven't seen before, thanks to the improved graphical look of the PC version.

GameSpot: How was the Vice City engine changed to allow for the much larger world map in San Andreas while still getting completely rid of the loading times for the world area?

Obbe Vermeij: A completely new level of detail system was implemented whereby a number of models (buildings) can share a single low-detail model. This way, the low-detail models could be loaded as the player moves around the map as opposed to in one go as the player moves between islands, like in Vice City.

GS: With this new, streaming map, is there any limit to the size that the world map can be? What creates this limit if there is one?

John Whyte: There are always limits! There are limits to the number of objects that can be in any section of the map, and this determines more than anything the density of objects in the game. Some of the city sections have effectively maxed out the game in its current form. If we wanted to increase the density of objects, then we would have to go back to the code and rewrite it to handle much larger numbers. (Technically speaking, there are a lot of structures in code that rely on 8-bit indexing to save space.)

GS: With the rampant rumors of "Bigfoot" running around in the game, is there a way to control the probability that an event will appear? Can a single event be scripted to occur extremely rarely, say once a year?

JW: That's a good idea! But I'm afraid there isn't any way of the scripts identifying the date and creating events that are scheduled like this.

GS: What is the estimated real-world scale of the game? How big is San Andreas in "real" terms?

JW: The map is 6 by 6 kilometers or 36 million square meters. That's just the outside map and doesn't include the interior locations in the game, of which there are many. On top of that, the player is not restricted to the populated area of the map. The player can take a boat or plane and travel in any direction as far as he or she may want.

GS: How many objects (cars and pedestrian-type things) are or can be active at any one time? Is this number increased in the PC version from the PS2 version?

JW: Definitely. The PC version has a further clip distance so more of the map is always visible, and the map has a lot of the detail that had to be removed from the PS2 version to get it to fit in the smaller memory footprint. The clip distances for cars and pedestrians are increased, as well. We have to draw these things further out because the PC will run at a higher resolution. In total, this means that the PC is pushing around a lot more than the PS2.

GS: How has the scripting engine changed since Vice City? How has it improved? What are some of your favorite new features?

Chris Rothwell: Our dedicated team of programmers are always continually striving to improve feature sets, efficiency, and usability of the scripting engine throughout the development of the GTA series. Although fundamentally the scripting language and engine hasn't changed much since it was used to make GTA3 five years ago.

CJ and his trusty bike are never far apart.

Since Vice City, numerous improvements have been made to make scripting more powerful, such as the addition of arrays, switch statements, sequence tasks for character artificial intelligence, and uncountable game-specific commands. A favorite tool that was added during San Andreas was the ability to record cars' positions while driving them around the city in the game, then being able to replay these car recordings in real time during a mission. This enabled us to really polish and improve our on-rails missions and scripted cutscenes.

A lot of the new gameplay features in San Andreas were only made possible by these advancements in the scripting language. For example, the 2D-based casino and console games weren't viable in Vice City until a host of heads-up display sprite commands were added during the development of San Andreas. There were also very few custom animations used during missions in Vice City, but for San Andreas we had a brand-new animation scripting interface. This system allowed the designers to implement animation-heavy gameplay coded entirely within the scripting language, such as in the pool game, the basketball odd job, the parachute, and in numerous other areas.