GTA 5 Mod Remakes Vice City

The map imports are starting to come fast and furiously for GTA V and one of those maps happens to be the 1980s themed Miami-inspired map from GTA Vice City. You can see how Vice City looks running in Rockstar's latest open-world action-crime title with a 12 minute video, courtesy of YouTuber taltigolt.

In taltigolt's description on YouTube, he explains that the map isn't available for download just yet because it's not finished. He does however state...

He's absolutely correct about that. In fact, we were regularly posting videos from him and the modding team who released those videos. It wasn't until the spring of 2013 did the Vice City modding team manage to actually get the missions working proper after converting the game over into GTA IV's game engine. They had spent years prior working through the model, texture and sound conversion process and it was no easy task.

The GTA IV: San Andreas mod moved along a bit faster, as they actually managed to get things up and running during the summer of 2012.

The difference between GTA IV and GTA V is that the former was harder to mod for due to poor optimization and a whole lot of crashes due to poor optimization. In the latter's case the game is optimized extremely well and runs like butter, but to compensate for this Rockstar implemented some heavy duty encryption that basically prevented modders from doing what they do best with GTA games.

Slowly and surely, though, the modders have managed to decrypt Rockstar's encryption and enable texture swapping, scripting, weather and pedestrian control, as well as stat modifications. Now, as you can see above, map imports are now possible but they're no easy task to take on.

Up next is model imports. Once model imports are possible the sky is the limit for GTA V modding. How long will it take the team at OpenIV to enable model importing? Well, no one knows; some people thought it would take them months to crack through Rockstar's encryption but it all happened in a matter of weeks.

At this point, I would suspect that model conversions are likely coming sooner rather than later, as evidenced with map makers importing GTA Vice City's map into GTA V.