GamesRadar held an exclusive Question and Answer meeting with the lead Rockstar North Audio team. They interviewed Matthew Smith, Craig Conner, and Will Morton all senior members of the team.

• "...every sound in the game has its own filter, so it can appear muffled, and a unique amount and size of reverb - so a car horn coming from a tunnel 100m away sounds very different to a car horn right next to the player, instead of just being quieter as it might have been previously."
• "Stand in the street and you’ll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc."
• "...you hardly ever need to fake anything – the world’s so rich and so busy, that if you make individual things sound right, the whole ambience pretty much just appears by itself. But we do also have a system of ambient sources to make the more distant city feel alive - what makes the two fit together so well is that they use exactly the same sounds, with exactly the same environmental effects, so it’s very hard to tell which is which."
• "It was our aim that you could place the player in a random position on the map, shut your eyes and listen, and be able to tell where you are, and what time of day it is, and I think we’ve achieved that pretty well."
• "We have around four-and-a-half thousand individual sfx in the game, which are combined into around 19 thousand different combinations. That’s ignoring the insane amount of dialogue, cutscenes and radio content. Rain sounds alone take up around a third of the entire audio budget for San Andreas!"
• "In the case of the peds, each character is given a back-story, his or her behaviors are sorted out, and then using this information a script is written. This can be anything from 20 lines of dialogue (for peds who are used only in very specific situations) up to 300 lines. An average ped will have about 200 lines of dialogue. While the script is being written, actors are cast and studio time is booked...Sometimes new features will be put into the game which will mean that peds who have already been recorded need more speech to deal with them. The peds continue to grow and evolve until the game is finished."
• "...at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Niko’s lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures don’t take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration."
• "The pedestrian AI is much more complex in GTA4 than it has been in previous games, and we have to create dialogue to cope with this - peds now do a lot more than they could do previously, and can react in more ways to what happens in the game. We also decided to make the pedestrian dialogue more realistic in GTA4... In real life, people (generally!) don’t go around talking to themselves, so we dropped this behavior from GTA4. However, we realized that the random chat of old GTA games was a good way for the player to pick-up on what sort of personality a ped has, so we created the cell-phone conversations in GTA4 as one realistic way of portraying personality."
• "The DJS have far more AI than previous titles. They know what time of day it is, what the weather is like and what’s going on in LC. They've even done their research on their playlists, some of their own tracks appears on them. In fact all the DJS are either famous singers or musicians (or both.) They have plenty to say about their chosen genre of music as they've lived it, loved it, or are living it."
• "Weasel News brings news to a whole new level. The broadcasts offer plenty of info on LC with up to date interactive bulletins of what is happening throughout the story."
  
  

I personally can't wait to really feel like I'm in the big city because of the sounds they have put into this game. If you personally don't feel like reading the three page article, there are a few new screenshots to look at! Thanks to GTA4.net for the news! Link: Grand Theft Auto IV: Audio Q&A

Lazlow, the host of many different radio shows throughout the GTA series, was live on the radio this morning on the Opie and Anthony Show. Lazlow revealed several new tidbits about the game.

• Lazlow prefers the Xbox 360 version of the game mostly because of the exclusive downloadable content that will begin in August: new missions, characters, comedy, etc.
• Depending on where Niko gets shot depends on how he will react to it. If Niko gets shot in the leg, he will bleed from the leg and begin to limp.
• There are over 100 radio commercials.
• You can date girls you've met on dating websites.

A full download of the show should be available later tonight.

The TV commercial with brand new footage that has been popping up all over Europe, and now all over the world via-internet has got gamers pumped for the big release. Rockstar just sent out four still frame screenshots from the commercial.

Thanks to GTAGaming for the shots and for the news!

Gaming blog PlayThree has the latest details from a special edition copy of CVG magazine that is only dedicated to Grand Theft Auto. In the magazine is an article concerning the downloadable content for the Xbox 360 coming late this Summer. It claims that the downloadable content is most likely a brand new city.

"...GTA IV is set to completely redefine the idea with expansions that are to GTA IV what Vice City or San Andreas were to GTA III. Yes, Rockstar is clearly hinting at new downloadable cities; and chances of them being London, Vice City or SA again are slim to none."

A huge thanks to PlanetGTA and whoever told them about the link (there is a list of four people and I'm not sure which one told them about this link)! An even bigger thanks to PlayThree for the details from CVG!

Currently I have found 5 websites that received brand new, exclusive screenshots, exclusive to each site.  Planet Grand Theft Auto, GTA4.net, GTA4.tv, GTAGaming, and GTA-Series.com all have these shots.  I am not sure if our site received one (because they would have sent it to Rullon), so check back later!

(Sorry, I couldn’t get GTA4.TV’s image to work, you will just have to go to their site and see it)

By far my favorite screenshot comes from GTAGaming.  I am a police and firefighter junkie and that picture gets me SO excited!  In the picture there are six marked LCPD cop cars, which appear to be Rockstar’s version of the Chevy Impala.  We then see three unmarked law enforcement vehicles, most likely the FBI, because if you look at the men standing near them, they are in nice dress clothes rather than an LCPD uniform. 

These unmarked vehicles appear to be Rockstar’s version of the Dodge Charger.  They have flashing red and white lights in the rear window and the front grill of the cars.  Among the group is my favorite law enforcement vehicle that we have seen so far, Rockstar’s version of the Hummer, the “Patriot.”  As of what law enforcement agency (probably LCPD or the FBI) runs out of that vehicle in the game, I am not sure.  We then see my favorite part of that picture!  The very detailed and very realistic (I am very impressed with Rockstar compared to previous games) ambulance.  If you look to the top center of the screen there is a Ford (Powerstroke most likely) ambulance at the top of the screen with it’s doors open and lights flashing.  If I am correct, this is the first time we have seen the ambulance for GTA IV. 

Thanks to the five fan sites and Rockstar Games for the awesome images!

UPDATE: GTA4.net has found four more exclusive screenshots (thanks you guys).  They are from fan sites TheGTAPlace, GTASite.pl, GTANetwork.it, and GTAWarehouse

Once again, very cool screenshots.  Thanks to GTA4.net for letting us know of those four new sites, thanks to the four fansites and thanks to Rockstar for the pictures.  If even more appear today, I will be sure to update you on it!

A special Grand Theft Auto IV edtion of the PlayStation 3 is supposedly to be launched come release day of the game.  It is a 40GB system packaged with a copy of GTA IV.  Swedish website webhallen.com broke the details and now has it listed on their site.

Thanks to PlanetGTA and Matt Garforth for the news!

Rockstar Games and GameStop have teamed together to create a video to advertise the Pre-Order of the Special Edition of Grand Theft Auto IV. This is a minute long video featuring the narration of Liberty City celebrity Jeremy St. Ives.

Trailer Links:

UPDATE #2: We now have the trailer on our "GTA 4 Video Page". Check it out. We will try and get a better version soon.

What we Know from the trailer: (Check back to updates)