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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#21

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

blibble wrote: post #10

I tried playing GTA online once and actually gave up due to the loading times (on a top end gaming rig) I can't believe I'm alone, I wonder how much this cost rockstar

My exact same experience. As to what it cost, in the old world paradigm I'd say "nothing, we already bought the game", but I guess these days there's probably a decent argument for a cohort of people who are too impatient to wait to get into the game and who pay extravagant sums of real-world money to get in-game items immediately.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#22

Post by dieulot »

blibble wrote: post #10

I tried playing GTA online once and actually gave up due to the loading times (on a top end gaming rig) I can't believe I'm alone, I wonder how much this cost rockstar

Same. Asking around why players tolerate it, the anecdotal conclusion I’ve got is that what makes these frequent and extremely slow loads tolerable is playing with friends on audio chat.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#23

Post by Joker_vD »

flohofwoe wrote: post #3

Clickbait title ;) The problem wasn't strlen(), that just showed up at the bottom of the call stack when profiling. IIRC the actual problem was an exceptionally dumb JSON parser combined with parsing a pretty big JSON file (which probably also grew much bigger than the original developer working on that feature anticipated). Edit: the title has been edited in the meantime, originally it was something about strlen() b…

The JSON parser was not "exceptionally dumb": it just used sscanf(s, "%d", ...) for parsing numbers. But most implementations of C's standard library (yes, including BSD and Linux's) implement sscanf() by converting the source string into a dummy FILE* object (which involves calling strlen() to set the stream's size) and calling fscanf() on it. Apparently most people who use sscanf() are unaware of this "lovely" implementation quirk and I can't really blame them.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#24

Post by kuroguro »

aardvarkr wrote: post #19
flohofwoe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm aware, that article basically triggered the official patch. Would be interesting to know if the Rockstar patch provided a further speedup though.

The author provided an update at the bottom. His hack cut the tone from 6m to 1m 30s. The official rockstar patch took it down to 1m 53s. It’s MUCH better but still off the mark by a bit.

It was 1:50 vs 1:53 - probably just noise.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#25

Post by azemetre »

kevinventullo wrote: post #18

There’s an implicit story here which I find quite sad that not a single developer at Rockstar in the prior eight years had the autonomy or bandwidth to discover and fix this themselves.

I’m starting to slowly realize how terrible it is working in environments where people simply aren’t curious. It’s so hard for me as an individual contributor to decouple this way of thinking. Curiosity is how we find better ways of doing things or finding out hidden flows that can be better. Incurious people are a contagion, but I want to believe you can make people curious. It can’t be innate.

Every company talks about wanting to have driven curious employees to solve complex issues or challenges but you just get stomped with a boot to your face if you do anything outside your lane or simply ask why.

It’s also worse because I’m starting to realize how lucky I was to be raised as a curious individual from my parents who never went to college but at least were curious themselves about different things (pottery, soldering, gardening).

The quote “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form” suddenly has a different context when working for a company.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#26

Post by blibble »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #21
blibble wrote: post #10

I tried playing GTA online once and actually gave up due to the loading times (on a top end gaming rig) I can't believe I'm alone, I wonder how much this cost rockstar

My exact same experience. As to what it cost, in the old world paradigm I'd say "nothing, we already bought the game", but I guess these days there's probably a decent argument for a cohort of people who are too impatient to wait to get into the game and who pay extravagant sums of real-world money to get in-game items immediately.

yes, GTA online's business model is making you buy in-game currency and paid DLC

which is kinda hard if the game takes 30 minutes to load

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#27

Post by ddtaylor »

whizzter wrote: post #17
flohofwoe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but replacing the strlen() with a caching version is just fixing the symptoms (of calling strlen too often... but the only realistic solution without the ability to recompile the game - so kudos to the author to come up with this hack). I bet the "official" patch by Rockstar simply dropped in a less embarassing JSON parser library :)

You don't think that it's a bigger WTF that sscanf implementation calls strlen when parsing a number (when it iirc even ignores any non-digit characters for the actual number parsing so no reason it couldn't terminate that part w/o the extra call)?

sscanf is essentially being used as a tokenizer for the JSON grammar, which means something like this:

    {"foo": "bar"}
Is potentially turning into 5 different tokens:

    {
    "foo"
    :
    "bar"
    }
After each token the "state" of sscanf is being discarded and each invocation of sscanf is independent. The API simply isn't descriptive enough to know that a string is immutable and hasn't been changed and there are certainly many valid use cases where one might be re-using the same char[] buffer with different contents.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#29

Post by boredemployee »

kevinventullo wrote: post #18

There’s an implicit story here which I find quite sad that not a single developer at Rockstar in the prior eight years had the autonomy or bandwidth to discover and fix this themselves.

where I work at, it is completely discouraged to do anything out of what was asked you to do. so I don't judge the workers/slaves. It's not allowed to be creative/careful in most places if it's not harming the bosse's wallets.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#30

Post by aliswe »

This is why you need a language (on a framework) with high introspection, with smart insights. Excuse my opinionatedism, but this is what .NET Core gives you. It even streams JSON serialization/deserialization without much memory requirements, iirc.
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