Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

nee.lv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 221 posts

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#51

Post by hermitdev »

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.

There's other costs: how many times per day to R* devs & testers have to go through the same loading? How many man-hours wasted? How many compute resources wasted? How many upgrades were justified by "I need better hardware to get my job done in a timely manner"?

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#52

Post by ajuc »

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…

In gamedev where crunch is the default and people are routinely working for 10, 12 or more hours a day, sometimes including weekends, sometimes for months on end - it's not very kind to assume it's curiosity that they lack.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#53

Post by mrandish »

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.

> they've made a mega flipton of money off this game.

It can be simultaneously true that they made a lot off the game && with lower loading times they could have made even more. In-game microtransaction ARPU scales with playtime. >4 min per session spent waiting to load instead of playing == lost rev.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#54

Post by azemetre »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #33
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…

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.

That’s totally fair, I honestly meant to blame the environment and not people. It just sucks to see the pattern of curiosity get stamped out of people due to environmental changes that aren’t obvious.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#55

Post by delusional »

khalladay wrote: post #46
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'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?…

You might say that assuming this was due to inherent incuriousity amongst the developers is quite incurious.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#56

Post by delusional »

ALittleLight wrote: post #50
jdwithit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

"the managers aren't even in a position to understand the problem or the reasons for it." Which is again the fault of management. It is the responsibility of management to facilitate proper management.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#57

Post by azemetre »

khalladay wrote: post #46
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'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?…

I wasn’t trying to blame engineers that wasn’t my intention, but someone needs to own establishing the environment that actively encourages or doesn’t encourage curiosity.

Talented people are found everywhere, but hopefully someone with authority over them doesn’t slowly poison the drive out of them.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#58

Post by azemetre »

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…

It wasn’t my intention to blame engineers but I agree with the other reply to you, someone needs to be responsible for creating these environments. It’s not like we’re dealing with fundamental forces of nature here, this is all self afflicted.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#60

Post by blobbers »

kingcharles wrote: post #34

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…

You are saying a game had a 6 minute load screen and everybody would throw their hands up and say “but look at the dynamic lighting once it loads… it’ll all be worthwhile!”

If that’s not group think gone bad, I don’t know what is.

Post reply on HN