Modders are fixing GTA Trilogy's rain already

A mod that makes rain more transparent in San Andreas — (Image credit: GTATrilogyMods)

One of the many messed-up things players have noticed about Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition is the rain. It falls in thick, vision-obscuring white lines—unless it's over the water, in which case it suddenly vanishes. It's as if rain goes behind the ocean. Even if it weren't for that, those ropy strands don't do as much for the atmosphere as a rainy night did in the originals.

Modders are already working on improving the rain, beginning by making it more transparent. GTATrilogyMods has a fix on Patreon, with version 1.1 free to download though you'll need to subscribe for early access to version 1.2. On the GTA Forums iNSANE666 has mods for better rain in GTA 3, as well as busted, wasted, and menu screens, which will be arriving on Nexus Mods once its page for the trilogy goes live. In the meantime, you can download the lot as a zip file. And on Brazilian site mixmods, Jessica Natália has uploaded a mod that makes rain more transparent in all three games.

While it's quite spread out at the moment, the trilogy's modding scene is already hard at work on multiple projects. There's a full radio restoration aiming to bring back the removed songs, which has currently got as far as Vice City's Flash FM, a tweak to get rid of the white outlines around targeted pedestrians, and one that fixes Grove Street gang members having an outline of the number 7 on their jerseys when they're wearing number 3, 5, or 9.

As I'm writing this, the GTA Trilogy has only just become available after being offline for two days. Who knows what modders will be able to achieve now the game's actually playable again?

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.