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.

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.