• Platform: PC
• Engine: Unity
• Date: December 2020
• Status: Cancelled

Vice City Remastered (or VCR) was a project aiming at recreating the world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in Unity, by importing the original models and reworking them before adding a few ways to explore the whole scene like cars, bikes and planes. The goal was to be able to experience a less dated version of the city and its magical atmosphere, without the constraints that the game was conceived around at the time to run on a PlayStation 2.

The full Vice City map had successfully been imported in Unity, and a few fixes had been applied to be able to work efficiently. The project has been cancelled in early 2021, when Take-Two Interactive started to take legal actions against developers of mods and projects related to GTA.

Anecdotes:

• The models and textures extraction tools were not designed to extract as much as the full game data, so I had to spend several hours to sort everything, reassign textures and materials, remove duplicates and such. It has been the most time-consuming task, but it was way more comfortable to work on the project after the whole assets folder was cleaned.
• Shortly after the project has been cancelled, for educational purpose, I tried to import everything into Unreal Engine 4 to see how it would handle a scene like the full Vice City. The idea was dropped because it would have taken way too much time to fix the issues, like missing coordinates or objects not rendering properly.