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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#71

Post by sassy_quat »

jrlowe wrote: post #47
mrandish wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just to be clear, you are saying, matter of factly, that the whole point of the American education system, is to suppress free thought.

You better tell Congress, the last thing they want is for America to fall into totalitarianism.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#73

Post by yeahSo »

Hamuko wrote: post #38
yeahSo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good for them. Computing performance is relative between machines.

I have no obligation to confirm for you relative truth. Gathering the evidence would be a waste of time and CPU cycles for what is ultimately an ePeen size competition.

Fact: my computers hardware and software configuration loads GTA5 in 5-6 minutes. I experienced it first hand two days ago. Sorry all of physical reality does not align with your experience, not sorry.

Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#74

Post by rvba »

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…

It is not that developers arent curious. They probably are in their cages set by bad project managers who dont even play own game and dont notice it takes forever to load.

The project managers could put load times as a priority but they genuinely dont see it as a problem or dont care at all. It happens all the time. There is a lot of unoptimized software.

Perhaps the issue comes from the top: the project managers are supposed to only do things that increase revenue and all other things are not rewarded at all? Perhaps executives only care if they hit quartely results? (Short term gain traded for long term loss - the game is made for whales who are so invested that they will play even when it is technically bad - so milk them now with new content for whales and ignore everththing else, who cares that new players will be discouraged by bad load times).

In my opinion if nobody plays own game / eats own dogfood, they dont even see its problems. Blizzard is at this stage now - some of their games barely work. You buy Starcraft 1 through the launcher... and it doesnt work(I think it works now, but it took them 1 month to notice it and another to fix it). Heroes of the storm - downloaded a 137mb patch every run - it took them half a year to notice it and do something with it. It is like nobody cares about the brand at all. Game company where your games dont work.

IMHO a problem with people - that comes from the top. They want only story points for things that bring money. The project managers either dont care, or cannot deal with other problems at all. I bet they dont care. This happens in many companies - there were few people who tried, they got burned for that: terminated or quit -> so now nobody cares. "The game is good enough to still sell some skins to the whales, so why bother".

Look at the results: they got an external comment what to fix. Did they launch their own internal project to optimize the game? Did they check for other things that make it load slow? It looka that someone else did a partial fix that is "good enough" so everything is back to usual and nobody cares about load times.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#75

Post by aidenn0 »

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 don't know that #2 is universally true. I am at a point in my career now where I will be able to comfortably retire without ever being promoted again (i.,e. CoL raises only). Judging by the salary ranges I see on offer for jobs for people with 5+ years of experience, this can't be that rare.

When I see a pain point that looks soluble, I take a crack at it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I get recognized for it, sometimes I don't. One, relatively minor (to me) thing, ended up being a big business win and my manager made sure I got a fat bonus for it. Other things have seemed more like a win for me that nobody but 2 of my peers ended up caring about.

#1 is true to the nth power though. I've seen places where if you do something even one millimeter outside of your silo, it will come up as a negative in your performance review. As in, if you write a 5 line perl script that makes you significantly more productive, do not share it as you will be asked time and time again why you wasted your time on something outside of your job description.

I think something missing for the context of TFA is that the gaming industry tends to be much more deadline focused than other industries. In theory you might be free to "make miscellaneous changes like this" but only if things aren't already behind schedule, and things are always behind schedule.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#76

Post by NateEag »

sassy_quat wrote: post #71
jrlowe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Just to be clear, you are saying, matter of factly, that the whole point of the American education system, is to suppress free thought. You better tell Congress, the last thing they want is for America to fall into totalitarianism.

John Taylor Gatto was an award-winning public schoolteacher who more-or-less agreed with this sentiment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#77

Post by ReaLNero »

aidenn0 wrote: post #75
ReaLNero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know that #2 is universally true. I am at a point in my career now where I will be able to comfortably retire without ever being promoted again (i.,e. CoL raises only). Judging by the salary ranges I see on offer for jobs for people with 5+ years of experience, this can't be that rare. When I see a pain point that looks soluble, I take a crack at it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I get r…

> As in, if you write a 5 line perl script that makes you significantly more productive, do not share it as you will be asked time and time again why you wasted your time on something outside of your job description.

This sounds like something I'd see in a Dilbert comic. Do you mind sharing what industry you work in? Perhaps you saw this in old-fashioned industries like banking or insurance? Have you experienced this in tech?

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#78

Post by blowski »

azemetre wrote: post #57
khalladay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should developers necessarily be trying to cut loading times? Perhaps GTA is phenomenally successful because they have good BAs and POs who are able to identify and convince engineers to work on what matters to the bottom line.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#79

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

aliswe wrote: post #30

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.

> This is why you need a language (on a framework) with high introspection, with smart insights.

That would be nice if it were true.

What happens in reality is you end up paying the performance cost in other areas specifically due to the framework. Frameworks tend to cater to very broad use cases and will generally be less performant than custom code written for one specific use case. Frameworks also tend to be extremely interdependent meaning that to rip out one part (for perf) you need to rip out another huge part.

That is why, to this day, if one's business NEEDS something to be performant (no do-overs! no second chances!) then industry veterans will opt for custom systems. Yes they'll have more edge case bugs. Yes they won't be performant in areas you don't care about. But you will still sell 165 million copies of your game because it performs well on a bunch of different platforms with varying specs.

This particular case is more of an organizational problem. No one was responsible for load times, it wasn't a priority to improve, and users weren't complaining enough about it to matter.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#80

Post by aidenn0 »

ReaLNero wrote: post #77
aidenn0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that #2 is universally true. I am at a point in my career now where I will be able to comfortably retire without ever being promoted again (i.,e. CoL raises only). Judging by the salary ranges I see on offer for jobs for people with 5+ years of experience, this can't be that rare. When I see a pain point that looks soluble, I take a crack at it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I get r…

> As in, if you write a 5 line perl script that makes you significantly more productive, do not share it as you will be asked time and time again why you wasted your time on something outside of your job description. This sounds like something I'd see in a Dilbert comic. Do you mind sharing what industry you work in? Perhaps you saw this in old-fashioned industries like banking or insurance? Have you experienced this…

This specific story was a friend working for a large defense contractor. I've never worked directly for a defense contractor, but know enough people that have that I should note that culture varies greatly from site to site; different sites of very large companies might as well be different companies (and in many cases were different companies before being purchased).

That sort of thing also varies with perceived team performance. If your team is perceived by upper mid-management (or higher) as being "good" then individuals on the team have more freedom. If your team is perceived as being "not good" then every deviation from standard practices is clearly the cause of the poor team performance.

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