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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

(nee.lv)
3883 points kuroguro | 2 comments | 28 Feb 21 19:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.016s | source
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breakingcups ◴[28 Feb 21 20:25 UTC] No.26296724[source]▶
It is absolutely unbelievable (and unforgivable) that a cash cow such as GTA V has a problem like this present for over 6 years and it turns out to be something so absolutely simple.

I do not agree with the sibling comment saying that this problem only looks simple and that we are missing context.

This online gamemode alone made $1 billion in 2017 alone.

Tweaking two functions to go from a load time of 6 minutes to less than two minutes is something any developer worth their salt should be able to do in a codebase like this equipped with a good profiler.

Instead, someone with no source code managed to do this to an obfuscated executable loaded with anti-cheat measures.

The fact that this problem is caused by Rockstar's excessive microtransaction policy (the 10MB of JSON causing this bottleneck are all available microtransaction items) is the cherry on top.

(And yes, I might also still be salty because their parent company unjustly DMCA'd re3 (https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3), the reverse engineered version of GTA III and Vice City. A twenty-year-old game. Which wasn't even playable without purchasing the original game.)

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neatze ◴[28 Feb 21 21:46 UTC] No.26297401[source]▶
I am not saying it is the case, nor understand details of solution in depth to comment on it, but in analogy, this reads to me, like an yelling at person who figure out how to solve rubix cube puzzle steps, because once steps are known solution is simple.
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1. burlesona ◴[28 Feb 21 22:43 UTC] No.26297813[source]▶
No, other people have pointed this out, this should have been very easy to recognize as inefficient in the source code. More likely the code was written hastily and only tested against very small inputs, and then nobody ever actually tried to improve the famously long load times.
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2. wnoise ◴[28 Feb 21 23:23 UTC] No.26298088[source]▶
The sscanf issue was not obvious: it looks linear. And should be, on a better sscanf implementation.

The duplicate checking on the other hand is a classic "accidentally quadratic" case that is obvious.