A modder who goes by Dryxio has demonstrated a Grand Theft Auto project that connects GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas through live portals. The result is a single setup where all three games keep running at the same time, and a player can move between them without a loading screen.
The demo matters because it is more than a map mashup. Dryxio shows CJ starting in San Andreas on Grove Street, firing through a portal into another part of the world, then crossing into Vice City and appearing as Tommy Vercetti. The video later shows CJ moving through Vice City and then into GTA III, with similar cross-world interactions.
Dryxio’s footage also shows gunfire passing through portals. A player standing in one game can shoot into another visible game space through the portal opening. The demonstration does not establish every boundary of the system. For example, it is unclear from the video whether vehicles can pass through the portals or whether some interactions are blocked.
The portals are not fixed scenery, according to the demo. Dryxio shows that they can be placed by the player in the game world, including across the three supported titles. That turns the project into a kind of live debugging nightmare with pedestrians, traffic, physics and player state all pretending they were invited to the same party.
How Dryxio says it works
Dryxio says the three games run inside one process and share a single Direct3D device. Each portal is rendered as a live GPU texture, rather than a captured video feed. When the player walks through, the mod switches control to the target game’s engine in real time while the other games continue running in the background.
According to Dryxio, each title keeps its native systems active: artificial intelligence, traffic, physics, saves, missions and settings. That is why the portal view can show a world continuing to run before the player enters it, instead of loading a static preview or a pre-rendered scene.
The technical path depends on community reverse-engineering work. Dryxio modified re3 and reVC, open-source projects that recreate GTA III and Vice City in readable C++ form, and used plugin-sdk to interface with San Andreas. The original games used RenderWare, a proprietary engine that was not built to render multiple separate game worlds together. Dryxio used librw, an open-source reimplementation of RenderWare, to compile the three games into one unified process.
The mod is not publicly available at the moment, according to the demonstration. That limits independent testing, so claims about stability, performance and edge cases remain Dryxio’s claims until other developers can run it themselves.
There is also an obvious rights problem sitting beside the technical one. Rockstar Games has previously been protective of Grand Theft Auto intellectual property, and a project built on reverse-engineered versions of three commercial games could attract legal attention. No takedown is reported here. For now, Dryxio’s work exists as a technical proof of concept: three old GTA engines running side by side, stitched together by portals that behave less like doors and more like live render targets with attitude.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
