Grand Theft Auto 4 PC Patch Improves Shadows, Removes Social Club App

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Coinciding with the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV's downloadable content 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' and 'The Lost and Damned' on PC today, Rockstar has released a new patch for the open-world murder simulator available in a 104MB download on FileShack.

The patch brings better-looking shadows as well as performance optimisations and bug fixes, and finally removes the need to run that irksome Rockstar Games Social Club application before you can play the game. The full changelog follows below.

GTA IV Title Update 1.0.6.0 \ 1.0.5.1 \ 1.0.4.2 (Patch 6)
  • Rockstar Games Social Club
    • Remove Rockstar Games Social Club application
    • Separate RGSC application no longer required to launch game
    • Social Club login now occurs during the launch process
  • Shadows
    • A new, less memory-intensive, and better-looking scalable shadow solution has been implemented
    • Enhanced Night Shadows added with user-selectable level of detail (replaces Shadow Density)
  • Performance
    • Rendering optimizations have been made to improve performance, particularly when enabling shadows
    • User-configurable graphics settings have been added for shadow control
    • Improved memory management
  • Multiplayer
    • Enhanced security to isolate users from cheaters and hackers
  • Episodic Content
    • Provide in-game support to purchase "The Lost and Damned" and "The Ballad of Gay Tony" (Not available in Russian/Japanese Versions)
  • Bug Fixes
    • Vehicle shadows re-enabled between 8pm and 6am
    • Fix floating street textures
    • Pedestrians in vehicles appear further out from the player to allow for long range sniping
    • The Moon has been implemented with simulated lunar phases
    • Fixed garbled text in Japanese Multiplayer menus
    • "RESC 10" error fix for specific hardware configurations

Thanks to 'Pulverdings' for the tip.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 13, 2010 11:06 AM

    "Pedestrians in vehicles appear further out from the player to allow for long range sniping" What exactly does this mean?

    • reply
      April 13, 2010 11:14 AM

      You would see empty cars driving when using the sniper rifle a few blocks down.

    • reply
      April 13, 2010 11:15 AM

      They random people driving cars probably used to disappear before the car did for LOD / performance reasons, or they just forgot to increase that when the increased the draw distance for other things.

    • reply
      April 13, 2010 11:17 AM

      The AI driver/passenger of a car has a longer clip distance before they disappear, so you can snipe them from a longer distance. I remember this annoying me on the 360.

    • reply
      April 13, 2010 11:20 AM

      ANSWER OVERKILL'D

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