Helicopters in GTA III / LCS or better late than never
Once upon a time, I had a dream of getting to the lighthouse in GTA III (and a couple of interesting places like a ghost town, an observatory, a stadium, etc.), but the developers made it practically impossible, from aircraft there was only an airplane Dodo without wings, which was very difficult to fly. Then came the part of Liberty City Stories for PS2 (with almost the same game city) - I didn’t have a prefix (we lived poorly then) and the game fell into my list of games. Many years later, I bought a prefix and went through it; there were no helicopters there either, but I made them for myself there and found something else.
Although this game was released a long time ago, I think this article will be of interest to many and may inspire someone to achieve its old goals. Personally, if my goal is set, I will fulfill it anyway, sooner or later. Then the idea came up to write an article about what happened. Then for a couple of years I was drawn into work, but I did not forget about the article, and here it is.
When writing the article, I found another cool thing for the PC version of GTA III, about which there is almost no information on the Russian Internet and got some more pleasant memories from childhood.
I did not want to read the walkthroughs and just went through Liberty City Stories on PS2 to the end. Helicopters and planes were not there, and the trick with hijacking a helicopter in one of the missions (as I later learned) was no longer available to me, I did not want to cross over again. After searching for cheats \ save \ editors, I realized that for this part on PS2 there is practically nothing, there is little for PSP, but I did not want to buy it.
By that time, I had already taught my PS2 to read games on the network, I got it in excellent condition and chipovannaya. As soon as I saw the network port on the console, I felt that something like this should be, and not in vain. It was a separate joy that only a piece of iron can understand or someone as frugal as I was - no laser wear and easy to switch between games, the prefix became almost eternal (though friends and relatives did not share my joy, okay). And also I could go into her memory card with the file manager (ulaunchelf).
And I decided that I could get a helicopter and so - I had full confidence that he was in the game. I made several saves in the same garage with different cars (so that there were different IDs) and copied them from the memory card to the USB flash drive (the version of the game loader that I used then could not make virtual memory cards).
There was no Internet in the house where I lived - I had to carry a USB flash drive to work, where another surprise was waiting for me - there were colons in the save names, FAT32 normally accepts such files, but all our computers worked under Windows (file name like “ 1: The Sicilian Gambit "is not accepted), and only the server was on ubunt ... I ended up just sticking a USB flash drive into the server and copying / renaming everything on it.
I tried to search by ID from the previous game - Vice City - nothing came of it, some were the same, some were different (by an arbitrary amount). Oddly enough, I was able to google "GTA LCS Vehicles IDs", on some account the page was the correct list. You could get it from the game’s files, but it would be more difficult, and this saved a lot of time.
After a couple of screenings, I found that even though only one transport was saved in the garage each time, it could be saved to different places in the file. For example, by one ID we find 100 values, and after dropping out by addresses in another file, not a single one. I was lucky that at least some files matched and recorded the transport ID at the same address, this was confirmed; and also very lucky that the file is not encrypted at all, just in its own format. In the end, I found that one of the positions in the garage is located at 0000DCF4, a 4-byte integer:
Changed the value (from 210 to 213 - ID Hunter'a, a military helicopter), was glad and went home. I copied the file back to the memory card at home and a bummer was waiting for me - "the save file is damaged." The next day, by some miracle, I managed to find the format of the Vice City save file, there wasn’t even a chance to find about LCS and I thought that although the IDs of the cars are different, the saves should be about the same (oh, this programming laziness), it turned out.
It turns out that at the end of the file (at 00018FFC) there is a simple check - the byte sum of the entire file in a 4-byte field. I wrote a simple script in PHP that summed the entire file as byte values (just open as a string and the sum ord () of all characters except the last four) and this confirmed that in the last cell there is such a sum.
Home that evening, I was really in a hurry. As it turned out, the colon in the file name can be replaced with anything and the game will "understand" it anyway, for example, "1_ The Sicilian Gambit" is also understood by it normally. And there was no limit to joy when the tail of a helicopter fell out in the open garage.
The homeworkers could not understand for a long time what was wrong with that, from which I had the whole evening a smile from ear to ear. In the game, a military helicopter was not used anywhere and did not appear, it was just lying around in the game, fully working, with a machine gun and missiles. It was a long joyful evening, I visited the lighthouse and almost everywhere I wanted to, I saw why the helicopters and planes were cleaned (most of the roofs without textures and collisions) and made a real pogrom.
It turned out almost everywhere, except for the ghost town (it wasn’t there, it is only in the third part) and the observatory (in this part of the game there is a low ceiling of heights and there is no way to get there). That was three years ago, and then I did not have time for this article.
Now I was looking for information and again did not find anything really for the PS2. But I found great news for those who, like me, want to explore GTA III - it turns out a year ago a group of people released an add-on for the PC version of this game, called "GTA III Aircraft", in its version of "Assisted Installation" you just need to copy all of it files in the game folder and helicopters and planes will appear in it. It is strange that there was really nothing about this mod on the Russian-speaking Internet. In order for helicopters to appear in several places, you need to find the CLEO.asi file on the Internet (an additional script loader) and copy it to the game folder, otherwise helicopters and planes will be in the game itself, but they will not spawn anywhere. After all the actions, the first helicopter can be found on a rock opposite the lighthouse, under it is the Skimmer watercraft, the rest are scattered on the map.
With this mod, I was able to get to the observatory (the ceiling height in the PC version of GTA III is large) and was even able to climb the lighthouse.
As it turned out, the lighthouse in the third part and in the LCS is not the same thing. If in the LCS you can walk around and go down the stairs around him, then in the third part he does not have a collision at all (interaction framework). It is flat on top and further the player simply flows down it into the water, even on the steps and the base you can not stay. I expected more from my childhood dream, I remember how my brother and I spent hours attacking the lighthouse on the Dodo airplane with its wings cut off, trying to climb on it, but couldn’t get on it (either that airplane was really terribly controlled, or the collision was to blame lighthouse).
One way or another, I am glad that I did what I wanted for a long time, flew wherever I could in this city and wrote this article. And by the way, I do not specifically attach a photo with an observatory or a ghost town, maybe someone will go there himself.
Do you have such childhood dreams? And someone wants to try redoing the height limit for the console executable in LCS? They say that it’s hardcoated inside it ...
UPD: In the PSP version, the lighthouse is really different (compared to part 3), it has a strange conflict - there is only the top and there is no center, you can fly right through it (in the PS2 version it’s the same).
And the observatory with all the surrounding landscape does not have a collision either.
I did not finish the hack for the PS2 version, there are a lot of options there and there is no desire to do this anymore, I think everything is the same as in the PSP version, but it is not clear why the height limit was made much less.
Although this game was released a long time ago, I think this article will be of interest to many and may inspire someone to achieve its old goals. Personally, if my goal is set, I will fulfill it anyway, sooner or later. Then the idea came up to write an article about what happened. Then for a couple of years I was drawn into work, but I did not forget about the article, and here it is.
When writing the article, I found another cool thing for the PC version of GTA III, about which there is almost no information on the Russian Internet and got some more pleasant memories from childhood.
I did not want to read the walkthroughs and just went through Liberty City Stories on PS2 to the end. Helicopters and planes were not there, and the trick with hijacking a helicopter in one of the missions (as I later learned) was no longer available to me, I did not want to cross over again. After searching for cheats \ save \ editors, I realized that for this part on PS2 there is practically nothing, there is little for PSP, but I did not want to buy it.
By that time, I had already taught my PS2 to read games on the network, I got it in excellent condition and chipovannaya. As soon as I saw the network port on the console, I felt that something like this should be, and not in vain. It was a separate joy that only a piece of iron can understand or someone as frugal as I was - no laser wear and easy to switch between games, the prefix became almost eternal (though friends and relatives did not share my joy, okay). And also I could go into her memory card with the file manager (ulaunchelf).
And I decided that I could get a helicopter and so - I had full confidence that he was in the game. I made several saves in the same garage with different cars (so that there were different IDs) and copied them from the memory card to the USB flash drive (the version of the game loader that I used then could not make virtual memory cards).
There was no Internet in the house where I lived - I had to carry a USB flash drive to work, where another surprise was waiting for me - there were colons in the save names, FAT32 normally accepts such files, but all our computers worked under Windows (file name like “ 1: The Sicilian Gambit "is not accepted), and only the server was on ubunt ... I ended up just sticking a USB flash drive into the server and copying / renaming everything on it.
I tried to search by ID from the previous game - Vice City - nothing came of it, some were the same, some were different (by an arbitrary amount). Oddly enough, I was able to google "GTA LCS Vehicles IDs", on some account the page was the correct list. You could get it from the game’s files, but it would be more difficult, and this saved a lot of time.
After a couple of screenings, I found that even though only one transport was saved in the garage each time, it could be saved to different places in the file. For example, by one ID we find 100 values, and after dropping out by addresses in another file, not a single one. I was lucky that at least some files matched and recorded the transport ID at the same address, this was confirmed; and also very lucky that the file is not encrypted at all, just in its own format. In the end, I found that one of the positions in the garage is located at 0000DCF4, a 4-byte integer:
Changed the value (from 210 to 213 - ID Hunter'a, a military helicopter), was glad and went home. I copied the file back to the memory card at home and a bummer was waiting for me - "the save file is damaged." The next day, by some miracle, I managed to find the format of the Vice City save file, there wasn’t even a chance to find about LCS and I thought that although the IDs of the cars are different, the saves should be about the same (oh, this programming laziness), it turned out.
It turns out that at the end of the file (at 00018FFC) there is a simple check - the byte sum of the entire file in a 4-byte field. I wrote a simple script in PHP that summed the entire file as byte values (just open as a string and the sum ord () of all characters except the last four) and this confirmed that in the last cell there is such a sum.
Home that evening, I was really in a hurry. As it turned out, the colon in the file name can be replaced with anything and the game will "understand" it anyway, for example, "1_ The Sicilian Gambit" is also understood by it normally. And there was no limit to joy when the tail of a helicopter fell out in the open garage.
The homeworkers could not understand for a long time what was wrong with that, from which I had the whole evening a smile from ear to ear. In the game, a military helicopter was not used anywhere and did not appear, it was just lying around in the game, fully working, with a machine gun and missiles. It was a long joyful evening, I visited the lighthouse and almost everywhere I wanted to, I saw why the helicopters and planes were cleaned (most of the roofs without textures and collisions) and made a real pogrom.
It turned out almost everywhere, except for the ghost town (it wasn’t there, it is only in the third part) and the observatory (in this part of the game there is a low ceiling of heights and there is no way to get there). That was three years ago, and then I did not have time for this article.
Now I was looking for information and again did not find anything really for the PS2. But I found great news for those who, like me, want to explore GTA III - it turns out a year ago a group of people released an add-on for the PC version of this game, called "GTA III Aircraft", in its version of "Assisted Installation" you just need to copy all of it files in the game folder and helicopters and planes will appear in it. It is strange that there was really nothing about this mod on the Russian-speaking Internet. In order for helicopters to appear in several places, you need to find the CLEO.asi file on the Internet (an additional script loader) and copy it to the game folder, otherwise helicopters and planes will be in the game itself, but they will not spawn anywhere. After all the actions, the first helicopter can be found on a rock opposite the lighthouse, under it is the Skimmer watercraft, the rest are scattered on the map.
With this mod, I was able to get to the observatory (the ceiling height in the PC version of GTA III is large) and was even able to climb the lighthouse.
As it turned out, the lighthouse in the third part and in the LCS is not the same thing. If in the LCS you can walk around and go down the stairs around him, then in the third part he does not have a collision at all (interaction framework). It is flat on top and further the player simply flows down it into the water, even on the steps and the base you can not stay. I expected more from my childhood dream, I remember how my brother and I spent hours attacking the lighthouse on the Dodo airplane with its wings cut off, trying to climb on it, but couldn’t get on it (either that airplane was really terribly controlled, or the collision was to blame lighthouse).
One way or another, I am glad that I did what I wanted for a long time, flew wherever I could in this city and wrote this article. And by the way, I do not specifically attach a photo with an observatory or a ghost town, maybe someone will go there himself.
Do you have such childhood dreams? And someone wants to try redoing the height limit for the console executable in LCS? They say that it’s hardcoated inside it ...
UPD: In the PSP version, the lighthouse is really different (compared to part 3), it has a strange conflict - there is only the top and there is no center, you can fly right through it (in the PS2 version it’s the same).
And the observatory with all the surrounding landscape does not have a collision either.
I did not finish the hack for the PS2 version, there are a lot of options there and there is no desire to do this anymore, I think everything is the same as in the PSP version, but it is not clear why the height limit was made much less.
