Kick off lounge season with MeUndies and get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping, at MeUndies.com/anyaustin enter promo code anyaustin. Also here’s a link to the reddit post with the map: www.reddit.com/r/chiliadmystery/comments/3g2qkx/map_of_the_power_grid_and_power_theory/ Big thanks to GRADY from PRACTICAL ENGINEERING. If he leaves a comment down below please give it many thumbs up. What other games should I look at the electrical infrastructure in?
It'd be really fun to see how the Just Cause games handle their electricity. Specifically Just Cause 2 or 3. I'm not sure if the first game has any lol
I mean, the first SimCity had no concept of plumbing at all - supply or waste - and IIRC its power "infrastructure" required that you drop a power plant somewhere, then pave at least one lane of roadway between it and the rest of your structures. Full stop. By SimCity 2000, you could already run power lines and lay out a whole underground water system beneath your city. The Simulation™ evolves at speeds that makes Conway's Game of Life seem lethargic.
Despite having dedicated most of the past decade to this game, I still thought “I didn’t know that” or “I haven’t seen that before” like a dozen times while watching this videos. Kudos, great video.
Transmission Line engineer here - there are definitely cases when a transmission structure would dead-end, but it’s normally to take the line from above ground to underground. Also those upper two wires are static wires, used for protection from lighting strikes
Same credentials here: it’s exceedingly rare to run transmission lines underground because of how expensive and problematic it can be, due to the voltage of the lines. Also, static wires aren’t necessary to prevent damage from lightning strikes, as that’s what the surge arrestors are for. The arrestors can be placed anywhere on the line, even miles down from a strike, and they’ll still do just as good of a job of protecting the lines from a surge.
I love the idea that there may be one person at Rockstar right now, spending their workdays passive aggressively making THE MOST accurate digital representation of a substation for GTA VI in response to these videos.
Judging by the gta 6 trailer they have a pretty accurate fiber/coax system that runs under the power poles as well, and if they are really putting in the detail, all of those cables should lead to an internet company
Across the vast, cerulean field A web of silver lines revealed Like veins of a celestial frame A network spun, a whispered name... (Whispered): "Any Austin"
Mechanical engineer here. The pipe work at @18:55 made me laugh out loud. I love how that single split case pump is totally rawdogging the elements with no shelter, whilst feeding three different lines. Head losses be darned! What a chad pump. I would 100% be interested in a piping video, but you'd probably just arrive at the same conclusions about the details being "close enough" for immersion. Great video though, subscribed!
If you go to sone of the parking garages that are in the city, you will see that some of the piping actually makes sense, it’s well put together, for a developer with no idea on how fire sprinklers systems, plumbing and mechanical piping works, it’s pretty darn good! There’s no need for R* games to work on all that, but they did it anyway and it’s pretty good.
The only option i could see is the pump is working in reverse and pumping the fluid out and not in. Which would make sense given its routed downward and the pipe constrictions but the headloss on the pump would be insane either way. It’s kinda a mind boggling system there they made.
The Saugus steel plant in Fallout 4 is the same thing. If you go to the roof you will see lots of the parts of a steel plant, but they aren't hooked together right. It's not fantasy - they obviously looked at pictures of real steel plants. But they have no understanding of how it works.
I'm a lineman in Europe so maybe not directly applicable for the setting in GTA but still. You actually aren't allowed to directly connect a transmission line directly to a substation, so it's actually quite realistic for a continetal transmission line to pass right over a city substation and where I live there are a couple of examples of exactly that happening. Its because there are multiple levels to the power grid and you can't just run wires between levels. A transcontinental powerline, usually 360KV+, which would be LVL1, can only connect to a LVL2 feed in. From the feed in you can then connect to the intercity highvoltage powerlines, typically 36-5KV which are LVL3. From LVL3 you would typically go to LVL5 in the form of a polemounted transformer or a standalone transformer that converts the intercity high voltage to a houshold voltage 230/120V. There is also LVL4 reserved for smaller powerplants that feed directly into the city grid. As said before you can't just wire between those levels, you can't just run an extension cord from your power plant next door to your Christmas lights because it's in a different level (even though it's technically verry doable). Similarly you can't just connect a substation to an intercontinental transmission line (even though it's also technically possible by using some extra transformers). There are designated ways to route power between levels because each level has very different safety and reliability concerns. A standard GFCI wouldn't work on 360KV, and resonant frequency detection wouldn't work at 230V. P.S. a couple details I noticed in the video: The substation powerlines swing way too much and would quickly get too close and short in the wind. Yes, you can split transcontinental transmission lines but it's frowned upon and the national grid companies almost never let it happen. Its not a bushing its an insulator. The plumpbobs are called eggs and are there to insulate the guywires so if they get energized they don't shock you when you touch them on the ground. The "substation " at 9:40 could be a feed in, but its a bit small and feeds directly into the LVL3 city grid and I'm just not going to go into the details about the substation itself because I'd be here all day. lets just say Grady was WAY to generous. 22:05 Those wires are way to low. Anyway love the vid.
Yeah this doesnt seem to apply to America, at least where I live in Kansas, because I have a substation right up the road from where I live that connects directly to a transmission tower chain via wires. I even double checked on Google Earth to be sure I wasnt mis-remembering. Now you got me interested in the ways that different countries manage their power grids
@@FartingSpider12 Completely unknowledgeable about electrical engineering but I'd imagine it would have something to do with the different power standards across regions? Europe has a completely different standard than america, and I would assume with that comes different rules for how power is allowed to be transferred.
I worked on Far Cry 6 and spent a long time working on the electrical grid doing this exact thing - its pretty surreal seeing someone go this deep on something that we spend so much time on thag usually gets ingored!
@@czardaster3261 Unfortunately, sponsored video, so the pinned comment automatically goes to the content creator posting about their sponsor, presumably by contractual obligation.
just wanted to say thank you for adding subtitles to your video ! a lot of people just leave it to the auto closed captions and those often get things wrong so i always love it when people go the extra mile to add proper captions . thank you for your videos , they’re super entertaining and awesome to have on
@@any_austin Well thanks to Lawrence, but I have to say after seeing this comment I checked it out, was nicely surprised you have german subtitles as well (I'm german if it's not obvious by now) and saw they were off by about two minutes into the future. Just wanted to let you know. Confused me a bit too making me think they didn't match at all, but they were subbing a part you would only mention about two minutes later. Subs at 18:00 correspond to video at 20:00 and so. Not a major problem, especially to me since I don't make use of subs much especially in german (if I use subs I use the english ones), but wanted to let you know that it is happening. I also guess it wouldn't be much of a problem in general but it also makes the subtitles appear and disappear very quickly so one might not be able to read them in whole. Anyways keep up your goddamn superior videos, I really enjoy them and am looking forward to your future work
It's more like a cockney fellow from England going like "core blimey gov'nor, Where's me undies?" Scots don't say such things. Had to clear that up. Thanks
Alright you're right in my wheel-house, since I design transmission lines for work. Here's some answers/responses I noted along the way: Yes, you can have a transmission structure that "splits" in a few different directions. This is called a Tap Structure and is usually used as a junction between multiple circuits. No additional equipment is needed necessarily because these lines are all the same voltage, but often times there will be some sort of switching on the structures or down line so that individual circuits can be isolated and outaged (turned off) for maintenance or repairs while keeping the rest energized. Among the many things a Sub does, like changing voltage, is switching, which is basically connecting and disconnecting certain circuits. No, transmission lines do not just "stop". If they end, its because that line is probably not energized for some reason (being taken down or being put up). Otherwise, it's probably a riser (point where it goes from above ground to underground) and you just can't see the wires taking power underground. No, those are not guy wires, but that's a good guess. Those are "Shield Wires" which shield the below circuits from lightning strikes. These are grounded and give lightning a path to ground, which is usually the structure itself, rather than the high voltage conductors. Guy wires, as you correctly stated, are used to support a structure in a certain direction - not very common on steel structures since these are designed to handle the necessary loads from the beginning. Guying is much more common in wood transmission poles or most distribution poles with deadends (point where a wire ends and the structure is supporting horizontal loads not just the weight of the wire as it does on "tangent" structure) or angles. Those wires that come off a pole into the ground and have the big orange thing around them that you were scared to touch as a kid? Yeah, those are guy wires (and if installed correctly will never be energized ever). You can guy between structures as well, so it's not completely impossible that something like that would be used for guying, but in this case those are certainly shield wires since they are attached at the shield wire attachment points on that structure. In Transmission and Distribution, we call them "insulators" not bushings. There are uses for bushings in some substation and a few distribution circumstances but almost never do they use "bushings" instead of "insulators" in transmission. Insulators insulate things from the electricity, bushings aren't necessarily used for insulating electrical pathways, and are more for "passing through" a conductor without touching anything. Yes, you can have multiple transmission lines that close together, you just have to meet certain clearance requirements established by the NESC (National Electrical Safety Code). In fact, many shown in this video are already double-circuit structures. Circuits are almost always 3 phase-conductors and a shield or two. You can see many instances here that there's 6 conductors, so those are double circuit lines. Yes, there are many reasons to just have one wire on a pole. It happens all the time in rural areas where they need to service a few homes and there's no real reason to bring higher voltage 3 phase circuits that way instead of just the single residential primary wire. These days its more economical to just run the 3 phases but in older times or in rural areas it's very common.
I mean, sure enough you can technically build a "blind" powerline, that just stops. It's just that there's literally no reason to do this, and it would probably be the most hilarious and simultaneously stupidest way to waste money, but it certainly would be doable. Or, y'know, you pull a German on the company building the line: find some endangered specimen (that THEY didn't find while filing the initial permit) and, consequently, force the company halfway through the building process by court order to stop building the power line, to save the creatures' habitat.
15:04 Gamedev here! Those wires doesn't simulate physics, they use a really CPU efficient method called vertex animation or point level animation. The 3D model of the wires are actually motionless and still between the poles, but their shaders\textures are offseted by time so they look animated. Foliage like grass and trees almost always using this technique, and if you see flyers on the wall or curtains animated like this means that the devs cared a lot. My theory is: In world position on the X,Y,Z axis, the linguini wires are probably close to a point where the time based vertex offset has a slight stroke. They probably noticed this too far in development that it was not worth going for a local position for the axis.
Can you explain further what you mean by "their shaders/textures are offset by time" not being an animation? Isn't that just another way of saying "animation"?
@@C.I... Vertex animation has almost no CPU involvement. GPU calculates the vertex position so it's cheap for "mass produced - samey" stuff like grass, cables, trees and even water waves. The 3D modes just looks like its moving, but its faked so the object can be static, thus more performance. 3D objects are made from polygons, and polygons are made from vertices. Each vertex of a polygon has multiple uv coordinates, color, position, tangent, bitangent, normal, bump, and so on so on. Most of these are unnecessary to transfer every frame inbetween CPU and GPU, and regular skeletal animation does exactly that. Edit: I'm just realizing how complex this stuff is. Look at the grass in Unreal games like: Silent Hill 2 Remake, Until Dawn, Hellblade, God Of War, The Callisto Protocol, Little Hope, Man Of Medan, etc. The grass models will be different ofc, but ALL of them is animated completely the same way, cause devs doesn't seem to care to change the default one for some reason.
@@Inferryu Probably have one Prop called "Electricity wire" and a Script which says "If Electricity Pole >50feet away, conect to it" And that's how the greed was created 😂
I love these videos. Every once in a while I see someone going like "Who cares if the power lines connect? It's just a video game." in response, but what you are doing is taking video games that you know *succeeded* in creating the feeling of a living world and then taking an analytical eye to them to see how much and how little they needed to do to give the player the intended impression. The comparison to the set of a play is appropriate.
The mischaracterization there is in framing it as "who _cares_ if/how the power lines connect?" It's not that anyone really **cares** - it's possible to be _curious_ or _interested_ in these details, without "caring" about it or (as Austin said early in the video) having it affect your opinion of the game in any way. And, very crucially, _not_ everyone *will* be remotely curious or interested about that. It's perfectly fine _not_ to be. But there are also a lot of us who _are_ curious/interested, because we're giant nerds who find endless fascination in pointless minutiae.
if we were not supposed to care about the power lines, they would not be in the game "why do you care if there's only 2 rocks copy pasted everywhere? its just a video game, thats why the clouds are black and static" - proper reducto ad absurdum
As an electrical engineer specialized in transmission and distribution I found this amazingly funny. it's like Grady said, it's the Lorem Ipsum of electrical system. Clearly it was made by someone who does not know how a system really works, but made it look like the real thing to make to convey the desired effect in game. It would be really amazing if they made a in game simulation to real life where if some character provoked a short-circuit or cut a cable would cause a local or wide area blackout, depending on the place of the cause. That would be amazing (and a resource hog in the game!). P.S.: In power plants like depicted in the game, the cables connecting the generators to the transformers would be underground. Substations have these gutters in the floor, concrete gutters, that take control cables, measurement cables to the control room and back, and there are other specialized gutters that take the high-voltage cables from the generators to the transformers. I don't know if you can see them in game, but in real life photos they can be seen on the floor, covered with concrete lids, in the typical white or gray color.
as an electrical engineer who does a lot of work with specifically transmission lines, distro lines, and substations (and more commonly, renewable power plants) this video warms my heart. Just amazing stuff.
Hi! I'm actually a Transmission Engineer. I'm kinda giddy to hear someone talk about my job 😊 Fun Fact: At 8:04 those 2 wires on the very top of the tower are actually called "Shield Wires" and protect the sets of 3 energized wires (that are usually attached below) from lightning strikes that could interfere with equipment on the line, or at the substations. Now those same wires are used to support bundles of fiber optic cable. Not in the photo you showed, but in other cases.
It’s also interesting that most of the Utility poles have no Neutral wire that is attached typically below the primary energized wires. It’s kinda funny that the game did have pretty good looking cutouts on the downed pole 16:26 which I didn’t see anywhere else.
@micahvandam9658 well I'm not sure if it's intentional or not but if the game is based on California. Then it works because most of California uses an ungrounded Wye overhead distribution system with no neutral.
@ okay, I didn’t know that, that makes sense then. Delta is the one without an overhead neutral. But id understand if they have more underground in California.
These videos make me so happy because it's just made for pure curiosity and admiration of small insignificant details in game world building. The fact that there is even a collab just to explain the intricacies of substations and transmission lines is amazing. There is so much I don't know but listening to people talk about their expertise and see people try to research about it for accuracy is so... well... charming!!!
7:40 What would happen if you created a dead end transmission tower: You'd waste a bunch of money building a tower that does nothing. Otherwise, you could totally do it, physically and engineering-ly. It would just be pointless
Would it cause problems with the line though and its earlier connections? Does a dead end line without dispersing the power anywhere at the end there cause a short that affects the rest of the line?
@Silverizael i am not an electrical engineer but my understanding is no, not really. Its basically a scaled up version of a power outlet with nothing plugged in. Power has nowhere to go so it doesn't flow there and it acts not like a short but rather like a broken circuit
The biggest problem would be that the tower would be very unstable, and would probably collapse. The truss structure of those towers are designed to be very strong when there is only downward force. Then cables are attached normally (cables on both sides), there is only a downward force since any lateral forces are canceled out by the opposite side. If there is only one side of cables attached, there is nothing to cancel it out. This could corrected if guy wires were attached to the tower opposite the transmission lines to provide the required counteracting forces.
Man im so fkn proud of you Austin, you are absolutely hilarious and i love your dry, weird ass jokes and humor. Your editing is peak comedy. Been here since 2012 watching Twilight Princess eggbusters. I'm proud of you, you're awesome
Hey Austin, I really appreciate your videos and specifically your videos on the power grid. I work as a power systems engineer in the U.S. planning and designing the power grid, so here are some thoughts/”insights” on some topics in the video: • You can have multiple transmission lines/circuits on a single structure. They can be the same voltage or different voltages. It’s common to have higher transmission voltage on top (i.e. 230 kV, 345 kV, 500 kV) and a lower transmission (69 - 138 kV) or even distribution voltage (below 69 kV) lower on the structure. • The way the wires swing in the wind in the game would be completely unacceptable in real life as faults/short circuits could occur from the wire to wire (phase to phase) contact. My guess is that they probably violate some sort of IEEE/ANSI/NEC/NESC standard. • Depending on the voltage, a transmission line may not connect directly to a specific substation. Sometimes you have to go to a “T to T” station to convert from a really high transmission voltage to a lower transmission voltage, and then that might go to a “T to D” station where the voltage is dropped to a medium or low voltage level. These voltages vary all over the U.S., with the highest being 765 kV (but there is no 765 kV on the western part of the U.S. as far as I know, it’s all in PJM near Ohio and Indiana). There is also underground transmission so the "non-connected" substation could have underground circuits coming from somewhere, though, they are not depicted in the game. • You may have a transmission line just end if the line is a radial line. This can happen for a variety of reasons but it is not the case for a majority of lines which are networked together. • What you are calling “bushings” are actually insulators on the transmission line. The pictures of the high voltage circuit breakers and transformers do have bushings, but the wavey/ridgey part is an insulator which (hopefully) keeps electricity from traveling to metal parts it isn’t supposed to touch. • What you are calling “guy wires” on the top of the transmission lines are actually called “shield wires”. They do what you might think - shield the line from lightning. They can be just steel wire or steel-supported fiber optic cables for communication. Guy wires are attached to the sides of poles to provide tension to keep the poles upright. • As Grady mentions, the wiring/connections in the substation is extremely problematic (no insulators or surge arrestors for transmission lines to connect to the substation deadend structures, no instrument transformers, no disconnect switches, etc…). • “Brown” energy is usually just called fossil energy unless you work at a utility, and then you use the PR-approved “thermal” energy (it is just using some sort of fuel to heat water). • There is a reason you would have “one wire” on a pole - sometimes a feeder does not have a lot of connections and therefore you just need one phase to serve all of the load. This is more common in rural areas. • Every power plant connects to the grid a little differently. Generally, the power is generated at a relatively low voltage (say 4.8 kV) and it’s then stepped up to a medium voltage (say 34.5 kV). This may be routed underground or overhead to a transmission substation where the voltage is again transformed to send the power out. • As for the pipe analysis… Just kidding.
another transmission grid engineer here, your comment is amazing! to add onto what you said (for the sake of curious people, i'm sure you already know): Austin asked if a line splitting is realistic. yes, it is! a line split is called a "tap" (at least at my company), and they are decently common. thee one problem with taps is if the transmission line were to have a fault somewhere (like a tree falling on it), the whole line has to be disconnected from all 3 substations. this decreases reliability, as a fault on the tap would take the main line offline. we evaluate the impacts of this scenario happening, and if they're beyond certain thresholds, we put a substation where the tap would come off the main line (no transformers, just circuit breakers). that way, a fault on the tap or on either half of the main line won't take out all 3 terminals of the line.
Been grinding through your entire post history. Absolutely love your channel and the concept. Recently i was replaying "Need for Speed underground" (2003) and whilst zoominb through the maps, i got thinking about your channel. Suddenly i found myself stopped infront of a small strip mall. The stores were just uninspired graphics displayed just beyond the glass barrier. i was stopped there for a minute and just took in the absolute beauty of the place. The game is littered with those spots, and wothout you, i never wouldve thought to slow down, and take it all in. Thank you Austin.
Slightly different, but I used to do mapmaking for Source Engine games as a hobby. And I always used to wonder how Valve got their game-worlds to look so solid and cohesive and realistic and compelling. So I played through Half Life 2, taking care to examine the architecture to see how it all fit together. And I quickly realised how many janky shortcuts Valve's level artists took. I found so many mis-aligned textures, or big sections of walls or ceilings with extremely plain textures on them, or areas where textures just cut off sharply without any margin or transition. And I realised why the game was like that: because no-one was ever intended or expected to look that closely at the weird bits. They were all off to the sides, or hidden in shadows, or in places where the player was expected to pass through quickly. The game world was only as detailed as it needed to be, to sell the illusion of a realistic place. That's basically the takeaway from all of Any Austin's videos, about the realism of videogames. They're only as real as they need to be.
19:55 the lamp post has a wire going directly into the ground, implying that there is an electrical grid underneath the substation, likely how the power plant and the station would be connected.
I'm a photographer and I've been recently working on a little project with virtual photography in this game with the little in-game phone camera you get. And honestly it's made me look at this game map in a whole different way and made me see things I would never if I was just playing through the missions normally. I love the approach of playing games the 'wrong' way to what the developers intended, like if you play the game as a power infrastructure inspector or a photographer for example. It's still the same world you're used to but you're moving through it differently now. At the risk of sounding pretentious it parallels how photography makes me 'play' life, like all this stuff is there for you to see just as the stuff you are 'supposed' to do is, you just have to stop and look around and see the world through a certain frame or from a certain angle to see it.
the whole 'immersed in the reality of a fictional world vs immersed in it being fictional' idea is really beautiful and ive never really thought about it that way thank you mr any
It's always a magical moment on RUclips when you think "I bet this other creator would have some valuable input here", and lo and behold, that other creator actually does show up to give valued input.
As a powerline technician I have to say that there was a significant effort put forward to make that second substation and all of its cables and connections look as real as possible
It’s also very possible that the output of a station could be 2400 volts, but in the station you would almost always warn for the highest voltage in proximity which is magnitudes higher.
@@bigboss3888 There is no way that the voltage out of a substation is 2400 volts or 2.4 kV. Primary voltage is at the magnitude of 10 KV. The substation voltage entering is even higher.
I have a very vivid memory of my dad freaking out when I flew a helicopter through some power lines in GTA5. To me it made perfect sense that they didn’t have any collision, but to him it looked like imminent danger. I wonder if GTA6 will have power lines collision, I think that could be cool.
Would be interesting to see. The cables could get caught in the rotors and turn the helicopter into a live wire death trap. Jets barnstorming the city could get their fins and wings sheared by cables. It would likely be a lot of work, but I would love to see it too.
@@sintanan469 And be veery intense on a graphical processor. It's a lot of physics to implement and process. So much to calculate. Every pixel of the line being processed with equations to make the overall effect realistic. You could have the line in tiny chunks with each being processed but then the effect would not be realistic. Some things like that sound nice, but the practicality of it and purpose is lost. That is hundreds of programming hours requiring near super-computer levels all for a single effect that most players would try once, go "That's cool" and move on from. It's better to not worry about it lol. For the gamer and for the programmer haha
@SphynxsShadow You could cheat things by using a vector offset to skew the wires to simulate movement and have a static hit box approximate the average center of the cable. From there you just detect when the vehicle collides with the hitbox and apply some canned damage or animation, substituting models as needed for the wires to make it look like you damaged the power lines. Add some fancy explosions and sparks to hide the shortcuts taken for swapping models and it's not perfect but it is good enough for prototyping. Skewing a vector to simulate movement is far from resource intensive since a N64 console can do that easily. If an N64 can handle it, then a modern GPU should be able to.
@@SammEater Not really. Only the player would ever be there, and they already do player vehicle collision with a very similar noise map based vertex manipulation.... Boats on the ocean. You'd be surprised how mathematically simple it is to check the collision when you're already creating the data for the visuals or run off.
I like how much this channel has taken off. Ive been watching for a long time now and i love how many autists (like me) gather here for our weird niche.
great, another 30 minute video essay on a video game topic that i was never interested in and never will, but will still watch and enjoy the whole thing!
My city (Eugene, OR) has two dead-end high-voltage electrical transmission lines. Both of them used to connect to steam plants--one to the city's central steam plant, and one to the University of Oregon's steam plant. Since the city's steam plant is now nonfunctional, it was disconnected from the electrical grid years ago. However, the transmission lines remained, because it was too expensive to remove them (they stretch over the Willamette River, and a massive crane would be needed on both ends). The University's working steam plant still has a electrical substation, and it may be reconnected to the electrical grid when the Univernity converts the boilers from natural gas to electrical.
@@Addsomehappy might be a general heating boiler? Might be central heating for the whole campus, as a guess. Could make use of lots of electricity that way.
These videos make me want to make games that are stupidly accurate in ways that nobody asked for nor needed, if I can manage to get this dude to not find a single inaccuracy, I would be set.
Fair point. Plus, games that size, if you did the numbers, someone else gets to sculp and again another animate, all that stuff. At least there is that
If you give game devs the time, I think many of them would be all too happy to call in professionals in the industries theyre attempting to simulate to oversee the design; such as calling in electricians and civil engineers to critique and direct things like pipes and the electric grids, geology and contours, etc. Its a beautiful thing to see when it happens, but such coordination is costly, time-intensive, and ramps up the complexity of simple details to astronomical levels.
12:31 Rockstar seems to do this mistake a lot, if you look on the car lift in the Auto Shop there's a sign that says "max 350 kg", it should be 3500 kg. When it comes to vehicles 350 kilos is nothing. For reference 350kg is 771 lbs and 3500 kg is 7 716 lbs.
love u Austin, you've helped me thru the worst months of my life. My life changed forever last june, june 23rd. And i discovered your videos just a few weeks before that. And i always look forward to you dropping some new ish, be safe brother. Keep it up :3
"Hey everyone, I’m the game designer and electrical engineer who worked on the details and design inside GTA V. I was involved in creating the complex wiring systems throughout the city, making sure that everything from streetlights to the electrical infrastructure was designed to function realistically within the game world. It's been an amazing experience combining my passion for both gaming and electrical engineering! While working on the wiring details, I made sure that the connections, circuits, and electrical grids matched the layout of the city, ensuring that power would flow correctly through different areas. Every building, lamp post, and even the streetlights had to be linked to this system, adding to the level of detail and realism in the game. The goal was to make everything feel interconnected, like a real city where the electrical systems truly shape the environment."
@@danielmallory4687 "Hey, thanks for Pointing that out! I get what you’re saying about the electric towers not connecting properly to the substations in GTA V. Honestly, the goal was to make the city look realistic, but I didn’t go too deep into how the power grid actually works since it’s more of a background detail and doesn’t affect gameplay. If I had more time or resources, I’d love to add proper connections and make the substations more functional. I’ll definitely keep this in mind for future improvements-really appreciate you taking the time to point it out!"
The curiosity of Any Austin will keep me clicking the videos every single time. I absolutely ADORE the way every little thing is investigated, just because of curiosity and a desire to know more. Learning about rivers, just cause of Zelda and Morrowind. Learning about wires, cause wire stuff is cool.... It's lovely.
22:01 - Your description here is the first time I've ever heard someone summarize _EXACTLY_ what I enjoy most about wandering around through Souls games like *_Bloodborne_* & *_Elden Ring_* that have this innate exaggerated fantasy realism, especially where the liveable elements of things are in ruins. It's an overt exposure to a weird balance between the videogame & realistic elements that is just uniquely satisfying in its own way to look at the same way as being immersed in the set of a play and where & how those boundaries exist. I've always found the nature of your videos with a focus around an arbitrary detail of various video games super satisfying in a very similar way to when I meander while playing games, and it's really neat to have a way to explain what that inclination is now. Cheers to ya, and all you do!
Rockstar has always put alot of effort into small details for things that dont really matter. Its usually stuff that i think a few devs personally cared about for some reason and just took out the time to add.
Being immersed in the reality of the actual digital space around you is a very underrated piece of gaming. You can pick any game and any spot and spend 10 minutes contemplating all the attributes and decisions that came together to create this piece of the world. Everything in the world is deliberate to a degree, and unwinding that is both satisfying and awe inspiring. Thanks for doing that for us :) P.S. IMO Ready Or Not has some of the best environmental design of all time. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys getting lost in the speculation of a digital space.
14:30 for anyone curious about putting multiple transmission lines next to each other--this is actually pretty common! The reason is because utilities own, or have rights to operate their equipment in, tracts of land called a "right-of-way". If a bunch of trees are being cleared and land is being purchased to make a right-of-way for one line, it often makes sense to just get a bit more land and put multiple lines together. Or a utility is trying to squeeze a new line in to an existing right-of-way, or remove one transmission line to replace with two different ones in the same amount of space, etc. We as engineers have to carefully check the clearances between those parallel lines, and any other utilities which might also be sharing the right-of-way (railroads, distribution lines, pipelines, etc). As a transmission line engineer, this makes me so happy. Nice work shedding light on such an overlooked part of our infrastructure! Other folks in the comments have already touched on pretty much everything I was going to say. It's lovely to see such a community come together over something so seemingly mundane.
Developer here (not game). I think the difference in wires to the substation may also be due to optimization. When you build a world like GTAV, you're likely to suddenly make some places too dense with details. To keep the framerate somewhat consistent, you likely run optimizers across the whole map to find spots where the detail is highest. You might strip away and simplify elements to lessen the load of these areas. These wires, however small their performance impact, may have been removed due to excessive complexity in that area.
I was thinking of it from the perspective of "They modeled this earlier, when they assumed more time, vs the other which is slapped in there to fill space with less time" BUT Your logic makes so much sense; the substation with few wires not connected to the proper grid IS in a valid spot,but its also in the city itself; theres a ton going on around it, so having detail stripped down to save on processing power. Compared to the other one. off the highway in the desert hills with much less surrounding scenery to actively render affording the station significantly more detail, wiring, direct connections, etc.
I’m sure the guy who spent days studying the designs of power lines is shining with happiness that after so long someone is finally obsessing over this minutia as much as they did. You made someone very happy.
I imagine the dirty power plant in GTA5 is a very clean, modern nuclear power plant that has a huge coal burning furnace for no reason. They just shovel coal in there to burn it. Fits the GTA style of satire in my mind.
I hope in GTA6 they have a bunch of solar and wind farms that they advertise but dont have any actual wires going to them and are just for show. Then in the background they’re expanding a coal power plant. Would really fit the california vibe.
Ofcorse the chilliad subreddit had the power grid mapped out, god bless that subreddit. They tried everything to get that damn Jetpack and we were robbed of the joy of discovering it.
You can’t have 1 single live wire. You would need at least 2 wires for a return path (neutral). For safety there should be a third wire (ground/earth) Although the single cable you’re referring to in the picture would have multiple wires inside that one cable.
Transmission Line Engineer here - I just wanted to say that I love these videos. The lines themselves make no sense but it’s still really fun to break it down!
8:19 So I work in telecom and there's a safety rating for how close you can get to the power lines. It's based on the length of the insulators. I believe it's 10 times the length of the insulator, but it may have been less. The insulators are a given length because they have to be longer than the possible arc length for the voltage on those wires, so technically you could get up to as close as the length of the insulators away from the wires, but I don't recommend it. Also the flea market near me has a transmission line running over the edge of it that constantly makes noises that concern me.
I found your channel through the Liberty City power lines video and very glad I did. The biggest feeling of kinship and belonging I felt watching your videos was when I noticed you love observing NPCs going about their day just as much as I do, almost as if I'm negotiating a mental budget with the game for my suspension of disbelief. Then I saw the river videos and I'm convinced receiving validation for one's weird obsession is probably the most gratifying feeling in the world. Please keep doing what you love
Something to note: Electrical bushings have the power lines passing through their centre from one end to the other, allowing them to go into metal-cased equipment without risk of arcing from the lines to the metal case. These are what you see on most of the equipment in the substations. What you call bushings on the transmission towers are in fact insulators, which ensure the power lines are held far enough away from the structure entirely (again, to prevent arcing). Suspension insulators (shown at 8:28 ) have the power lines go in a relatively straight line, only connecting to the tip of a single insulator per tower. The transmission towers shown in-game appear to use tension insulators, where the power line is held between the tips of two insulators, with a U-shaped section of the line hanging between them. However, this extra section of wire does not appear to be present on the towers, meaning they would not actually transfer power past the transmission tower, let alone to the structures they fail to connect to. (Either that, or they did, in fact, dangerously use bushings instead of insulators.)
not gonna lie this video is a fever dream. after the ad bro STILL has the underwear in his hands yet is still so nonchalant about the power grid of 2013s GTAV. incredible
From a gamedev perspective (I know that yall know that but just let me have this) you're setting up a world for the player. But since your budget is limited, you kinda have to know which parts to indulge and which to leave as theatre props. Considering that GTAV's world is massive and REALLY well made, believable, detailed and most importantly huge, I really don't blame Rockstar for not designing a functional electrical grid for Los Santos, this is one of the things that can be, looking "Good enough", where you won't question it as long as you don't go out of your way to nerd out about it... ... And I do love nerding out over game worlds like this don't get me wrong... The more useless the trivia the better
i work in the power line grids in Italy and i just wanted to say that you don't really need equipment to 'split' wires in transmission towers or any other utility pole, think it as a really long pipe that transports water or gas, electricity naturally flows where the potential is lower (or where needed in simple words) Great video! i love when someone puts attention to details in general
I'm genuinely so ecstatic that this video and your channel exist. I *love* honing in on the silly little details and drawing as much out of them as humanly possible, it's part of why I've decided to become a cultural historian in real life. It's always so fascinating to see the human touches in a work like GTA V and for someone else to share in the fascination of the benign.
This video reminded me I had ordered Grady's book three months ago and it hadn't arrived yet. I just checked and it's stuck at some depot. I don't blame Grady for that, I blame the useless postal subcontractor. Hope I get it soon.
I think the wires you point to at 8:35 as 'guy wires' are actually lightning protection. If there's a very narrow wire at the very top of transmission lines or above substations, that's usually lightning protection. Lightning hits these instead of the power lines and gets grounded at the towers, protecting the power grid. Your overall conclusion about the photo is correct, there's no power on that tower, it's probably been decommissioned and the lines have been removed.
Mt Chiliad turned out to be an abandoned project, another victim of GTAO, along with the planned (and announced) single-player DLC which Taketwo Interactive forced Rockstar to drop, then denied all knowledge of despite the Rockstar Newswire post announcing it being visible to this day.
i didnt see the previous video with grady in it and was so excited to see him in this one!! im a big fan of practical engineering and it was a real treat to see him :)
Kick off lounge season with MeUndies and get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping, at MeUndies.com/anyaustin enter promo code anyaustin.
Also here’s a link to the reddit post with the map: www.reddit.com/r/chiliadmystery/comments/3g2qkx/map_of_the_power_grid_and_power_theory/
Big thanks to GRADY from PRACTICAL ENGINEERING. If he leaves a comment down below please give it many thumbs up.
What other games should I look at the electrical infrastructure in?
Red Dead 2 XD
YAY i was wondering when you'd upload again, love ur vids man
It'd be really fun to see how the Just Cause games handle their electricity. Specifically Just Cause 2 or 3. I'm not sure if the first game has any lol
No way you have blue sky….please for the love of god…. Unsubbing if you use bluesky
@ninjatriplexxx6109 why do you even care?
This man just added two months to GTA6 development
hahaha
gta 6 gonna turn devs into electrical engineers aswell
nothing a few modders cant fix
we can only hope... would be rather funny imo lol
I better not see any lorem ipsum
Now someone's going to develop a game with a highly accurate electrical grid. The game will suck. But the electrical grid will be impeccable.
Can't wait for all the videos named "Electrical Grid Simulator - A Misunderstood Masterpiece"
I mean, the first SimCity had no concept of plumbing at all - supply or waste - and IIRC its power "infrastructure" required that you drop a power plant somewhere, then pave at least one lane of roadway between it and the rest of your structures. Full stop. By SimCity 2000, you could already run power lines and lay out a whole underground water system beneath your city. The Simulation™ evolves at speeds that makes Conway's Game of Life seem lethargic.
Relatable
i deadass think i know a guy perfect for this.
Despite having dedicated most of the past decade to this game, I still thought “I didn’t know that” or “I haven’t seen that before” like a dozen times while watching this videos. Kudos, great video.
mr 2nd place no-damage-run is here
Hey its dark viper! Thanks for reminding me to check in your channel!
I can't wait for the next Facts and Glitches where you talk about the electrical grid 😂
Fancy seeing you here
seriously matt? it was a pretty big selling point back when rockstar had that community tad in their website lol
Transmission Line engineer here - there are definitely cases when a transmission structure would dead-end, but it’s normally to take the line from above ground to underground. Also those upper two wires are static wires, used for protection from lighting strikes
Same credentials here: it’s exceedingly rare to run transmission lines underground because of how expensive and problematic it can be, due to the voltage of the lines. Also, static wires aren’t necessary to prevent damage from lightning strikes, as that’s what the surge arrestors are for. The arrestors can be placed anywhere on the line, even miles down from a strike, and they’ll still do just as good of a job of protecting the lines from a surge.
@@nolanthedude yall aint got no credentials
Censoring "fuck" with "fuck" is comedy genius.
I'm pretty sure it's Memoria too, even funnier
@@onyon238 good ear.
@@any_austin I'm, assuming we're a few years off of a Baldur's Gate III: Lower City series?
No
Thank you! Agreed! Bravo @any_austin !
I love the idea that there may be one person at Rockstar right now, spending their workdays passive aggressively making THE MOST accurate digital representation of a substation for GTA VI in response to these videos.
Maybe they were an AnyAustin fan before these last 2 videos and when he posted them a massive wave of "oh fuck" went over them
Maybe they were an AnyAustin fan before these last 2 videos and when he posted them a massive wave of "oh fuck" went over them
Judging by the gta 6 trailer they have a pretty accurate fiber/coax system that runs under the power poles as well, and if they are really putting in the detail, all of those cables should lead to an internet company
May be a little too late. Maybe not.
They'll definitely get it right in GTA 7 (2038)
@reyntime1950 how are you optimistic enough to think 7 is coming in your lifetime? Lol
Across the vast, cerulean field
A web of silver lines revealed
Like veins of a celestial frame
A network spun, a whispered name...
(Whispered): "Any Austin"
My other favorite channel.
Hey Mr. Grady!
Thanks Grady!
The book looks really good, I going to pick up a copy.
AnyAustin making it big with guests like these!
Mechanical engineer here. The pipe work at @18:55 made me laugh out loud. I love how that single split case pump is totally rawdogging the elements with no shelter, whilst feeding three different lines. Head losses be darned! What a chad pump.
I would 100% be interested in a piping video, but you'd probably just arrive at the same conclusions about the details being "close enough" for immersion.
Great video though, subscribed!
If you go to sone of the parking garages that are in the city, you will see that some of the piping actually makes sense, it’s well put together, for a developer with no idea on how fire sprinklers systems, plumbing and mechanical piping works, it’s pretty darn good!
There’s no need for R* games to work on all that, but they did it anyway and it’s pretty good.
Cool, thanks! I really hadn't looked too hard at the fire sprinklers, but now I want to!
I watch alot of piping videos not on RUclips tho
The funniest part for me is it’s feeding 3 pipes that are same diameter and have a constriction at the entrance.
The only option i could see is the pump is working in reverse and pumping the fluid out and not in. Which would make sense given its routed downward and the pipe constrictions but the headloss on the pump would be insane either way. It’s kinda a mind boggling system there they made.
"This is the lorem ipsum of substations" dying omg
That's a brand new sentence right there
@@DrSpaceman42 But if you think it, it makes whole lot of sense
The Saugus steel plant in Fallout 4 is the same thing. If you go to the roof you will see lots of the parts of a steel plant, but they aren't hooked together right. It's not fantasy - they obviously looked at pictures of real steel plants. But they have no understanding of how it works.
@@spejic1 I bet they thought, "It just works."
@@spejic1 just like how they saw pictures of the previous fallout installations but had no understanding of what made it fun or engaging as an rpg
There's an essential phrase every game developer should become intimately aware of.
That essential phrase is, "You get the idea."
Thats whats happening these days, 'just imagine you are getting 100+ fps and playable input delay, you get the idea'
@CalgarGTX well shoot. I should have been more specific
@@mobbs6426no no, he's got the idea
"Perfect is the enemy of good" -Voltaire
I'm a lineman in Europe so maybe not directly applicable for the setting in GTA but still.
You actually aren't allowed to directly connect a transmission line directly to a substation, so it's actually quite realistic for a continetal transmission line to pass right over a city substation and where I live there are a couple of examples of exactly that happening.
Its because there are multiple levels to the power grid and you can't just run wires between levels. A transcontinental powerline, usually 360KV+, which would be LVL1, can only connect to a LVL2 feed in. From the feed in you can then connect to the intercity highvoltage powerlines, typically 36-5KV which are LVL3. From LVL3 you would typically go to LVL5 in the form of a polemounted transformer or a standalone transformer that converts the intercity high voltage to a houshold voltage 230/120V. There is also LVL4 reserved for smaller powerplants that feed directly into the city grid.
As said before you can't just wire between those levels, you can't just run an extension cord from your power plant next door to your Christmas lights because it's in a different level (even though it's technically verry doable). Similarly you can't just connect a substation to an intercontinental transmission line (even though it's also technically possible by using some extra transformers).
There are designated ways to route power between levels because each level has very different safety and reliability concerns. A standard GFCI wouldn't work on 360KV, and resonant frequency detection wouldn't work at 230V.
P.S. a couple details I noticed in the video:
The substation powerlines swing way too much and would quickly get too close and short in the wind.
Yes, you can split transcontinental transmission lines but it's frowned upon and the national grid companies almost never let it happen.
Its not a bushing its an insulator.
The plumpbobs are called eggs and are there to insulate the guywires so if they get energized they don't shock you when you touch them on the ground.
The "substation " at 9:40 could be a feed in, but its a bit small and feeds directly into the LVL3 city grid and I'm just not going to go into the details about the substation itself because I'd be here all day. lets just say Grady was WAY to generous.
22:05 Those wires are way to low.
Anyway love the vid.
Yeah this doesnt seem to apply to America, at least where I live in Kansas, because I have a substation right up the road from where I live that connects directly to a transmission tower chain via wires. I even double checked on Google Earth to be sure I wasnt mis-remembering. Now you got me interested in the ways that different countries manage their power grids
@@FartingSpider12 Completely unknowledgeable about electrical engineering but I'd imagine it would have something to do with the different power standards across regions? Europe has a completely different standard than america, and I would assume with that comes different rules for how power is allowed to be transferred.
Using small brain language would’ve been helpful. Got confused a few sentences into reading this
@kobi399 Thank for the expertise. But why are some transmission lines linguini?
Thanks for the little lesson!
I worked on Far Cry 6 and spent a long time working on the electrical grid doing this exact thing - its pretty surreal seeing someone go this deep on something that we spend so much time on thag usually gets ingored!
This should've been the pinned comment
@@czardaster3261 Unfortunately, sponsored video, so the pinned comment automatically goes to the content creator posting about their sponsor, presumably by contractual obligation.
just wanted to say thank you for adding subtitles to your video ! a lot of people just leave it to the auto closed captions and those often get things wrong so i always love it when people go the extra mile to add proper captions .
thank you for your videos , they’re super entertaining and awesome to have on
You can thank my friend Lawrence for that one.
Thanks any_austin's friend Lawrence!
@@any_austin Well thanks to Lawrence, but I have to say after seeing this comment I checked it out, was nicely surprised you have german subtitles as well (I'm german if it's not obvious by now) and saw they were off by about two minutes into the future. Just wanted to let you know. Confused me a bit too making me think they didn't match at all, but they were subbing a part you would only mention about two minutes later. Subs at 18:00 correspond to video at 20:00 and so. Not a major problem, especially to me since I don't make use of subs much especially in german (if I use subs I use the english ones), but wanted to let you know that it is happening. I also guess it wouldn't be much of a problem in general but it also makes the subtitles appear and disappear very quickly so one might not be able to read them in whole. Anyways keep up your goddamn superior videos, I really enjoy them and am looking forward to your future work
@@any_austinthank you Lawrence making me (a deaf person) enjoy videos
Bonus points if he did something silly in it
Thank you Austin, your contributions to the UPS (Utility Pole Society) are greatly appreciated and will never be forgotten
UTS? Why does Pole make a T? Or is it just ignored, not represented in the acronym at all?
UPS was already taken so it was (Ut)ility Pole (S)ociety@@jasonwinstance6614
Because apparently it's a pole dancing group according to google
dude wtf
Utility Tole Society?
my favorite thing about the MeUndies sponsorship is when you say "buy MeUndies" like a pirate with an OF
"LIKE A PIRATE WITH AN OF" DYINGGGG
Or an Irish 😂
@@istvánpletserOr a scot!🏴
It's more like a cockney fellow from England going like "core blimey gov'nor, Where's me undies?" Scots don't say such things. Had to clear that up. Thanks
@@mOki.i" Scotland is not a real country! You're an Englishman with a dress" ~ Soldier TF2
Alright you're right in my wheel-house, since I design transmission lines for work. Here's some answers/responses I noted along the way:
Yes, you can have a transmission structure that "splits" in a few different directions. This is called a Tap Structure and is usually used as a junction between multiple circuits. No additional equipment is needed necessarily because these lines are all the same voltage, but often times there will be some sort of switching on the structures or down line so that individual circuits can be isolated and outaged (turned off) for maintenance or repairs while keeping the rest energized. Among the many things a Sub does, like changing voltage, is switching, which is basically connecting and disconnecting certain circuits.
No, transmission lines do not just "stop". If they end, its because that line is probably not energized for some reason (being taken down or being put up). Otherwise, it's probably a riser (point where it goes from above ground to underground) and you just can't see the wires taking power underground.
No, those are not guy wires, but that's a good guess. Those are "Shield Wires" which shield the below circuits from lightning strikes. These are grounded and give lightning a path to ground, which is usually the structure itself, rather than the high voltage conductors. Guy wires, as you correctly stated, are used to support a structure in a certain direction - not very common on steel structures since these are designed to handle the necessary loads from the beginning. Guying is much more common in wood transmission poles or most distribution poles with deadends (point where a wire ends and the structure is supporting horizontal loads not just the weight of the wire as it does on "tangent" structure) or angles. Those wires that come off a pole into the ground and have the big orange thing around them that you were scared to touch as a kid? Yeah, those are guy wires (and if installed correctly will never be energized ever). You can guy between structures as well, so it's not completely impossible that something like that would be used for guying, but in this case those are certainly shield wires since they are attached at the shield wire attachment points on that structure.
In Transmission and Distribution, we call them "insulators" not bushings. There are uses for bushings in some substation and a few distribution circumstances but almost never do they use "bushings" instead of "insulators" in transmission. Insulators insulate things from the electricity, bushings aren't necessarily used for insulating electrical pathways, and are more for "passing through" a conductor without touching anything.
Yes, you can have multiple transmission lines that close together, you just have to meet certain clearance requirements established by the NESC (National Electrical Safety Code). In fact, many shown in this video are already double-circuit structures. Circuits are almost always 3 phase-conductors and a shield or two. You can see many instances here that there's 6 conductors, so those are double circuit lines.
Yes, there are many reasons to just have one wire on a pole. It happens all the time in rural areas where they need to service a few homes and there's no real reason to bring higher voltage 3 phase circuits that way instead of just the single residential primary wire. These days its more economical to just run the 3 phases but in older times or in rural areas it's very common.
I mean, sure enough you can technically build a "blind" powerline, that just stops. It's just that there's literally no reason to do this, and it would probably be the most hilarious and simultaneously stupidest way to waste money, but it certainly would be doable.
Or, y'know, you pull a German on the company building the line: find some endangered specimen (that THEY didn't find while filing the initial permit) and, consequently, force the company halfway through the building process by court order to stop building the power line, to save the creatures' habitat.
We're AnyAustin fans, of course we're curious about the infrastructure of fictional videogame cities
a fictional world's infrastructure, dipped in AnyAustin's Analysis oil
An anyaustin fan and Northernlion fan at the same time??? are you me??
@@ChronicSkooma yes
while we're counting the utility poles in San Andreas, would anyone care for a DOUBLE CHUNK CHOCOLATE COOKIE
I hope rdr2 is next in this series
15:04 Gamedev here!
Those wires doesn't simulate physics, they use a really CPU efficient method called vertex animation or point level animation.
The 3D model of the wires are actually motionless and still between the poles, but their shaders\textures are offseted by time so they look animated.
Foliage like grass and trees almost always using this technique, and if you see flyers on the wall or curtains animated like this means that the devs cared a lot.
My theory is:
In world position on the X,Y,Z axis, the linguini wires are probably close to a point where the time based vertex offset has a slight stroke. They probably noticed this too far in development that it was not worth going for a local position for the axis.
Can you explain further what you mean by "their shaders/textures are offset by time" not being an animation?
Isn't that just another way of saying "animation"?
@@C.I... Vertex animation has almost no CPU involvement. GPU calculates the vertex position so it's cheap for "mass produced - samey" stuff like grass, cables, trees and even water waves. The 3D modes just looks like its moving, but its faked so the object can be static, thus more performance.
3D objects are made from polygons, and polygons are made from vertices. Each vertex of a polygon has multiple uv coordinates, color, position, tangent, bitangent, normal, bump, and so on so on. Most of these are unnecessary to transfer every frame inbetween CPU and GPU, and regular skeletal animation does exactly that.
Edit: I'm just realizing how complex this stuff is.
Look at the grass in Unreal games like: Silent Hill 2 Remake, Until Dawn, Hellblade, God Of War, The Callisto Protocol, Little Hope, Man Of Medan, etc. The grass models will be different ofc, but ALL of them is animated completely the same way, cause devs doesn't seem to care to change the default one for some reason.
Is not that "they probably noticed this too far in development", is more like they, considering the size of the game, didn't notice this at all.
@@Inferryu Probably have one Prop called "Electricity wire" and a Script which says "If Electricity Pole >50feet away, conect to it"
And that's how the greed was created 😂
@@Inferryu Or, they noticed it, but considered it such a minor problem compared to every other bug they had to fix that they never addressed it.
I love these videos. Every once in a while I see someone going like "Who cares if the power lines connect? It's just a video game." in response, but what you are doing is taking video games that you know *succeeded* in creating the feeling of a living world and then taking an analytical eye to them to see how much and how little they needed to do to give the player the intended impression. The comparison to the set of a play is appropriate.
Everyone has their own opinions
The mischaracterization there is in framing it as "who _cares_ if/how the power lines connect?" It's not that anyone really **cares** - it's possible to be _curious_ or _interested_ in these details, without "caring" about it or (as Austin said early in the video) having it affect your opinion of the game in any way. And, very crucially, _not_ everyone *will* be remotely curious or interested about that. It's perfectly fine _not_ to be. But there are also a lot of us who _are_ curious/interested, because we're giant nerds who find endless fascination in pointless minutiae.
if we were not supposed to care about the power lines, they would not be in the game
"why do you care if there's only 2 rocks copy pasted everywhere? its just a video game, thats why the clouds are black and static" - proper reducto ad absurdum
As an electrical engineer specialized in transmission and distribution I found this amazingly funny. it's like Grady said, it's the Lorem Ipsum of electrical system. Clearly it was made by someone who does not know how a system really works, but made it look like the real thing to make to convey the desired effect in game. It would be really amazing if they made a in game simulation to real life where if some character provoked a short-circuit or cut a cable would cause a local or wide area blackout, depending on the place of the cause. That would be amazing (and a resource hog in the game!). P.S.: In power plants like depicted in the game, the cables connecting the generators to the transformers would be underground. Substations have these gutters in the floor, concrete gutters, that take control cables, measurement cables to the control room and back, and there are other specialized gutters that take the high-voltage cables from the generators to the transformers. I don't know if you can see them in game, but in real life photos they can be seen on the floor, covered with concrete lids, in the typical white or gray color.
Just wait for gta 7
as an electrical engineer who does a lot of work with specifically transmission lines, distro lines, and substations (and more commonly, renewable power plants) this video warms my heart. Just amazing stuff.
So how do power stations usually connect up to substations?
@@kadebrockhausenwith wires
@@virionspiral Not just any wires...thick wires
@@kadebrockhausenbig towers with wire thingys connecting them🤙
tell us some shit man cmon
Hi! I'm actually a Transmission Engineer. I'm kinda giddy to hear someone talk about my job 😊
Fun Fact: At 8:04 those 2 wires on the very top of the tower are actually called "Shield Wires" and protect the sets of 3 energized wires (that are usually attached below) from lightning strikes that could interfere with equipment on the line, or at the substations. Now those same wires are used to support bundles of fiber optic cable. Not in the photo you showed, but in other cases.
It’s also interesting that most of the Utility poles have no Neutral wire that is attached typically below the primary energized wires. It’s kinda funny that the game did have pretty good looking cutouts on the downed pole 16:26 which I didn’t see anywhere else.
Ooo that sounds cool :0 can I ask what got you interested in that ?
@micahvandam9658 well I'm not sure if it's intentional or not but if the game is based on California. Then it works because most of California uses an ungrounded Wye overhead distribution system with no neutral.
@ okay, I didn’t know that, that makes sense then. Delta is the one without an overhead neutral. But id understand if they have more underground in California.
@micahvandam9658 Yeah it looks like Delta but it's still Wye.
My favorite part about being a Game Dev is finding guys like this who dig around in all our dirty shit. A+, King.
These videos make me so happy because it's just made for pure curiosity and admiration of small insignificant details in game world building.
The fact that there is even a collab just to explain the intricacies of substations and transmission lines is amazing. There is so much I don't know but listening to people talk about their expertise and see people try to research about it for accuracy is so... well... charming!!!
7:40 What would happen if you created a dead end transmission tower: You'd waste a bunch of money building a tower that does nothing. Otherwise, you could totally do it, physically and engineering-ly. It would just be pointless
Would it cause problems with the line though and its earlier connections? Does a dead end line without dispersing the power anywhere at the end there cause a short that affects the rest of the line?
@Silverizael i am not an electrical engineer but my understanding is no, not really. Its basically a scaled up version of a power outlet with nothing plugged in. Power has nowhere to go so it doesn't flow there and it acts not like a short but rather like a broken circuit
It wouldnt be point *less.* There would be many points. All of the ends of the wires and cables.
Of course, the lines would still be live so if anything touched it, power would flow through. But nothing is touching it!
The biggest problem would be that the tower would be very unstable, and would probably collapse. The truss structure of those towers are designed to be very strong when there is only downward force. Then cables are attached normally (cables on both sides), there is only a downward force since any lateral forces are canceled out by the opposite side. If there is only one side of cables attached, there is nothing to cancel it out.
This could corrected if guy wires were attached to the tower opposite the transmission lines to provide the required counteracting forces.
Austin is a true gamer. The speech at 22:00 hits heavy when you think about how truely passionate developers work to get us to buy into their vision.
Go outside, touch a power line
Basically watsonian Vs doyalist approach. Enjoying the medium from within it or from without it, both are valid.
@@jackhazard6960 You are a small, sad person. Be better.
Man im so fkn proud of you Austin, you are absolutely hilarious and i love your dry, weird ass jokes and humor. Your editing is peak comedy. Been here since 2012 watching Twilight Princess eggbusters. I'm proud of you, you're awesome
I read this wrong and I thought you called Austin "Princess Eggbusters"
This series of videos is making me love electrical sub-stations. I genuinely get so excited.
we got los santos power line analysis before gta 6
Love your videos
It's so cool that the creators I watch watch the creators I watch.
Yo Duck with the great taste.
Im gonna try and finish it before GTA 6
get an original comment
Hey Austin, I really appreciate your videos and specifically your videos on the power grid. I work as a power systems engineer in the U.S. planning and designing the power grid, so here are some thoughts/”insights” on some topics in the video:
• You can have multiple transmission lines/circuits on a single structure. They can be the same voltage or different voltages. It’s common to have higher transmission voltage on top (i.e. 230 kV, 345 kV, 500 kV) and a lower transmission (69 - 138 kV) or even distribution voltage (below 69 kV) lower on the structure.
• The way the wires swing in the wind in the game would be completely unacceptable in real life as faults/short circuits could occur from the wire to wire (phase to phase) contact. My guess is that they probably violate some sort of IEEE/ANSI/NEC/NESC standard.
• Depending on the voltage, a transmission line may not connect directly to a specific substation. Sometimes you have to go to a “T to T” station to convert from a really high transmission voltage to a lower transmission voltage, and then that might go to a “T to D” station where the voltage is dropped to a medium or low voltage level. These voltages vary all over the U.S., with the highest being 765 kV (but there is no 765 kV on the western part of the U.S. as far as I know, it’s all in PJM near Ohio and Indiana). There is also underground transmission so the "non-connected" substation could have underground circuits coming from somewhere, though, they are not depicted in the game.
• You may have a transmission line just end if the line is a radial line. This can happen for a variety of reasons but it is not the case for a majority of lines which are networked together.
• What you are calling “bushings” are actually insulators on the transmission line. The pictures of the high voltage circuit breakers and transformers do have bushings, but the wavey/ridgey part is an insulator which (hopefully) keeps electricity from traveling to metal parts it isn’t supposed to touch.
• What you are calling “guy wires” on the top of the transmission lines are actually called “shield wires”. They do what you might think - shield the line from lightning. They can be just steel wire or steel-supported fiber optic cables for communication. Guy wires are attached to the sides of poles to provide tension to keep the poles upright.
• As Grady mentions, the wiring/connections in the substation is extremely problematic (no insulators or surge arrestors for transmission lines to connect to the substation deadend structures, no instrument transformers, no disconnect switches, etc…).
• “Brown” energy is usually just called fossil energy unless you work at a utility, and then you use the PR-approved “thermal” energy (it is just using some sort of fuel to heat water).
• There is a reason you would have “one wire” on a pole - sometimes a feeder does not have a lot of connections and therefore you just need one phase to serve all of the load. This is more common in rural areas.
• Every power plant connects to the grid a little differently. Generally, the power is generated at a relatively low voltage (say 4.8 kV) and it’s then stepped up to a medium voltage (say 34.5 kV). This may be routed underground or overhead to a transmission substation where the voltage is again transformed to send the power out.
• As for the pipe analysis… Just kidding.
I came to say a bunch of the exact same things! Thank you for your service (both as a power systems engineer and in RUclips comments)
another transmission grid engineer here, your comment is amazing! to add onto what you said (for the sake of curious people, i'm sure you already know):
Austin asked if a line splitting is realistic. yes, it is! a line split is called a "tap" (at least at my company), and they are decently common.
thee one problem with taps is if the transmission line were to have a fault somewhere (like a tree falling on it), the whole line has to be disconnected from all 3 substations. this decreases reliability, as a fault on the tap would take the main line offline. we evaluate the impacts of this scenario happening, and if they're beyond certain thresholds, we put a substation where the tap would come off the main line (no transformers, just circuit breakers). that way, a fault on the tap or on either half of the main line won't take out all 3 terminals of the line.
Weird that they call fossil energy "thermal energy", when Nuclear is also basically a really big pool of boiling water.
@@Mr.MasterOfTheMonsters every new form of power production is just a fancier way to boil water
Finally an actual engineer not a gaming nerd in the comments. I was looking for this comment.
1:32 That good old Star Wars Battlefront 1 sound effect is so good
Oh man I saw the lines, heard the sound, and got so excited.
Literally came here to say exactly this. Great choice for a transition.
Weaponuzed nostalgia got me dead
That's where they're from!! Thank you! It's just way too familiar but i couldnt figure out what's it from.
Now that's a sound I've not hear in a long time. A long time.
*_Maybe what’s really connecting the power lines in GTA V is the friends we made along the way_*
Been grinding through your entire post history. Absolutely love your channel and the concept.
Recently i was replaying "Need for Speed underground" (2003) and whilst zoominb through the maps, i got thinking about your channel. Suddenly i found myself stopped infront of a small strip mall. The stores were just uninspired graphics displayed just beyond the glass barrier. i was stopped there for a minute and just took in the absolute beauty of the place. The game is littered with those spots, and wothout you, i never wouldve thought to slow down, and take it all in.
Thank you Austin.
These are the gamers we need in the gaming space these days
Fr Austin got me appreciating all the details in the towns of Oblivion.
He definitely changed how I play and explore those games.
need for speed underground is a fantastic game for those kinda thoughts, the vibe is just so perfectly in-line with the concepts here
like fr I did this so much back when I was playing Underground 2 so having these kind of things actually talked about in a fun way is really lovely
Slightly different, but I used to do mapmaking for Source Engine games as a hobby. And I always used to wonder how Valve got their game-worlds to look so solid and cohesive and realistic and compelling.
So I played through Half Life 2, taking care to examine the architecture to see how it all fit together. And I quickly realised how many janky shortcuts Valve's level artists took. I found so many mis-aligned textures, or big sections of walls or ceilings with extremely plain textures on them, or areas where textures just cut off sharply without any margin or transition. And I realised why the game was like that: because no-one was ever intended or expected to look that closely at the weird bits. They were all off to the sides, or hidden in shadows, or in places where the player was expected to pass through quickly. The game world was only as detailed as it needed to be, to sell the illusion of a realistic place.
That's basically the takeaway from all of Any Austin's videos, about the realism of videogames. They're only as real as they need to be.
19:55 the lamp post has a wire going directly into the ground, implying that there is an electrical grid underneath the substation, likely how the power plant and the station would be connected.
Legendary find
I'm a photographer and I've been recently working on a little project with virtual photography in this game with the little in-game phone camera you get. And honestly it's made me look at this game map in a whole different way and made me see things I would never if I was just playing through the missions normally. I love the approach of playing games the 'wrong' way to what the developers intended, like if you play the game as a power infrastructure inspector or a photographer for example. It's still the same world you're used to but you're moving through it differently now. At the risk of sounding pretentious it parallels how photography makes me 'play' life, like all this stuff is there for you to see just as the stuff you are 'supposed' to do is, you just have to stop and look around and see the world through a certain frame or from a certain angle to see it.
Bluesky??? I knew those hair pins were sus lol.
the whole 'immersed in the reality of a fictional world vs immersed in it being fictional' idea is really beautiful and ive never really thought about it that way thank you mr any
It's always a magical moment on RUclips when you think "I bet this other creator would have some valuable input here", and lo and behold, that other creator actually does show up to give valued input.
As a powerline technician I have to say that there was a significant effort put forward to make that second substation and all of its cables and connections look as real as possible
It’s also very possible that the output of a station could be 2400 volts, but in the station you would almost always warn for the highest voltage in proximity which is magnitudes higher.
@@bigboss3888 There is no way that the voltage out of a substation is 2400 volts or 2.4 kV. Primary voltage is at the magnitude of 10 KV. The substation voltage entering is even higher.
Hmmm didn't the Chiliad Mystery require at least a powerplant and a substation connected?
I have a very vivid memory of my dad freaking out when I flew a helicopter through some power lines in GTA5. To me it made perfect sense that they didn’t have any collision, but to him it looked like imminent danger. I wonder if GTA6 will have power lines collision, I think that could be cool.
Would be interesting to see. The cables could get caught in the rotors and turn the helicopter into a live wire death trap. Jets barnstorming the city could get their fins and wings sheared by cables. It would likely be a lot of work, but I would love to see it too.
@@sintanan469 And be veery intense on a graphical processor. It's a lot of physics to implement and process. So much to calculate. Every pixel of the line being processed with equations to make the overall effect realistic. You could have the line in tiny chunks with each being processed but then the effect would not be realistic. Some things like that sound nice, but the practicality of it and purpose is lost. That is hundreds of programming hours requiring near super-computer levels all for a single effect that most players would try once, go "That's cool" and move on from. It's better to not worry about it lol. For the gamer and for the programmer haha
@SphynxsShadow You could cheat things by using a vector offset to skew the wires to simulate movement and have a static hit box approximate the average center of the cable. From there you just detect when the vehicle collides with the hitbox and apply some canned damage or animation, substituting models as needed for the wires to make it look like you damaged the power lines. Add some fancy explosions and sparks to hide the shortcuts taken for swapping models and it's not perfect but it is good enough for prototyping.
Skewing a vector to simulate movement is far from resource intensive since a N64 console can do that easily. If an N64 can handle it, then a modern GPU should be able to.
Having all the lines in a big city have colision I think would be too much for consoles to handle.
@@SammEater
Not really. Only the player would ever be there, and they already do player vehicle collision with a very similar noise map based vertex manipulation.... Boats on the ocean.
You'd be surprised how mathematically simple it is to check the collision when you're already creating the data for the visuals or run off.
I cannot express how excited I get for this man's infrastructure and economy videos
Same! I waited weeks for this damn video, i hope he uploads soon
5:54 bro it’s 2024 they’re connected by Bluetooth
Yeah because everything is wireless nowadays isn’t it?
actually, substations are usually connected by underground infrastructure. im not sure why he thought they would be overhead?
@@billypilbrow Because all the other wires are above ground so it makes it seem like that should also be above ground even if it isn't
It's connected through underground
I like how much this channel has taken off. Ive been watching for a long time now and i love how many autists (like me) gather here for our weird niche.
21:41 You missed the hydro power plant. Seems like it too is connected to the power grid
Los Santos powerlines connect directly with my heart.
That sounds unhealthy. You should get that looked at.
Are you related to the Iron Giant by any chance?
The OG Battlefront zoom-in was nice.
Thank you for calling it out my nostalgia was hitting so hard off of that but I just couldn’t place it for some reason
@@rechasebass Same, I had to sit and think for a minute
But that sound instantly set of alarms in my brain lol
Dudududu düdüdüdü bliuu
It's the best way to zoom in on a map, hands down.
It's my sleeper cell code
great, another 30 minute video essay on a video game topic that i was never interested in and never will, but will still watch and enjoy the whole thing!
You and Grady bring me such joy you deserve this and much more.
My city (Eugene, OR) has two dead-end high-voltage electrical transmission lines. Both of them used to connect to steam plants--one to the city's central steam plant, and one to the University of Oregon's steam plant. Since the city's steam plant is now nonfunctional, it was disconnected from the electrical grid years ago. However, the transmission lines remained, because it was too expensive to remove them (they stretch over the Willamette River, and a massive crane would be needed on both ends). The University's working steam plant still has a electrical substation, and it may be reconnected to the electrical grid when the Univernity converts the boilers from natural gas to electrical.
they'll use electricity to generate electricity...?
@@Addsomehappy might be a general heating boiler? Might be central heating for the whole campus, as a guess. Could make use of lots of electricity that way.
These videos make me want to make games that are stupidly accurate in ways that nobody asked for nor needed, if I can manage to get this dude to not find a single inaccuracy, I would be set.
Careful, that's how you end up having to math out how much horse balls shrink in the cold.
@@insaincaldo Why *wouldn't* I want Game of the Year?
Fair point. Plus, games that size, if you did the numbers, someone else gets to sculp and again another animate, all that stuff. At least there is that
If you give game devs the time, I think many of them would be all too happy to call in professionals in the industries theyre attempting to simulate to oversee the design; such as calling in electricians and civil engineers to critique and direct things like pipes and the electric grids, geology and contours, etc.
Its a beautiful thing to see when it happens, but such coordination is costly, time-intensive, and ramps up the complexity of simple details to astronomical levels.
12:31 Rockstar seems to do this mistake a lot, if you look on the car lift in the Auto Shop there's a sign that says "max 350 kg", it should be 3500 kg. When it comes to vehicles 350 kilos is nothing. For reference 350kg is 771 lbs and 3500 kg is 7 716 lbs.
Well maybe it's an inside joke, that they don't only scale the maps size but also the measurements inside xD
My first car was an old 80s Honda. It was 750kg... Very light as far as cars go. Yet still too heavy for that lift.
nah that's hilarious though, it's an auto shop that only serves little tykes cars
@@itsHaniiMusic that could be true, I hadn't thought of that! But most likely it's just a mistake lol
The video sequel we needed but didn't ask for.
love u Austin, you've helped me thru the worst months of my life. My life changed forever last june, june 23rd. And i discovered your videos just a few weeks before that. And i always look forward to you dropping some new ish, be safe brother. Keep it up :3
Keep on
"Hey everyone, I’m the game designer and electrical engineer who worked on the details and design inside GTA V. I was involved in creating the complex wiring systems throughout the city, making sure that everything from streetlights to the electrical infrastructure was designed to function realistically within the game world. It's been an amazing experience combining my passion for both gaming and electrical engineering!
While working on the wiring details, I made sure that the connections, circuits, and electrical grids matched the layout of the city, ensuring that power would flow correctly through different areas. Every building, lamp post, and even the streetlights had to be linked to this system, adding to the level of detail and realism in the game. The goal was to make everything feel interconnected, like a real city where the electrical systems truly shape the environment."
Sounds cool 😮
@alexandernova3685 Yeah it's great working with rockstar
Explain the substations
@@danielmallory4687 "Hey, thanks for Pointing that out! I get what you’re saying about the electric towers not connecting properly to the substations in GTA V. Honestly, the goal was to make the city look realistic, but I didn’t go too deep into how the power grid actually works since it’s more of a background detail and doesn’t affect gameplay.
If I had more time or resources, I’d love to add proper connections and make the substations more functional. I’ll definitely keep this in mind for future improvements-really appreciate you taking the time to point it out!"
0:11 ah yes, a UTIILTY pole I see
uhhhh i dont get it
its there like a pokedex for poles
i thought it was just pole
@@alguien3832 AnyAustin misspellt utility, by writing "utiilty". Happens.
The curiosity of Any Austin will keep me clicking the videos every single time. I absolutely ADORE the way every little thing is investigated, just because of curiosity and a desire to know more. Learning about rivers, just cause of Zelda and Morrowind. Learning about wires, cause wire stuff is cool.... It's lovely.
22:01 - Your description here is the first time I've ever heard someone summarize _EXACTLY_ what I enjoy most about wandering around through Souls games like *_Bloodborne_* & *_Elden Ring_* that have this innate exaggerated fantasy realism, especially where the liveable elements of things are in ruins. It's an overt exposure to a weird balance between the videogame & realistic elements that is just uniquely satisfying in its own way to look at the same way as being immersed in the set of a play and where & how those boundaries exist.
I've always found the nature of your videos with a focus around an arbitrary detail of various video games super satisfying in a very similar way to when I meander while playing games, and it's really neat to have a way to explain what that inclination is now.
Cheers to ya, and all you do!
Rockstar has always put alot of effort into small details for things that dont really matter. Its usually stuff that i think a few devs personally cared about for some reason and just took out the time to add.
this makes me feel warm and fuzzy
Just like power lines do!
That's the uranium
That's the heroin.
Being immersed in the reality of the actual digital space around you is a very underrated piece of gaming. You can pick any game and any spot and spend 10 minutes contemplating all the attributes and decisions that came together to create this piece of the world. Everything in the world is deliberate to a degree, and unwinding that is both satisfying and awe inspiring. Thanks for doing that for us :)
P.S. IMO Ready Or Not has some of the best environmental design of all time. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys getting lost in the speculation of a digital space.
14:30 for anyone curious about putting multiple transmission lines next to each other--this is actually pretty common!
The reason is because utilities own, or have rights to operate their equipment in, tracts of land called a "right-of-way". If a bunch of trees are being cleared and land is being purchased to make a right-of-way for one line, it often makes sense to just get a bit more land and put multiple lines together. Or a utility is trying to squeeze a new line in to an existing right-of-way, or remove one transmission line to replace with two different ones in the same amount of space, etc.
We as engineers have to carefully check the clearances between those parallel lines, and any other utilities which might also be sharing the right-of-way (railroads, distribution lines, pipelines, etc).
As a transmission line engineer, this makes me so happy. Nice work shedding light on such an overlooked part of our infrastructure! Other folks in the comments have already touched on pretty much everything I was going to say. It's lovely to see such a community come together over something so seemingly mundane.
Imagine taking out the power plant and a cutscene goes to the whole city going dark, taking maybe 15 minutes to restore itself.
9:41 did you censor “fucking” with “fuck” 😂 peak comedy.
Developer here (not game). I think the difference in wires to the substation may also be due to optimization. When you build a world like GTAV, you're likely to suddenly make some places too dense with details. To keep the framerate somewhat consistent, you likely run optimizers across the whole map to find spots where the detail is highest. You might strip away and simplify elements to lessen the load of these areas. These wires, however small their performance impact, may have been removed due to excessive complexity in that area.
I was thinking of it from the perspective of "They modeled this earlier, when they assumed more time, vs the other which is slapped in there to fill space with less time"
BUT
Your logic makes so much sense; the substation with few wires not connected to the proper grid IS in a valid spot,but its also in the city itself; theres a ton going on around it, so having detail stripped down to save on processing power. Compared to the other one. off the highway in the desert hills with much less surrounding scenery to actively render affording the station significantly more detail, wiring, direct connections, etc.
@@Nazuikoespecially considering this was 2012-2013 and this game was built for ps3/360
Your conclusion reminds me of a Kubrick quote:
“You don't try to photograph the reality, you try to photograph the photograph of the reality”
I’m sure the guy who spent days studying the designs of power lines is shining with happiness that after so long someone is finally obsessing over this minutia as much as they did. You made someone very happy.
Oh this is the perfect "RUclips video I watch in the shower because I have depression" video
Fuck I felt this comment hard man
fr
Omg I ain't the only one
I literally watched this. Propped up. In my shower on a shelf after work lol
You don't have to call me out like that.
I imagine the dirty power plant in GTA5 is a very clean, modern nuclear power plant that has a huge coal burning furnace for no reason. They just shovel coal in there to burn it. Fits the GTA style of satire in my mind.
I hope in GTA6 they have a bunch of solar and wind farms that they advertise but dont have any actual wires going to them and are just for show. Then in the background they’re expanding a coal power plant. Would really fit the california vibe.
@@24680kong The big problem is GTA6 is Miami, FL
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Public Utility Commission, Mr. Austin puts in a lot of work in the public sector.
My first video ever where I dont skip a sponsorship ad 🤣🤣his approach is very good 🙆🏽♂️😂
Thank you for your service.
Ofcorse the chilliad subreddit had the power grid mapped out, god bless that subreddit. They tried everything to get that damn Jetpack and we were robbed of the joy of discovering it.
B-roll footage of The Conduit? The Conduit??????
If you release a video essay about the conduit, I’ll release a video essay about the conduit
You can’t have 1 single live wire. You would need at least 2 wires for a return path (neutral). For safety there should be a third wire (ground/earth)
Although the single cable you’re referring to in the picture would have multiple wires inside that one cable.
Transmission Line Engineer here - I just wanted to say that I love these videos. The lines themselves make no sense but it’s still really fun to break it down!
8:19 So I work in telecom and there's a safety rating for how close you can get to the power lines. It's based on the length of the insulators. I believe it's 10 times the length of the insulator, but it may have been less. The insulators are a given length because they have to be longer than the possible arc length for the voltage on those wires, so technically you could get up to as close as the length of the insulators away from the wires, but I don't recommend it. Also the flea market near me has a transmission line running over the edge of it that constantly makes noises that concern me.
I found your channel through the Liberty City power lines video and very glad I did. The biggest feeling of kinship and belonging I felt watching your videos was when I noticed you love observing NPCs going about their day just as much as I do, almost as if I'm negotiating a mental budget with the game for my suspension of disbelief. Then I saw the river videos and I'm convinced receiving validation for one's weird obsession is probably the most gratifying feeling in the world. Please keep doing what you love
it's been a while since I've fully watched a sponsor pitch
sponsor ends at 3:31
Support or man AnyAustin
Most annoying sponsor I've seen
@@Movilancerclearly youve never watched JoJo S or the Paul Brothers or any other American RUclipsrs
😘
@@BilobateDripour?
Grady is an absolute legend for this. You actually got me thinking we were on our own for this one.
Something to note: Electrical bushings have the power lines passing through their centre from one end to the other, allowing them to go into metal-cased equipment without risk of arcing from the lines to the metal case. These are what you see on most of the equipment in the substations.
What you call bushings on the transmission towers are in fact insulators, which ensure the power lines are held far enough away from the structure entirely (again, to prevent arcing).
Suspension insulators (shown at 8:28 ) have the power lines go in a relatively straight line, only connecting to the tip of a single insulator per tower.
The transmission towers shown in-game appear to use tension insulators, where the power line is held between the tips of two insulators, with a U-shaped section of the line hanging between them.
However, this extra section of wire does not appear to be present on the towers, meaning they would not actually transfer power past the transmission tower, let alone to the structures they fail to connect to.
(Either that, or they did, in fact, dangerously use bushings instead of insulators.)
not gonna lie this video is a fever dream. after the ad bro STILL has the underwear in his hands yet is still so nonchalant about the power grid of 2013s GTAV. incredible
All you had to do was follow the damn power line, CJ!
From a gamedev perspective (I know that yall know that but just let me have this) you're setting up a world for the player. But since your budget is limited, you kinda have to know which parts to indulge and which to leave as theatre props. Considering that GTAV's world is massive and REALLY well made, believable, detailed and most importantly huge, I really don't blame Rockstar for not designing a functional electrical grid for Los Santos, this is one of the things that can be, looking "Good enough", where you won't question it as long as you don't go out of your way to nerd out about it...
... And I do love nerding out over game worlds like this don't get me wrong... The more useless the trivia the better
1:36 brought me back to 2004, good lord that sound is burned into my brain
Star wars battlefront 😢
WE LOST A COMMAND POST, BUT NOT THE BATTLE
@@LorenzoDeenee to this day I still play as the clones during a clone wars match on Rhen Var: Harbor. It still hits even after 20 years lmao
When he played that sound I got so much dopamine
i work in the power line grids in Italy and i just wanted to say that you don't really need equipment to 'split' wires in transmission towers or any other utility pole, think it as a really long pipe that transports water or gas, electricity naturally flows where the potential is lower (or where needed in simple words)
Great video! i love when someone puts attention to details in general
1:32 The Star Wars: Battle Front map loading reference sent me to full nostalgia heaven
Bro we are old now
It's not the first time he's used it. I hope it becomes a core component of this channel.
Gotta love finding the exact comment I was about to type at the top of the comment section lol
I'm genuinely so ecstatic that this video and your channel exist. I *love* honing in on the silly little details and drawing as much out of them as humanly possible, it's part of why I've decided to become a cultural historian in real life. It's always so fascinating to see the human touches in a work like GTA V and for someone else to share in the fascination of the benign.
"video games are impressionist pieces of art"
What a bomb to drop as an aside a propos of basically nothing. Nobody else does it like that.
Yeah honestly that's a surprisingly good way of stating that while miraculously not sounding like a pompous prick.
"bomb" doing a lot of lifting here.
@@EdenAdema Do you think its spelled atropos?
@@EdenAdema its not
I never thought I would watch a 23 minute video about fictional power lines in a video game and stay entertained, but here we are.
This video reminded me I had ordered Grady's book three months ago and it hadn't arrived yet. I just checked and it's stuck at some depot. I don't blame Grady for that, I blame the useless postal subcontractor. Hope I get it soon.
If you reach out to him I’d imagine he’d figure something out
If you are in Canada there is a postal strike going on.
I think the wires you point to at 8:35 as 'guy wires' are actually lightning protection. If there's a very narrow wire at the very top of transmission lines or above substations, that's usually lightning protection. Lightning hits these instead of the power lines and gets grounded at the towers, protecting the power grid. Your overall conclusion about the photo is correct, there's no power on that tower, it's probably been decommissioned and the lines have been removed.
Mt Chiliad turned out to be an abandoned project, another victim of GTAO, along with the planned (and announced) single-player DLC which Taketwo Interactive forced Rockstar to drop, then denied all knowledge of despite the Rockstar Newswire post announcing it being visible to this day.
It became the Doomsday Heist
The mystery can be solved in story but with the addition to aliens in Zancudo gtao still has a bigger mystery
@@bennywarren17 Yeah, GTAO can fuck off as the cancer that it is.
i didnt see the previous video with grady in it and was so excited to see him in this one!! im a big fan of practical engineering and it was a real treat to see him :)
9:42 the mem fbombs!!!! 🤣
Can I just say the Star Wars battlefront one “zooming in” sound effect was just delightful
Any Austin's videos are connected directly to my heart
I love the idea of the community coming together to look into some stuff like this as a group