LITTLE ITALY - DISTRICT EXTENSION
LA MESA BLOCK REWORK
I am pleased to present the Little Italy project. A fusion of an old industrial American district and an Italian neighborhood. A place where an opportunist looking to open a start-up business, someone looking for housing in a classic New York styled neighborhood or a mobster looking for a safe haven for his illegal operation hidden in the heart of a residential area can retreat.
After several months of work (more like constant rework), I finally managed to release a new project that focuses on adding New York / Liberty City culture to the current map of Los Santos. and gives that East Coast vibe, that some people might be looking for.
The project went through several phases and its original idea was to create residential complexes in the La Mesa district that would adhere to the architectural style and palette of materials that the district offers. But during production, I encountered conflicts with the original part of the map, which in my opinion downgraded the overall effect of the residential area. Later, I decided to slightly rework a few buildings to expand half of the industrial block, still keep a few original warehouses and aspire the entire project to be based on Los Angeles modern architecture. But even this result did not fully convince me of the fulfillment of its potential.
A few months later, a new idea came - to introduce architecture from New York / Liberty City using the palette of materials from Los Santos and expand the current districts with Italian. During my time in the roleplaying community, I have come across dozens, if not hundreds, of cases where players resort to adapting the mafia or syndicates of the East Coast of America. And so a representation of the Italian community was created in the forgotten side of the Los Santos Canal - Little Italy. A place where the Italian wave of migration encountered the old American industrial revolution.
The neighborhood itself is made up of unique buildings that were modeled based on real properties that I came across either directly in Brooklyn or New Jersey (traveling in Google Earth is an underrated tourist activity). None of the building models are taken from the current GTA 5 or GTA 4 map and only share a texture palette.
The second section is commercial-residential and forms the middle strip stretching from the railroad tracks in the west to the asphalt of Popular Street - the main drag of the La Mesa neighborhood. The buildings are made up of residential townhouses specific to the real Little Italy, NYC. Next to them is the old Clemente Hotel, again inspired by New York architecture. The second half-block of the central lane is made up of lower residential buildings, one of which contains the interior of a typical New York loft, a closed Italian restaurant and a pawnshop “Offer you can’t refuse”.
The third and final section at the lowest point of the new block is a purely residential area, made up of classic single-family homes. Here, the architecture of the buildings is based purely on New Jersey. The eastern side of this section contains a few businesses such as Peter & Paulie’s Real Estate Office, massage and nail studios, but mainly there is a remnant of the original inhabitants of the La Mesa neighborhood - the Irish Darnell families. After them, on the ground floor of the white corner building, Darnell Bros Pub and Darnell Bistro remain. The southern tip of Little Italy is separated from the warehouses of La Mesa by a narrow natural strip filled with vegetation, the paths of which lead you either to Popular Street or to the park on the eastern part of the block.
3 MLOS (2 walk-in warehouses and 1 port-in shell of LOFT apartment) for V1.0
Optimized for undisturbed performance in the form of;
Low-poly models (minimal virtual memory load - most complex building is 2MiB rest is under 1MiB)
High quality LOD & SLOD system that seamlessly swaps between HD version
Optimized collisions (separated for peds & cars vs gun decals (hi@col including low-poly meshes))
Custom Occlusion map
Complete Navmesh
| Assets are accessible | METADATA, YBNs & YTDs |
| Subscription-based | No |
| Texture size and amount | Up to 1024px |
| Recommanded GameBuild | 3717 |
| Support | Yes |
MAP WORKS WITH OLDER GameBuilds (3258+) but 3717 gives access to statues & wallart in Loft Interior) and you risk conflict issues from previous DLC (be sure to check bob74_ipl stream folder, if you are running older builds - ybn conflict possibility).
| MLO | Yes |
| Number of interiors | 3 |
| Requirements & dependencies | Requirements |
Word to the wise, remembah’ Pearl Harbor 
