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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

(nee.lv)
3883 points kuroguro | 3 comments | 28 Feb 21 19:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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comboy ◴[28 Feb 21 20:26 UTC] No.26296735[source]▶
Holy cow, I'm a very casual gamer, I was excited about the game but when it came out I decided I don't want to wait that long and I'll wait until they sort it out. 2 years later it still sucked. So I abandoned it. But.. this... ?! This is unbelievable. I'm certain that many people left this game because of the waiting time. Then there are man-years wasted (in a way different than desired).

Parsing JSON?! I thought it was some network game logic finding session magic. If this is true that's the biggest WTF I saw in the last few years and we've just finished 2020.

Stunning work just having binary at hand. But how could R* not do this? GTAV is so full of great engineering. But if it was a CPU bottleneck then who works there that wouldn't just be irked to try to nail it? I mean it seems like a natural thing to try to understand what's going on inside when time is much higher than expected even in the case where performance is not crucial. It was crucial here. Almost directly translates to profits. Unbelievable.

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mdoms ◴[28 Feb 21 21:32 UTC] No.26297263[source]▶
Me and my twice-a-week gaming group enjoyed GTA V but abandoned it years ago simply because of the load times. We have 2x short slots (90-120 minutes) each week to play and don't want to waste them in loading screens.

We all would have picked this game back up in a second if the load times were reduced. Although I must say even with the same results as this author, 2 minutes is still too long. But I'll bet that, given the source code, there are other opportunities to improve.

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1. thw0rted ◴[01 Mar 21 12:00 UTC] No.26301902[source]▶
I wonder if a paid subscription would have fixed this? If you left a paid MMO, they'd probably ask you to fill out an exit survey, and you could say "I'm canceling because load times are terrible", which would (hopefully) raise the priority of reducing load times. But since GTA online is "free", there's not a single exit point where they can ask "why did you stop playing".
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2. thatguy0900 ◴[02 Mar 21 17:15 UTC] No.26317613[source]▶
Gta has made billions off of its shark card micro transaction system. So the incentives are probably pretty similar for player retention. Granted, the players leaving over load times are probably not the players who are invested enough to spend thousands in micro transactions.
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3. thw0rted ◴[03 Mar 21 09:41 UTC] No.26326402[source]▶
That's my point though, you don't get to survey people not buying the microtransaction because they quit due to terrible load times, whereas you could survey people who cancel a subscription. I guess they could still gather data by reading reviews, looking through forums / Reddit / whatever, and tallying up complaints, though.