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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

(cookieplmonster.github.io)
1371 points yett | 1 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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db48x ◴[23 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43772686[source]▶
[flagged]
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mschuster91 ◴[23 Apr 25 14:43 UTC] No.43772801[source]▶
To u/db48x whose post got flagged and doesn't reappear despite me vouching for it as I think they have a point (at least for modern games): GTA San Andreas was released in 2004. Back then, YAML was in its infancy (2001) and JSON was only standardized informally in 2006, and XML wasn't something widely used outside of the Java world.

On top of that, the hardware requirements (256MB of system RAM, and the PlayStation 2 only had 32MB) made it enough of a challenge to get the game running at all. Throwing in a heavyweight parsing library for either of these three languages was out of the question.

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1. debugnik ◴[23 Apr 25 19:02 UTC] No.43775548[source]▶
JSON didn't save them: This is the same studio that handrolled a JSON parser with accidentally quadratic time complexity, making most players wait 3 to 10 minutes to load GTA Online, for 7 years, until a player got tired and found the root cause.

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...