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 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.

For what it's worth, 10MB of JSON is not much. Duplicating the example entry from the article 63000 times (replacing `key` by a uuid4 for unicity) yields 11.5MB JSON.

Deserialising that JSON then inserting each entry in a dict (indexed by key) takes 450ms in Python.

But as Bruce Dawson oft notes, quadratic behaviour is the sweet spot because it's "fast enough to go into production, and slow enough to fall over once it gets there". Here odds are there were only dozens or hundreds of items during dev so nobody noticed it would become slow as balls beyond a few thousand items.

Plus load times are usually the one thing you start ignoring early on, just start the session, go take a coffee or a piss, and by the time you're back it's loaded. Especially after QA has notified of slow load times half a dozen times, the devs (with fast machines and possibly smaller development dataset) go "works fine", and QA just gives up.

> Plus load times are usually the one thing you start ignoring early on, just start the session, go take a coffee or a piss, and by the time you're back it's loaded.

In GTA V, when I tried to enjoy multiplayer with my friends the abysmal load times were what killed it for me.

You actually have to load into the game world - which takes forever - before having a friend invite you to their multiplayer world - which takes forever, again.

So both a coffee, and a piss. Maybe they fixed that now?

> So both a coffee, and a piss.

Reminds me on loading "G.I. Joe" (from Epyx) on the C64 with a 1541 floppy disk. However, the long loads came after every time you died and meant you also had to swap 4 disks.

I remember as a kid I went to someone's birthday party in the 80s and we wanted to play a karate themed game on something that used a cassette tape. It took so long to load we went and played outside!

To be fair to GTA V, I don't think my installation was on a SSD because it was 50GB or something at the time (now it's 95GB?), but that said when it released SSDs were not as cheap or widespread as they are now so that's their problem. The linked article shows the initial load to be much shorter which did not match my experience.

Oh gods, now I'm reminded of a cassette based game where there was one enemy where if he got a solid hit on you, you got bumped back to the beginning of the level.

Which meant the game displayed "rewind to mark 500 and then hit play" and you had to do that to restart lolsob.