A new Ammunation gun shop added into Manhunt’s Carcer City

For some cities, like Manhunt’s Carcer City, the challenges are great. Manhunt was a linear stealth game; its levels were never designed to all be connected and part of an open world. Dkluin has to stitch each level together and fill in any gaps.

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Other cities like Bully’s Bullworth weren’t designed GTA’s with planes or explosives in mind. Dkluin’s small team also had to modify every single Bully NPC so they would work within Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Even the cars you see in Bully, which aren’t drivable, are being modified so that players can steal them, customize them and even blow them up. All of this is made harder because some games, such as Bully, don’t have a lot of online tools or documentation. Dkluin and his team have had to make many of the tools they use themselves.

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Dkluin and his team also plan to add a few custom cities. These include Atlanta parody Atlantis, and Mainland Liberty, a parody of Chicago. These custom-built urban centers are proving to be difficult, and Dkluin said that some of the, might not make the final cut. The main focus of the Underground team currently is getting Carcer City and Bullworth polished and more playable, adding in multiplayer support and improving the lighting across all the cities.

Building an enormous mod that involves numerous different games means lots of code and assets that were never intended to interact now have to work together in one world. This can lead to some strange bugs and glitches. One slightly disturbing glitch involves the skin of the player character stretching and growing in strange ways. Dkluin shared an image, a thumbnail for a video, that represents how the bug looks in-game.

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Another bug involves some buildings in Bullworth acting bizarrely. “We still haven’t take care of all the internal object attributes (IDE flags) [in Bullworth],” explained Dkluin. “So you’ll encounter buildings which are affected by in-game wind.” The buildings essentially can move or get tossed around by the weather. . Dkulin explained that these buildings and other bugs will get fixed once their tools become more automated.

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Dkluin didn’t set out to create such an ambitious mod when he first started working on Underground. The initial plan was to just add Vice City from GTA Vice City Stories and Liberty City from GTA Liberty City Stories into GTA San Andreas. Eventually he decided to add the maps from GTA VC and GTA III instead and as time went on he kept adding more to the mod until he finally decided to add the entire Rockstar 3D universe. Dkluin never expected the mod to get noticed, figuring it would remain “underground forever.” Now he has fans, a custom area of GTA Forums and a community on Youtube. Despite having a team, Dkluin told me that he is still doing most of the work as the other members of the team only contribute when they can.

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Rockstar hasn’t contacted Dkluin or his team, at least not yet. One fan of the mod did reach out to Lazlow, a radio host and long time contributor to Rockstar games since GTA III, asking if he could do some voice work for the mod, but was told Lazlow was “ very very busy with RDR2.

Dkluin and his team are working hard on an upcoming beta release, but beyond that plans are still being figured out. For those who are interested in playing GTA Underground before then, you can download the latest snapshot and go fly around the world visiting the different cities of the GTA universe.

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Zack Zwiezen is a a writer living in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written for Gamecritics, Killscreen and Entertainment Fuse.