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

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#41

Post by jdwithit » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:30 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…

+1 to the other replies here, I think it's very poor form to throw the engineers under the bus for not being curious. The most likely explanation is they were under insane time and resource constraints, especially in the games industry. They wrote something that worked, then were forced to move on to the other 5000 tasks in their backlog that had to get done before release. When you're already being told to crunch 80+ hour weeks for months or years at a time, you run out of gas.

I guess it's possible that the engineers who were talented enough to create this extremely impressive game in the first place somehow threw up their hands and said "guess it can never take less than 7 minutes to load, best we can do". But it seems much more likely that they were well aware, but never allowed by poor management to go back and fix it. The game was released and printing money, why bother. They're on to the next title.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#42

Post by blablabla987 » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

bastardoperator wrote: post #35

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.

I know so many people that have stopped playing due to the loading times. Just because a scene is active and alive, doesn't mean it couldn't be even more active and alive with such a minor fix that could be implemented within a day.

I am pretty sure they lost >100.000.000$ by that. Just shows how shitty the management over there is that they never tried fixing that problem.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#43

Post by ReaLNero » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

boredemployee wrote: post #29

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.

In order for a worker to bother with this

1) It has to be alright to make miscellaneous changes like this, and

2) It has to contribute to getting promoted.

The second point is IMO why random QoL changes like this are rare in large corporations.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#44

Post by mrandish » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:42 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…

> I want to believe you can make people curious

In my experience it's the opposite. Most people are born innately curious. It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. For many of us that conditioning begins in the traditional education system and is completed in the workplace.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#45

Post by thatswrong0 » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

I cannot fathom how dysfunctional Rockstar must be that this slipped through the cracks for so long given the fact that GTA Online is Rockstar’s cash cow.

6 minutes is insanity and must have turned off so many people from playing.. this person deserved far more than $10k

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#46

Post by khalladay » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:45 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…

I'd be careful about painting the developers at Rockstar as "not curious," that feels like an incredibly unfair conclusion to draw from this. Those developers have other pressures, and deadlines to hit. There are a million reasons why this bug wasn't solved by the team there. When a user complains about a bug in software you wrote, is it because you just "weren't curious" enough? Or is the situation more complicated?

Lots of incredibly talented people worked on GTA Online, it's worth trying to think through why a team of smart developers might not have prioritized this, rather than assuming something negative about them.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#47

Post by jrlowe » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #44

azemetre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I want to believe you can make people curious In my experience it's the opposite. Most people are born innately curious. It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity. For many of us that conditioning begins in the traditional education system and is completed in the workplace.

>It takes intense systemic conditioning to suppress their natural curiosity.

Yep, the public school system in America excels at squelching curiosity and any desire to learn.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#48

Post by switchbak » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

alach11 wrote: post #37

azemetre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When problems are this obvious, it's surprising that someone doesn't have a look, even if they're busy. Maybe I'm asking too much/projecting here, but I just don't understand how people put up with fairly obvious semi-breakage as much as they do.

I have this at my current job, I seem to be the only one (not really, but seems like it sometimes) interested in finding out why things are slow/broken and investing the time to fix it. If you're "busy" all the time, but put up with things that slow you down, you're hamstringing yourself by not fixing the brokenness. When only a small number of people take the time to fix things (typically other's issues), that becomes very demotivating.

That would be like being on an all-day ski tour, and feeling too rushed to bother getting rid of the slush on your skis. Yes, you feel rushed because you're moving slower that usual. Taking 4 minutes to kick the slush off will make you much faster on the overall trip. (Sharpening the saw analogy, etc).

Sometimes "busy" is a state of mind, more than it is a reflection of reality. I know each situation is unique, but I've seen this enough times to understand that it's often a form of dysfunction rather than a reasonable reaction to the work situation. This is like when people used to say "we're too busy to write tests". Well, maybe you need to get better at communicating the trade-offs to the broader business, and be a bit more assertive about non-functional aspects that are still important to address.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#49

Post by jonwinstanley » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:47 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.

To be fair, the person that found the issue was persistent and did some serious digging to figure out what was going on.

I imagine that even if you were on the GTA team, you'd most likely think the long loading time was unavoidable due to some complexity you were not aware of.

Great work to solve it from outside of the company.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#50

Post by ALittleLight » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

jdwithit wrote: post #41

azemetre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1 to the other replies here, I think it's very poor form to throw the engineers under the bus for not being curious. The most likely explanation is they were under insane time and resource constraints, especially in the games industry. They wrote something that worked, then were forced to move on to the other 5000 tasks in their backlog that had to get done before release. When you're already being told to crunch 80…

The problem with this way of thinking is that it basically absolves everyone of blame. Bad stuff happens and nobody's at fault. You point to the managers, because the engineers were so busy, but the managers are going to claim they were busy too. Again, from the manager's perspective - the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it.