Life in Los Santos can be tough going sometimes. Especially when you’re a deer.
Grand Theft Auto V fan Brent Watanabe had a dream. And that dream was to breathe life — AI-controlled life, but life all the same — into one of the game’s deer, then put a livestreaming camera on it.
It worked. Here is your Grand Theft Auto V “deer cam”:
A few things to know about our friend, the deer. First: He’s invincible. We’ve seen him smacked down by a speeding semi, blown up by multiple tank shells, shot with thousands of bullets and more.
At one point, the deer leapt into the ocean, sank to the bottom and just chilled out there. He can’t swim, and he seemed to get stuck on a rock. Was he trying to end it all? Or just find a quiet place where he could ponder his own existence?
You might have already picked up on this, but the deer isn’t controlled by an actual person. Watanabe is using a mod in which the deer is programmed to “play itself.” So what you’re seeing is the mind of a machine existing in the mind of a deer.
“The deer activity is primarily based on what I believe is standard NPC AI,” Watanabe told Mashable. “I’m calling general functions that are available to a pedestrian, but then attempting to override occasionally so they don’t always follow what seems to be predetermined NPC paths.
“Since I’m working through the Script Hook V library,” — Script Hook V is GTA V modding software — “I’m not sure what’s happening deeper in the code, but that’s my guess.”
The action seems to reset every so often, teleporting the deer to different parts of Grand Theft Auto V‘s vast open world. There’s always some initial wonkiness with these scene changes, but they do a lot to keep buggy behaviors from becoming the norm.
Watanabe created the deer as an art project.
“I’ve been working on computer controlled installations for over 10 years, and they all incorporate animals and man-made environments. Up until now I’ve created all of the characters and code that drives the installations, but I got fixated on working in GTA V simply because it’s such a beautiful, vast environment.
“It’s like having access to a 65 million dollar playground! The deer cam is not that different than another project I did years ago, where I built a video game engine and set a duck loose in a computer generated city.”
This deer might not be real, and it might be controlled by a computer brain. But it wants to live. And it does so very well.
With additional reporting by Max Knoblauch.
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