I cut GTA Online loading times (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#31

Post by jenscow » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:00 PM UTC

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 strongly believe that R&D teams should have some time reserved to "do what you want" (limited to product improvement, obviously)

Perhaps this might not be appropriate in the gaming industry... and who knows if Rockstar don't already have this.

However, the GTA loading time is horrendous (and I had a spectrum sinclair when I was a kid) - surely there must have been a work item, ticket, bug reports, or whatever, for this.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#32

Post by sfteus » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #8

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…

It's funny though. Several years ago a coworker did some profiling on one of our server software components and found that it was spending up to 10% of the CPU time in strlen()... for very similar reasons.

Had something similar happen with low-level components in a PHP application I inherited repeatedly calling trim() and/or str_pad() on values that had already been processed. Refactoring those out led to a 10-15% performance boost in our test suites.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#33

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:04 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #25

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 a…

Don't blame the people, blame the environment.

People might start off curious but eventually they keep running into political roadblocks and other nonsense, which slowly beats the interest out of them.

If those are the kinds of people that continue surviving then those are the kinds of people which your environment cultivates.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#34

Post by kingcharles » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

I used to be a video game developer.

I guess it's down to priorities and passing the buck.

Our priorities were always on profiling the running game to make sure we got every ounce of juice out of the hardware and the game ran smoothly on the lowest systems. I can't think of one time we would have had the spare time to look at loading times. In those days we were being pushed into 80+ hour weeks just to make the game work at all, never mind finding time for "luxuries" such as this.

And of course, on a big team, a problem like this would always be someone else's problem.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#35

Post by bastardoperator » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

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

Not much, the GTA5 online scene is alive and well. Considering they've sold this game over the course of three generations makes me believe they've made a mega flipton of money off this game.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#36

Post by yeahSo » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #9

malka wrote: post #4

Did rockstar ever release a patch for this ?

They took his fix, applied it to the game in an update and paid him a bug bounty of $10,000. "Just got awarded $10k through their H1 in-game bounty as an exception" https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/360061161574/GTAV...

Anecdotally; I still wait 5-6 minutes for online to load, and 3-4 for single player.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#37

Post by alach11 » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

azemetre wrote: post #25

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 a…

Sadly at Rockstar it's likely that employees are curious, but are under so much pressure for deadlines, and working such long hours, that they don't have time to follow their curiosity.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#38

Post by Hamuko » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

yeahSo wrote: post #36

Hamuko wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took his fix, applied it to the game in an update and paid him a bug bounty of $10,000. "Just got awarded $10k through their H1 in-game bounty as an exception" https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/360061161574/GTAV...

Anecdotally; I still wait 5-6 minutes for online to load, and 3-4 for single player.

Digital Foundry measured a 20.2-second boot load time for GTA V single player on the PS5 and 28.9-second boot load time on a PC. Not even the PS4 takes 3-4 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5QHInJShQw

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#39

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

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

Think about how many human lifetimes worth of extra minutes were wasted from everyone waiting for this x number of players X years this has been a problem. Even if you can’t implement bubble sort on a whiteboard in your sleep, 5+ minute load times should have been setting off alarm bells in many engineers heads. I’m sure this did actually cost R* real money. Bounce rates for websites increase 32% for 1s vs 3s load times, according to Google: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... Obviously we don’t have public data on it but I’m quite sure that some at least some people got frustrated with waiting and just stopped playing.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#40

Post by jawarner » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #39

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

Think about how many human lifetimes worth of extra minutes were wasted from everyone waiting for this x number of players X years this has been a problem. Even if you can’t implement bubble sort on a whiteboard in your sleep, 5+ minute load times should have been setting off alarm bells in many engineers heads. I’m sure this did actually cost R* real money. Bounce rates for websites increase 32% for 1s vs 3s load ti…

If you think about it, those lives actually were saved. People either didn't play the video game, or they spent a moment in the loading screen in quiet contemplation.