How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

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.)

The popular view is that companies who write software know how to prioritise, so if a problem like this isn't fixed, it's because they've done the calculations and decided it's not worthwhile.

I disagree. If there are no internal incentives for the people who know how to fix this to fix it, or if there's no path from them thinking fixing it could improve revenues to being assigned the ticket, things like this won't get fixed. I can fully believe the load times will result in fewer users and lower expenditure.

I think we'll see this happen with Facebook Messenger. Both the apps and the website have become slow and painful to use and get worse every month. I think we'll start to see engagement numbers dropping because of this.

You have just described why I laugh anytime someone complains that government is inefficient. ANY organization of sufficient size is "inefficient" because what a large organization optimizes for (for reasons I cannot explain) cannot align with what that organization's customers want optimized.

With the added difference that governments also have to be far more procedural by virtue of the way they are set up. Regardless of size they are accountable and responsible to a far higher degree in the eyes of the population they represent so there is a legitimate reason to be "slow".

In games the added reason to be slow is that game code is by definition some of the least mission critical code one could find (competes with 90% of the internet web code). Your Linux or Windows code might run a hospital's infrastructure or a rover on another planet. A game on the other hand can launch with bugs the size of your windshield, and can stay like that forever as long as people still pay. And people will pay because games are not unlike a drug for many people.

As such most game coding teams and coders are "trained" to cut every corner and skimp on every precaution. They're not needed beyond a very low baseline as far as software is concerned.

Look at the amount of bugs or cheats incredibly popular games like GTA or CoD have. These are billion dollar a year franchises that leave all this crap on the table despite all the money they make. They have all the resources needed, it's a conscious call to proceed like this, to hire teams that will never be qualified enough to deliver a high quality product and will be encouraged to cut corners on top of that.

Source: a long time ago I worked for a major game developer in a senior management role (unrelated to the dev activity) and left after feeling like "facepalm" for too long in every single SM meeting.

Remember this story from a few days ago?

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis...

I've seen plenty of interesting bugs, best I found personally was a compiler that was outputting files 1 byte at a time.

Games are riff with these sorts of bugs, but the volume of released games vs other types of software makes any sort of comparison unfair.

> but the volume of released games vs other types of software makes any sort of comparison unfair.

No comparison is entirely fair but I think your objection is unfounded. The quantity of games being released is irrelevant when we're talking about the quality of their code. Which is really bad for most big titles.

If anything the comparison was unfair in the other direction. Sure, an OS or browser have a lot of bugs. But if games and their code had a fraction of the scrutiny something like Windows gets you might just find out that 4 lines of code were written "by the book". It's something any honest game dev will confirm, game code is a stack of spaghetti code on top of more spaghetti code. The philosophy is that you can just go ahead with bad code because you can always fix it with a patch later on. Then you notice there's no widespread pushback from gamers (because unless it's an absolute bomb there won't be) and move on with the next round of "features", nobody has time for fixing bugs or combing the spaghetti.

One other problem is that eventually some people coming from the gaming industry will end up switching to other types of software development but will stick to the philosophy. I've done a lot of hiring over my career and of one thing I'm certain. Whenever someone came with most of their career in game development or most of the recent experience I asked for the CV to be put at the bottom of the stack. It was a lesson I learned the hard way.

Issues like the low criticality of game code, the "crunch" work style, the idea that you should just get it out there as quickly as possible, the lack of serious scrutiny into the matter, etc. all compound each other to create a coding (and coordination) style that's hard to shake off.