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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

(nee.lv)
3883 points kuroguro | 1 comments | 28 Feb 21 19:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.338s | 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. bborud ◴[01 Mar 21 16:02 UTC] No.26304073[source]▶
I went back and had a look at that maxim a few years ago and found that it actually doesn't say what many people claims it says. And definitively not as the blanket excuse for slow code that it has always to some degree been used as.

The reason for the misunderstanding is that the kinds of practices it actually talks about are uncommon today. People would often take stuff written in higher level languages and reimplement them in assembler or machine code. Which makes them more time-consuming to change/evolve.

It also isn't like it is hard to figure out which part of a piece of software that is taking up your runtime these days. All worthwhile languages have profilers, these are mostly free, so there is zero excuse for not knowing what to optimize. Heck, it isn't all that uncommon for people to run profiling in production.

Also, it isn't like you can't know ahead of time which bits need to be fast. Usually you have some idea so you will know what to benchmark. Long startup times probably won't kill you, but when they are so long that it becomes an UX issue, it wouldn't have killed them to have a look.