The next instalment for GTA might be quite away but some new information has come to light relating to new patents that appear to be relating to Rockstar Games.
A Twitter user Big Jim Colosimo discovered a few new patents published by Take-Two Interactive, the parent company for Rockstar Games relating to virtual environments and a new session management system for online titles.
Virtual Environments – what does this mean?
What this practically means the virtual environment patent indicates a new form of generated navmesh for the NPCs (it controls where NPCs are allowed to go) and it may appear that artificial intelligence may also play a part in the next title so there is a more prominent chance that Rockstar could be leveraging dedicated servers rather using localized hardware.
This would also benefit consoles as most of the AI would be handled on the servers so if this becomes implemented into the next title, Rockstar should be able to push the game even further beyond AI, thus won’t be pushed back from any hardware limitations.
With this in mind the next game is going all in with an advanced AI system (again) for NPCs as we’ve similarly seen with Red Dead Redemption II (2018) that introduced daily routines and improvements which was a major step up compared to GTA V from 2013.
Session Management – what’s this?
Being alone in the next GTA Online title might be even harder with a new patent that demonstrates there may be a new system that merges sessions without any action on the player.
This technology is somewhat already used in Red Dead Online but this patent shows it could be advanced even further to populate sessions much as possible. This feature could also eliminate some loading screens if a player wants to join a friend’s session as the game would seamlessly switch sessions as nothing happened. Or if a player is kicked from an online session, the game will seamlessly enter the X player into a different session without any effect or loading screen.
For the time being take all this info with a grain of salt. Companies can often publish patents without some things ever being featured in a final product.
