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    How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

    (nee.lv)
    3883 points kuroguro | 14 comments | 28 Feb 21 19:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.889s | source | bottom
    1. trollied ◴[28 Feb 21 20:19 UTC] No.26296670[source]▶
    Wow. I always assumed that profiling would be part of the pre-release test processes for AAA games...
    replies(6): >>26296682 #>>26296732 #>>26296804 #>>26296878 #>>26296894 #>>26297012 #
    2. paulryanrogers ◴[28 Feb 21 20:20 UTC] No.26296682[source]▶
    Could it be that MMO players are just more accustomed to long load times? (Lack of loading patience is one of the reasons I don't play SWOTOR.)
    replies(1): >>26297330 #
    3. jimbob45 ◴[28 Feb 21 20:26 UTC] No.26296732[source]▶
    Same. I wonder if the dev didn’t bother to fix it because they assumed profiling would identify it as a non-issue.
    replies(1): >>26296756 #
    4. bombcar ◴[28 Feb 21 20:28 UTC] No.26296756[source]▶
    I wonder if the list was much shorter at release and wasn’t super slow on Developement systems.
    5. IgorPartola ◴[28 Feb 21 20:33 UTC] No.26296804[source]▶
    More importantly how do you release a game that takes 6 minutes to load? This is why mobile gaming has the advantage. In those 6 minutes I could have played a round of a game that’s quite satisfying and put it down already. This just seems sloppy.
    replies(3): >>26296836 #>>26296868 #>>26297100 #
    6. Aerroon ◴[28 Feb 21 20:37 UTC] No.26296836[source]▶
    I've actually opened a game with long loading times and alt tabbed out, because I knew it would take a while. I booted up another game to play a little bit until the first game finishes loading. 3 hours later I was done playing and realized that I was supposed to play game #1.
    7. superjan ◴[28 Feb 21 20:41 UTC] No.26296868[source]▶
    It’s quite possible that there were way less items in the store on launch, or during testing. Then it could easily be overlooked. Of course no excuse to not fix it later.
    replies(1): >>26296981 #
    8. gbl08ma ◴[28 Feb 21 20:42 UTC] No.26296878[source]▶
    I had heard about this giant JSON from friends in the GTA V modding community. OP's idea of what it is used for is right. My guess is that this JSON was quite smaller when the game released and has been increasing in size as they add more and more items to sell in-game. Additionally, I speculate that most of the people with the knowledge to do this sort of profiling moved on to work on other Rockstar titles, and the "secondary team(s)" maintaining GTA Online throughout most of its lifespan either didn't notice the problem, since it's something that has become worse slowly over the years, or don't have enough bandwidth to focus on it and fix it.

    It's also possible they are very aware of it and are saving up this improvement for the next iteration of GTA Online, running on a newer version of their game engine :)

    replies(1): >>26299548 #
    9. Negitivefrags ◴[28 Feb 21 20:44 UTC] No.26296894[source]▶
    When it was released the game didn't have all the microtransactions so it probably took no time at all to process the JSON even with this issue.

    Then over time they slowly add data to the JSON and then this O(n^2) stuff starts to creep up and up, but the farther away from release you are, the less likely that the kind of engineers to who do optimisation and paying any attention.

    They are all off working on the next game.

    10. IgorPartola ◴[28 Feb 21 20:56 UTC] No.26296981{3}[source]▶
    OK but how come even without the store it took more than 20-30 seconds? This was a beefy computer 7 years ago.
    11. yread ◴[28 Feb 21 21:00 UTC] No.26297012[source]▶
    Could be that at release the JSON was just 200kb with 1000 entries or something and this quadratic "algorithm" wasn't the slowest part of the process
    12. bluedino ◴[28 Feb 21 21:11 UTC] No.26297100[source]▶
    It was only one minute at first. As the game had content added, it got longer and longer and nobody cared.
    13. josephg ◴[28 Feb 21 21:39 UTC] No.26297330[source]▶
    When I used to play world of Warcraft, it never took more than 30 seconds or so to load. It got much faster over the years - when I was playing a few years ago it was more like 5 seconds from character selection to being in the world.

    Nothing like the 6 minutes people are talking about for GTA. That’s ridiculous.

    14. wruza ◴[01 Mar 21 03:53 UTC] No.26299548[source]▶
    are aware of it and are saving up

    Still much better than e.g. Ubisoft which repainted safety borders from red to blue and removed shadows in TM2 Canyon few years after release, also breaking a lot of user tracks. (If you’re not sure why, it was before a new iteration of the game)