GTA San Andreas Plane Crash Mystery Has Been Solved

gamerant.com:

Plane crashes that are commonly encountered throughout Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas stem from some problematic code that is both buggy and imperfect, partially due to the technical limitations of the game's original target hardware. This information, shared by a former Rockstar developer, finally offers a solution to a mystery that has been puzzling GTA: San Andreas players for nearly two decades.

One of the many weird encounters throughout the Grand Theft Auto series is the case of the mysterious crashing plane. While not necessarily exclusive to GTA: San Andreas, it is particularly common in the 2004 game, to the point that many people who play it to relative completion will encounter it multiple times, especially in the Las Venturas area.

Former Rockstar developer Obbe Vermeij has finally shed some light on this curiosity in a recent social media update. The developer, who worked on GTA: San Andreas as a technical director, confirmed that the plane crashes weren't an intentional feature, but that they also cannot be categorized as a simple bug. He has instead characterized the phenomenon as a result of some flawed code responsible for spawning planes to perform flybys near the player.

Due to the technical constraints of the 2004 hardware, the logic itself was rudimentary. Specifically, while the code was meant to ensure there were no obstacles in the plane's path before spawning it, such checks were so costly that Vermeij opted to use «the absolute minimum,» which resulted in the safeguards often not detecting thin obstacles that the plane would collide with, causing it to crash. The game would also occasionally spawn a plane without enough initial momentum to maintain its altitude, causing it to drop below its precalculated flight path, hit an obstacle, and go down.

A separate problem occurred in scenarios when map models and their collision detection were loaded after the plane, which would lead to the same outcome. Twitter user @__silent_ even found a bug in