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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

(nee.lv)
3883 points kuroguro | 5 comments | 28 Feb 21 19:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.85s | 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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nikanj ◴[28 Feb 21 21:39 UTC] No.26297332[source]▶
The old maxim of "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" has over time evolved to "If you care one iota about performance, you are not a good programmer".
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ehsankia ◴[28 Feb 21 23:54 UTC] No.26298281[source]▶
That doesn't really apply here. I don't even play GTA V but the #1 complain I've always heard for the past 6 years is that the load times are the worst thing about the game. Once something is known to be the biggest bottleneck in the enjoyment of your game, it's no longer "premature optimization". The whole point of that saying is that you should first make things, then optimize things that bring the bring the most value. The load time is one of the highest value things you can cut down on. And the fact that these two low hanging fruit made such a big difference tells me they never gave it a single try in the past 6 years.
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1. djmips ◴[01 Mar 21 00:35 UTC] No.26298514[source]▶
Sure it does apply. These complaints come out after the game has been released. They should have optimized this before they released, while they even designed the system. However that's considered premature optimization, when in fact it's just bad design.
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2. ehsankia ◴[01 Mar 21 08:38 UTC] No.26300730[source]▶
> while they even designed the system

See, that's exactly why you're wrong. This wasn't a bad "design". If the fix required to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, then you would have a point and thinking about it "prematurely" would've been a good idea. In this case, both the fixes were bugs that could've been fixed after the game was finished without having to undo much of the work done.

The whole point of the saying is that you don't know what's gonna be a bottleneck until after. Yes by optimizing prematurely, you would've caught those two bugs early, but you would've also spent time analyzing a bunch of other things that didn't need to be analyzed. Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow, you're only spending the minimum amount of time necessary on fixing the things that matter.

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3. jcelerier ◴[01 Mar 21 11:53 UTC] No.26301852[source]▶
> Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow

I think that we should also stop doing crash tests in cars. Just release the car to the public and analyze human crashes afterwards.

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4. handoflixue ◴[01 Mar 21 20:01 UTC] No.26307615{3}[source]▶
You do understand that "my entertainment takes 6 minutes to load" is a very different problem from "my essential transportation kills people"? And therefore call for different approaches?
5. ehsankia ◴[01 Mar 21 23:36 UTC] No.26310025{3}[source]▶
Putting aside the bad analogy that the other comment covers, the overall point I was making also covers doing the optimization before game release, but after the game is more or less complete. Rockstar optimizing during the final few months of playtest wouldn't be premature optimization.

Premature optimization is about trying to optimize the micro (a given function), while you don't yet have the macro (the game itself). If the function accounts for 0.1% of the performance of the final game, it doesn't matter if you make it 5x faster since that will only make the game 0.08% faster. You could've spent that time optimizing a different function that accounts for 10% of the performance, and even optimizing that function by 5% would make the game 0.5% faster, which is more impactful.