Mystery of the vanishing seaplane: why did Windows 11 24H2 cause the vehicle to disappear from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas?

• Windows 11 24H2 caused a plane to completely disappear from GTA: San Andreas
• A lengthy investigation determined it was a coding error in GTA, and not Microsoft’s fault
• The error in the plane’s Z axis positioning, which was finally exposed by the 24H2 update, effectively shot it into space

A two-decade-old game has produced a marked demonstration of just how strange the world of bugs can be, after Windows 11 24H2 appeared to break something in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – though I should note upfront that this wasn’t Microsoft’s fault in the end.

Neowin picked up on this affair which was explained at length – in very fine detail, in fact – by a developer called Silent (who’s responsible for SilentPatch, a project dedicated to fixing up old PC games, including GTA outings, so they work on modern systems).

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released way back in 2004, and the game has a seaplane called the Skimmer. What players of this GTA classic found was that after installing the 24H2 update for Windows 11, the Skimmer had suddenly vanished from San Andreas.

The connection between applying 24H2 and the seaplane’s disappearance from its usual spot down at the docks wasn’t immediately made, but the dots were connected eventually.

Then Silent stepped in to investigate and ended up diving down an incredibly deep programming rabbit hole to uncover how this happened.

As mentioned, the developer goes into way too much depth for the average person to care about, but to sum up, they found that even when they force-spawned the Skimmer plane in the game world, it immediately shot up miles into the sky.

The issue was eventually nailed down to the ‘bounding box’ for the vehicle – the invisible box defining the boundaries of the plane model – which had an incorrect calculation for the Z axis (height) in its configuration file.

For various reasons and intricacies that we needn’t go into, this error was not a problem with versions of Windows before the 24H2 spin rolled around, purely by luck I might add. Essentially, the game read the positioning values of the previous vehicle before the Skimmer (a van), and this worked okay (just about – even though it wasn’t quite correct).

But Windows 11 24H2 changed the behavior of the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, so it no longer read the values of that van – and with error now exposed, the plane effectively received a (literally) astronomical Z value. It wasn’t visible in the game any longer because it was shot up into space.

And so the mystery of the disappearing seaplane was solved – the Skimmer, in fact, was orbiting a distant galaxy somewhere far, far away from San Andreas. (I feel a spin-off mash-up game coming on).

Analysis: Too quick to pin the blame

This is a rather fascinating little episode that shows how tiny bugs can creep in, and by chance, go completely unnoticed for 21 years until a completely unrelated operating system update changes something that throws a wrench into the coding works.

It also serves to underline a couple of other points. Firstly, that there’s a complex nest of tweaks and wholesale changes under the hood of the 24H2 update, which comes built on a new underpinning platform. That platform is called Germanium, and it’s a pivotal change that was required for the Arm-based (Snapdragon) CPUs that were the engines of the very first Copilot+ PCs (which was why 24H2 was needed for those AI laptops to launch).

In my opinion, this is why we’ve seen more unexpected behavior and weird bugs with the 24H2 update than any other upgrade for Windows 11, due to all that work below the surface of the OS (which is capable of causing unintended side effects at times).

Furthermore, this affair highlights that some of these problems may not be Microsoft’s doing, and I’ve got to admit, I’m generally quick to pin the blame on the software company in that regard. My first thought when I started reading about this weird GTA bug was – ‘what a surprise, yet more collateral damage from 24H2’ – when in fact this isn’t Microsoft’s fault at all (but rather Rockstar’s coders).

That said, much of the flak being aimed at Microsoft for the bugginess of 24H2 is, of course, perfectly justified, and the sense still remains with me that this update – and the new Germanium platform which is its bedrock – was rather rushed out so that Copilot+ PCs could meet their target launch date of summer 2024. That, too, may be an unfair conclusion, but it’s a feeling I’ve been unable to shake since 24H2 arrived.

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