By now everyone should be well aware that Grand Theft Auto V has been leaked for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, right? Well you should also know that most crackers don't just dump and upload a game, they fiddle with the code, they play with the file structures and ultimately they open the game up to see what's inside. Do you guys want to know what they found inside?
When modding games on consoles it's sometimes fun to see how a game is structured. For a lot of newer games, though, the files are heavily encoded and unless you have the source files it's tough to mod console games or take a peek inside their inner workings. However, with a lot of patience and a little bit of torrenting, the sewage of the internet managed to cook up some interesting results... I'm talking about the folk over at 4Chan.
A cross-post on Reddit links to an alleged Pastebin file containing an XML of the config file for the Xbox 360 version of GTA. Just in case Rockstar has Take Two put their lackey lawyers on the link, here's an image of the XML.
Of course, there's the obvious skeptical take that we have to address first and foremost: Could someone have wasted their time to type out nearly 2,000 lines of code and paste it online and say it's from the Xbox 360 version? Yes, very much so. However, I'm here to tell you from personal experience, it's easier to have copied the contents of the file from the leaked torrent and uploaded it online than to re-type it.
For those of you wondering why build code for the PC, PS3 and PS4 would be in an Xbox 360 config file, a few other games also had similar config files in their SDK with multiple configurations for different platforms, including Borderlands, Unreal Tournament 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront 2 just to name a few. Heck, there are even PS3 and Xbox 360 configuration settings for APB: Reloaded if you bother to look through the data folders.
To better explain this for newbies: Most developers build games around a general code base and configure the game's specifications per platform within an single config file, as opposed to building new code or separate config files for each and every platform. The only time the code will drastically changed is when a mobile or portable port is involved.