Steve's GTA Page

The day has finally come, GTA: San Andreas has been released for PC in the US today.

I didn’t have the opportunity to check any of the file formats yet, but I got one bad news already: The exe is encrypted and protected with Securom 7, that means there possibly won’t be new versions of Menu Editor, Limit Adjuster and similar tools for SA, since they change the exe file directly, what isn’t possible anymore. However, I think it’s still possible by memory editing at runtime, we’ll see…

Update: I’ve managed to decode the new .col file format (COL3). Besides the collision mesh it also contains a simplified shadow mesh, which the engine uses to calculate the realtime shadows. Here is a comparison, using the col model of the “Bravura”: