GTA III is a ground breaking and hugely popular open world action/adventure game.
I worked as the lead programmer on the Xbox port of GTA3 it as part of the Rockstar Vienna team between 2003 and 2004. As a lead on this project, my work split was roughly 60/40 programming/management. I worked closely with Clemens Beer, lead of the Vice City half of the double-pack, to ensure effort on the two very similar code bases was not duplicated.
GTA3 was implemented in C++ using the RenderWare engine for the PS2.
The remit of the port was to improve the game visually without changing the gameplay or tone. Visual improvements made included:
A significant part of the porting work was optimisation. One of the things I was "hands on" involved in improving was the load time, which was achieved using the Capture File technique I presented at the ACCU conference in 2004.
Rockstar used Alienbrain for version control.