Apr 24, 2025 19:00:00

After updating to Windows 11, a bug occurred in 'GTA:SA,' which was released more than 20 years ago, that caused 'planes to appear 1 quadrillion light years away'

The developer of a Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (GTA:SA) mod revealed that he had received a report from a player that a bug had occurred after updating to

Windows 11 version 24H2 . The developer of the mod explained how a bug that had originally existed in GTA:SA had become apparent after 20 years.

How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 | Silent's Blog
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas-win11-24h2-bug/

Adrian, who develops a mod called SilentPatch , received a report from a user that 'after upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, the seaplane called Skimmer disappeared completely from the game.' If this was the only report, it would be assumed that it was due to the user's environment or a misconfiguration, but since many people had reported the same problem on the GTA forum, Adrian decided to investigate the problem.

To summarize the reports, the issue does not occur on Windows 10 22H2 or Windows 11 23H2, but only on Windows 11 24H2, and it occurs even when no MOD is being used, which suggests that GTA:SA itself may be incompatible with Windows 11 24H2.

In fact, Adrian tested this in a virtual environment running Windows 11 24H2 and found that as soon as a Skimmer spawns in the game, it is launched into the sky 1.0287648030984853e+0031 units away from the spawn point, or roughly 1.087 quadrillion light years away.

If you have the SilentPatch installed, the game freezes, and if you don't, the camera behaves strangely. In any case, it seems that the problem is caused by the movement of the plane after spawning, and when I investigated, I found that the Z coordinate indicating the height of the spawn point was broken.

The way the game works is that when a vehicle of a certain model is first spawned, its height is determined by its suspension, but Skimmer was missing two of the four parameters needed to determine its height.

Normally, a vehicle with only two parameters is a boat. Adrian found out that the Skimmer, a floatplane, was originally defined as a boat, and when it was later changed to a plane, it was likely that the additional parameters were forgotten. In fact, adding the parameters fixed the bug completely.

The question is, why has this bug existed for 20 years without anyone noticing, and why did it only become apparent in Windows 11 24H2?

After further investigation, Adrian discovered that the internal operation of Windows 11 24H2 had changed, changing the way functions that had worked in favor of GTA:SA in previous versions.

From this, it was concluded that since GTA:SA was compatible with Windows 98, which was released in 1998, the bug had been avoided for more than 10 major versions, and it happened to become apparent in Windows 11 24H2. In addition, since the bug had been fixed in the Xbox version, it is possible that it was even more difficult to notice.

'This was the most interesting bug I've come across, and it's been hidden for 20 years, at least on PC,' said Adrian. 'But this isn't the first time this kind of problem has happened. It's possible that an OS update can change the way things work. In many other games, these kinds of problems would have remained unfixed and remained as rumors. Thankfully, GTA is moddable and well understood, so we can address these issues and make sure the game continues to work for a long time to come.'