Animation

In GTA: Vice City the developers have broadened the range of animations performed by the player and pedestrians.

The animations in the game, during cut-scenes especially, have been revamped and are now much more fluid than ever. Facial expressions are built into the game, and during cutscenes the game will take heavy use of these.

Your player will control weapons as never before. The chainsaw will include Tommy holding the saw carefully without hitting himself, and cutting apart whatever he's decided to attack. Every weapon has a unique animation which all bind together for a very unique feel to the action.

Hand-to-hand combat animations were designed to surprise the player as much as possible, and so Tommy will be performing an assortment of tricks to take down his enemy.

The animations were made using motion-capture and stop-motion animation techniques. The cutscenes being motion-captured and in-game moves are built as a combination of both. All these have been reworked for hours to make them as close as possible to perfection.

Adjusting the player model to sit on top of a motorcycle was a challenging task. Since there is an assortment of bikes, on all of them the player has to have a different position, it took a lot of time to iron out the flaws. In fact Rockstar went so far as to give specific mounting and demounting animations to get on and off the motorbikes.