Want to see Dragon Ball Z and Naruto characters duke it out on the streets of Liberty City? OpenIV has you covered. Want to build Tony Stark's tower in the middle of the city and fly around in an Iron Man suit? OpenIV allowed an ambitious modder to build that experience in GTA IV. Out of the box, GTA games are narrowly focused on this cops-and-criminals perspective, which is kind of a waste considering how impressive the world they're set in is. GTA games are set in giant, semi-realistic cities, with constant beehive-like activity: traffic, day and night cycles, weather, and different, interacting AI, most obvious in the relationship between police, civilians, and criminals. When you look beyond its satire of American culture, headline-making ability to pay and kill prostitutes, and industry leading sales numbers, GTA's defining feature has always been its open world. OpenIV can now browse GTA V's game files, an important first step. It also has a set of text-based formats (called openFormats), allowing users to edit 3D models and collisions (what happens when 3D objects intersect), in 3D modeling and animation tool 3D Max.
It started as an archive editor, allowing users to dig through and edit the game's encrypted files, but with time became more powerful, adding a built-in texture editor, which lets users modify the 2D images that wrap around 3D models, a 3D model viewer, and an animation viewer. OpenIV is a kind of "all-in-one" tool for modding GTA IV. Modding should also be far easier on PC, but Rockstar used a different encryption for game files this time, which so far has blocked more elaborate mods and modding tools like OpenIV.
They literally want modding dead."Īs the latest entry in the series, GTA V's version of Los Angeles and surrounding area, Los Santos, is the biggest, most detailed open world Rockstar created to date, especially on PCs, which can support better graphics than the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions. That number is likely to rise as soon as OpenIV is updated to allow users to similarly mod GTA V. These days, Krivoruchko said, OpenIV has about 4,000 daily active users. The GTA modding community relies on a lot of work and tools created by a lot of people, but Krivoruchko is leading the team of four that's on the cutting edge of solving GTA V modding challenges.