Game developer Adrian works on game bugs during his free time, and he has continuously been releasing fixes for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas) and many other games for modern computers. One such bug that caught our attention is the missing Skimmer seaplane on GTA: San Andreas after updating to Windows 11 24H2, which GitHub user hiddenmask58 brought up four days ago. According to the user, the modded and vanilla with SilentPatch versions of his game have this problem. Thankfully, Adrian got wind of the issue, fixed it within 24 hours, and shared the findings on Silent's Blog.
According to the investigation, the root cause of the issue is missing information in the vehicles.ide configuration file. The line for the Skimmer is missing its last four parameters, which include the front and rear wheel scale. It seems that this problem has existed in GTA: San Andreas since its launch, but how Windows loaded the information in previous years meant that it went undetected for nearly 20 years.
The missing information was apparently by design. The Skimmer is a seaplane, and all other boats in the game have also omitted the last four parameters. In previous versions of the game (i.e., GTA III and GTA: Vice City), this vehicle was defined as a boat but was converted to a plane in GTA: San Andreas. However, when the game’s developers made this conversion, they seemingly forgot to add the four extra parameters required for such vehicles, leading to the bug.
However, this error went undetected for over two decades because of how the operating system handled the missing information. In previous versions of Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows 11 23H2, the operating system loaded the wheel scale of the vehicle above the Skimmer in the vehicles.ide file, which is 0.7. However, changes to how Windows 11 242 handles memory exposed the problem, where instead of using the previous vehicle’s parameters, it adjusted the stack pointer by four bytes, resulting in a massive value for the wheel scale.
So, you cannot see the Skimmer in the unpatched game versions in Windows 11 24H2 because it’s way too big for the game to render. If you forcibly put CJ in the cockpit of the seaplane without fixing the issue, you’ll see that his in-game altitude is 1.087 quadrillion light-years high, turning him into a spaceman.
If you want to enjoy the game on your newly updated Windows PC, head to your GTA: San Andreas install directory and look for data\vehicles.ide. Open the file in Notepad and look for 460, Skimmer. From there, add -1, 0.7, 0.7, -1 to the end of that line and save the file. Alternatively, you can wait for SilentPatch to release a Hotfix for this game on his GitHub, including fixes for other in-game bugs. With that, you should be able to fly the Skimmer seaplane again and go on with the progress on your 50th re-run of GTA: San Andreas.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
