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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: 0.423s | 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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1. GhostVII ◴[01 Mar 21 00:57 UTC] No.26298654[source]▶
The problem here isn't a lack of optimization, it's a lack of profiling. Premature optimization is a problem because you will waste time and create more complex code optimizing in places that don't actually need it, since it's not always intuitive what your biggest contributors to inefficiency are. Instead of optimizing right away, you should profile your code and figure out where you need to optimize. The problem is that they didn't do that.
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2. Cthulhu_ ◴[01 Mar 21 13:39 UTC] No.26302637[source]▶
I'd like to add, while GTA is running I'm really impressed by its performance, even / especially when it was on the PS3; you could drive or fly at high speed through the whole level, see for miles and never see a loading screen. It is a really optimized game, and that same level is continued in RDR2.

Which makes the persisting loading issue all the weirder.