Os Arquivos Escondidos Por Trás dos NPCs de GTA 6

Take Two has been registering patents for years, and I see few people talking about it. But there is a specific group of patents that started to be registered in 2019 that is different from everything we've seen. Individually, they seem random. We have hand tracking, animation tools, rendering systems, but the interesting thing is: when you put them all together, something happens. Because this set of patents solves in silence the problem that all open world games have never been able to improve.

And look, if I'm right in what I'm going to show you today, Rockstar may be about to surprise us in a way we didn't expect. I'm PC, and today we're going to reveal everything Take-Two/Rockstar tries to hide when they register a new patent in their games.

Since open world games exist, NPCs have a fundamental problem: they are never unique. Each character on the street was created by hand. The modeler models the body, the animator creates the walking cycle and its interactions, the designer defines certain types of behavior, and that's where it is, when the studio needs a thousand different NPCs. What do they do? Well, if you answered "copy and recolor", you're right. They always resize, change the skin, change one detail or another here and twist it there

But the point is, we always notice. You see the same NPC in three different streets, the same construction worker in five, six neighborhoods too, and the same animation of drunk for every drunk NPC. And look, it's not because the devs are incompetent, it's because the physical pipeline can't generate infinite variety. And even Rockstar, with an absurd budget, working for years in the area, still hit that wall. But, from 2019, they decided to break down that wall once and for all.

Starting to talk about the first patent, I already warn you in advance that it completely changes the way an NPC is created. Instead of building each character from scratch, the system treats NPCs as a selection of components with tags, parts that the game engine automatically assembles in real time. Imagine this: Rockstar creates 25 different heads, 25 torsos, 25 sets of arms and 25 legs. That alone gives about 390,000 possible body combinations. Add variations of torso,

Let's say 10 to 15 different tones And you'll be facing something between 3 to 6 million unique bodies Before even entering the NPC clothing variations But look, the system doesn't stick the pieces in any way It follows rules Those predefined tags prevent meaningless combinations For example, a leg with the wrong skin tone Out of place proportions Combinations that break the visual logic Everything here needs to make sense within the world

All of this added to very conservative combination skin filters, you still get something between 250 to 500 thousand viable body combinations. Dude, just that is already an absurd, but it's just the beginning. Okay, but before anyone comes here in the comments and says: "Ah, this can be for any Take Two game." Yes.

Technically, it can. Take Two obviously has other studios, and these patents don't mention GTA 6 by name. But look, pay close attention, all of them attack exactly the gargantuan that Rockstar has been publicly talking about for years. Variety of characters, density of population, longer animation time, a really realistic performance in an open world. When you look at the GTA 6 trailers, the variations of body types, the reaction system of people,

The amount of unique NPCs on the screen, they fit almost perfectly with what these patents describe. Ah, but could it be a coincidence? Okay, it could. But look, we have to admit that the chances are very, very low.

Ok, here we have a bunch of NPCs with unique bodies, but how do they move? How will their animation be? In the old system, animations were bound to specific models. If the NPC didn't have exactly the type of body that that animation expected, the NPC broke. That's why Rockstar and all the other developers used the same walking cycles for the entire population of the game. In GTA V, no matter where you were,

everyone was partially the same, different skins and identical movements. And of course, this is already getting out of hand, especially when we put in front the variety that the TAGS system introduces. But Rockstar got something different here, something that adds even more. According to the patent, it describes a system where animations are not attached to specific characters. The movement is divided into modular blocks that the engine adjusts in real time to fit into any body that has just been molded. And what does this mean for you, player? The NPCs will not all walk the same.

They won't move the same way and they won't react the same way as things that happen in the world. Your brain as a player will think: "Wow, a new animation!" It will simply feel that the world looks intensely alive and real, because the movement will make sense for each specific body that is on the screen. And it's this type of immersion that you can't camouflage by putting a bigger map or super well improved ray tracing effects.

Now you have NPCs with unique bodies and unique movements. The next problem is: How to make them all interact with the world in a realistic way? Look, the old system was very simple and not very advanced. The NPC followed a straight line until he found an obstacle. Either he deviated, like a escape route, or stood in front of the obstacle. Now, already the third patent,

It describes something very different. The world is filled with a much more complex network of nodes of movement, both standing and vehicles. And the NPCs choose paths between these nodes based on environmental, physical and even behavioral factors. A confident NPC will not run away like a cowardly NPC. A distracted driver does not behave like someone completely focused. A stressed pedestrian can take a different path. The whole system would still have a control base. The world would not become a total chaos. But...

And it also wouldn't eliminate chaos completely. This control system would manage the whole environment. And that's when things start to look real. The more variable the system considers, the more unpredictable the NPCs become. Look, it's not randomness for randomness, but something genuinely dynamic. And that changes especially police persecution. You won't be able to predict every reaction of the traffic, the police will make decisions based on their own individual parameters, on their risk tolerance and on reading the situation around them.

Now imagine, you have a city full of unique NPCs, with unique animations, and traveling back and forth dynamically. And then a new problem arises: how to render all this without your PC or console exploding? I'm sure every gamer here has already suffered from a LOD problem. The NPC model is degrading as you move away,

And when he gets close again, boom, his face is square, his clothes losing the detail out of nowhere, that horrible pop that breaks all immersion at the time. And now comes the fourth patent, and it describes something called "continuous logic". Instead of jumping between levels of fixed details, the models smoothly transit between them. The engine scales the details up or down, without any movement.

a sudden visible change. Ok, but if GTA 6 is using this, what can change along with the other patents? Well, the answer is: larger crowds, no drop in performance, NPCs keeping the visual detail even at a distance, almost imperceptible pop-up, the world seems stable, consistent and alive from the horizon

Even the street you're on. And look, you can already see this in the trailers that came out. Look at the open scenes of the first trailer. Compare it with the traditional LODs that exist today. You would see pop-ins, you would see simplifications, abrupt transitions, but they are simply not in the trailer.

Look, if you're that kind of guy who thinks Rockstar spent years developing this game to leave small details aside, I feel like I'm informing you that you're wrong. And that's why we get into the fifth patent, which at first glance seems significant. It's a hands and fingers capture system using machine learning. It predicts precise finger positions

hands based on incomplete data, cleaning the parts that most break the immersion in the animations of the characters. And look, you who play for a long time know that hands and 3D models have always been the weak point of the industry. Stiff hands floating in the air, holding objects in the wrong way, gesturing often mechanically, any of these things take your immersion out of the game at the time. Your brain automatically detects that there is something wrong there, the movements do not make sense and take all your immersion out of the game. But what this fifth patent

tend to deliver, we'll have the animations on the phone looking much more natural, the objects that the NPCs hold will seem to behave correctly, next to the fingers, the gestures will seem intentional, the interactions will stop falling into that scary valley of strangeness. In a game like GTA 6, where you do hundreds of different things with your hands, this matters much more than it seems.

So if we put all the patents together, we have the TAGS system, modular locomotion engine, dynamic navigation IA, continuous loading, hand animation with machine learning, and look, none of these patents confirm anything if they are separated. But when you put them all together and compare with what Rockstar has shown in the GTA 6 trailers,

One thing is clear: each of these patents attacks exactly the same gargantuan that limited open world games over these 15, 20 years: variety, movement, navigation and density of scale of development. And look, if these systems were integrated in GTA VI, even if, come on, just some part of them, we're not talking about better NPCs, we're talking about Rockstar building one of the most fundamental parts of the design of the open world from scratch. And I find it very difficult to believe that Take-Two developed these five specific patents

right after the production of GTA 6, which is exactly facing the problems Rockstar has been trying to solve over the years. To, indeed, create the best open world game of all time.