Exclusive Information | R* Leaked their dev tool (Patreon)

Hello there!I am still trying to find as many GTA releases and re-releases as possible and you know what, there is a freaking point to continue my work.

Several days ago I found a real R*'s dev tool in the updated macOS releases of San Andreas. 😱According to my finds, this tool was leaked in the newest update of Steam and AppStore releases, which is very strange. How could it leak?

The tool is called "Colim", and was compiled on 22/08/2002, found in "*\models\coll".As you could guess, this tool has something to do with .coll files (collision files).According to HEX editor it was created by Richard Jobling and Adam Fowler.

Richard is credited only in GTA 3, while Adam seems to be R* veteran. This stuff is real. 

But anyways, what this tool can do?The bad thing is, nothing interesting for us as it was R*'s internal tool.In other words, GTA community came up with different ways to make these .coll files, however here is how R* used it.

They modeled the map in 3DS max, which is made from hundreds of models. The whole thing is called a "scene".

Then they used a tool (as I understand 3ds max tool), which dumped a "scene" to .a3d file. It is a dump of environment with coordinates and other important information.Fun fact, GTA 3 a3d files were leaked in the iOS port of the game and here what they look like:

Then, as I understand, they used their special tools to convert this 3ds max dump to .ide, .coll and .ipl files. This format is what the game understands. Thanks to them the game places objects and other stuff around the map.Basically, they invented a way to export 3DS scene to a game.

So... "Colim" is the tool, which takes these a3d files and converts them to .coll files. The tool works and here is an example:

To sum the things up, nothing interesting, but forget that it was never meant to be leaked. Say thanks to macOS dev team? 

~~~~By the way, I tried to convert every single GTA3 a3d file to coll to see if there is a difference between the final and these converted files.

Unfortunately, the differences are minor, because only some bytes are different. No one knows what these bytes do. Don't forget that this tool could be updated and that's we see these changes.

~~~

Special thanks to: 

FireHead, who analyzed this tool and explained what it does;

app, who explained a3d files (not directly).

~~~I hope, I will find more cool dev stuff in the future and I hope you enjoyed this exclusive information.See you next time!