The Windows 11 24H2 update has revealed a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Microsoft is not to blame for this.
It turns out that this bug had been quietly hiding from players for 20 years and didn’t make itself felt until the latest OS update. And here’s what we’re talking about — with the update to 24H2, the Skimmer seaplane disappears from the game. But not completely.
Silent, the developer known for its SilentPatch, which adapts classic Rockstar games for modern systems, has found out the reason. It turns out that the plane literally took off into space. When you tried to force it to sleep, Skimmer instantly went on a space adventure. A closer inspection revealed that its position along the Z-axis reached… more than a quadrillion light years. The reason — in the configuration file vehicles.ide.
This file was missing the last four parameters for the Skimmer, which determine the scale of the front and rear wheels. The boats in the game do not have these values, and the developers seem to have forgotten to add them after they converted the Skimmer from a boat to a seaplane. In older versions of Windows, the game simply «borrowed» these values from the previous vehicle (in this case, a van), and everything looked fine. But Windows 11 24H2 behaves differently: it changed the memory handling, and instead of the default values, the game picked up a random number. And so we have Skimmer in orbit in a distant galaxy.
But the bug itself was not noticed by Silent, but by an ordinary GitHub user under the nickname hiddenmask58. It was he who passed the information to the developer and he fixed the glitch in less than a day. According to him, the fix is simple: just open data vehicles.ide, find the string 460, Skimmer and at the end add -1, 0.7, 0.7, -1. This brings the airplane back to the ground, or rather — to the water.
It’s fascinating that the bug had every chance of remaining hidden forever… if not for the insidious 24H2. If not, a folder that can remove Windows updates and seaplanes in the galaxy. As noted in the analysis, the new version of Windows runs on the Germanium platform, which was created specifically for ARM processors in Copilot+ PCs, and this could cause unexpected behavior in the old code.
This shows once again how strange updates can be for old games: 20 years ago, everything worked without a hitch, and now Skimmer has gone on an intergalactic journey. Fortunately, enthusiasts have not abandoned the game, so old games are not falling apart because of new technologies. For now developers are busy with GTA 6which They don’t advertise much on purpose. Although the example of a remaster Oblivion has shown that this strategy works.
Source: TechRadar
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