Large outdoor urban environments crowded with people and vehicles are difficult to accurately simulate in video games. A huge number of moving parts are needed to make a scene believable, but the greater the number of moving parts, the greater the likelihood that something will go very wrong somewhere.

Take-Two Interactive's new patent application, with the prosaic title "System and Method for Virtual Navigation in a Gaming Environment," offers a glimpse of what may be the first big step toward changing all that.

The article begins with a breakdown of how navigation in gaming environments currently works, with pre-programmed instructions for pathfinding along linked nodes, and then describes the limitations of these systems and the many ways they may not work describes: for example, vehicles programmed for "wandering behavior" may not take into account external factors such as traffic conditions or weather.

"Given the foregoing, there is a need for improved systems for virtual navigation to overcome the aforementioned obstacles and deficiencies of traditional video game systems," the application states. I see.

The new process described in the patent application is interspersed with long, tedious, doze-inducing flowcharts, but its central gist is that offloading the bulk of the virtual navigation work to the cloud can dramatically improve large life simulations:

"The system comprises a server that manages virtual navigation of one or more non-player characters and one or more player consoles; said server generates a coarse graph of low-level nodes and associated links and of at least one of the low-level nodes and the coarse graph to perform path finding from the start node to the target node; the path finding in the coarse graph reduces the number of low-level node loads required by the one or more player consoles to generate the path from the start node to the target node. "As I said

, this is dry stuff, but assuming it works as intended, the technical details are less important than the practical application. But even the best games sometimes stumble visibly. It may not be as dire as the streets of "Night City," but it is enough to remind players that they are indeed in a video game. If Take-Two has really figured out a superior way to manage such a system, it could have a major impact on the biggest city simulator: Grand Theft Auto

The patent application makes no specific mention of GTA (or any other game, really), Grand Theft Auto 6 has not even been officially announced yet. However, Grand Theft Auto 5 is already seven years old (although the PC version is five years old), and despite Rockstar's commitment to porting it to the latest generation of consoles, there is no reason why a new game should not appear. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but this patent filing could be taken to mean that it's still years away, but it could make a big difference in what we can expect from a large outdoor environment, no matter when it appears.

Thanks, IGN.