Game developer Adrian has been diligently addressing game bugs in his spare time, consistently releasing fixes for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas) and various other titles to ensure they run smoothly on modern computers. Recently, a particular issue came to light involving the missing Skimmer seaplane in GTA: San Andreas following an update to Windows 11 24H2. This concern was raised by GitHub user hiddenmask58 just four days ago, who noted that both the modded and vanilla versions of the game, including those with SilentPatch, were affected.
Swift Resolution
Fortunately, Adrian quickly became aware of the problem and managed to devise a fix within a mere 24 hours, sharing his insights on Silent’s Blog. His investigation revealed that the root cause lay in the vehicles.ide configuration file, where the line for the Skimmer was missing its final four parameters, which are crucial for defining the front and rear wheel scale. Intriguingly, this oversight has persisted since the game’s original launch, remaining undetected for nearly two decades due to how Windows previously loaded the information.
In earlier versions, specifically Windows 11 23H2, the wheel scale for the vehicle above the Skimmer in the vehicles.ide file was set to 0.7. However, the recent changes in Windows 11 24H2 regarding memory handling exposed this issue. Instead of utilizing the parameters from the previous vehicle, the system adjusted the stack pointer by four bytes, resulting in an inflated value for the wheel scale. Consequently, the Skimmer became too large for the game to render, rendering it invisible in unpatched versions of the game on Windows 11 24H2.
For those curious, if you were to forcibly place CJ in the cockpit of the seaplane without addressing the bug, you would find him soaring at an astonishing altitude of 1.087 quadrillion light-years, transforming him into an unlikely spaceman.
How to Fix the Issue
If you’re eager to enjoy GTA: San Andreas on your newly updated Windows PC, you can manually rectify the issue by navigating to your game’s install directory. Locate the datavehicles.ide file, open it in Notepad, and find the line for the Skimmer (460). To resolve the problem, simply append -1, 0.7, 0.7, -1 to the end of that line and save the changes. Alternatively, you may opt to wait for SilentPatch to release a Hotfix on GitHub, which will address this and other in-game bugs.
With these adjustments, you’ll soon be back in the cockpit of the Skimmer seaplane, ready to continue your adventures in your 50th re-run of GTA: San Andreas.