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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#61

Post by bastardoperator »

blablabla987 wrote: post #42
bastardoperator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By the time you get to the loading screen they've already profited. The fact that they continue to sell the same game over and over means individuals have likely purchased the game multiple times meaning they don't care about loading times, they just like the game.

It's easy to say their management is shitty from the comfort of your computer, but the reality is Rockstar produces great games, and they're making a ton of money because there games are good. I find most multiplayer games have a start up cost, glad they shortened it, but I don't think it's stopped anyone from playing that really wants to play.

https://www.thegamer.com/gta-5-rockstar-2-5-million-per-day/ https://www.tweaktown.com/news/80912/grand-theft-auto-made-o...

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#62

Post by mrandish »

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.

Having been on both sides of this (as a developer and later a senior manager with product/feature responsibility), I'd say it can be both. A really good manager/executive has enough knowledge and experience to ask the right questions and parse the answers even when they are technical. Sadly, many managers aren't that good (at least yet).

On the other side, a really good developer has the knowledge and experience to frame the problem in an understandable business context when communicating the issue and options to management. Some of the best work experiences I've ever had were in orgs with such experienced developers and managers. Working together we were often able to solve apparently intractable problems with creative options which would never have been conceived absent the clarity of thought and communication on both sides.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#63

Post by ramesh31 »

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…

>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.

That's because "curiosity" translates to "more work" at #BigCo. And people work at #BigCo so that they can comfortably do as little work as necessary to maintain their lifestyles. This is a hard rule for any organization. So if you want what you're describing, it will only be found at small startups where everyone has skin in the game.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#64

Post by themerone »

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 have a solid 2-3 years worth of work assigned to me in my issue tracker, with new issues rolling in every day.

All I can do is prioritize and hope nobody gets too unhappy that their pet features is never going to happen.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#65

Post by switchbak »

ReaLNero wrote: post #43
boredemployee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had this situation fluctuate at my workplace. When misc changes are supported, and those improvements are actually valued by management, I've seen the system improve dramatically.

I've also seen a single-minded focus on pushing cards across a board, which seems to typically correlate with higher levels of a dogmatic SCRUM process.

Pushing cards is great, but not when it prevents the various little things that have to happen to cultivate quality software. Especially not when there's a gatekeeper prioritizing these things into oblivion.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#66

Post by shultays »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #49
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.

Serious digging was needed because he does not have the source. Any devs could easily profile the game during loading and that sscanf or strlen would be at top

Maybe they saw sscanf and assumed it is normal that it takes time, but more likely there were so much stuff to do and somehow no one checked

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#67

Post by swarnie »

thatswrong0 wrote: post #45

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

Because the user experience isn't important.

Enough still play it and buy a few micro tractions per month regardless of the load times Dev time is better spent reskinning a hat or something.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#68

Post by barrysteve »

blobbers wrote: post #60
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.

The customer has put up with 6 minute load times, but a low framerate kills sales quickly (unless you're Star Citizen).

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#69

Post by azemetre »

ajuc wrote: post #52
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…

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.

Yes but death marches are typically a sign of bad project management IME. As for lack of curiosity, the environment obviously plays a huge role in what is encouraged.

I feel like history is repeating itself here (at least in regards to death marches):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#70

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #23
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" impl…

Is C's std impl slow because of calling strlen() or due to converting into a dummy FILE* object or due to calling fscanf?
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