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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#81

Post by heurisko »

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.

It's not a particularly American phenomenon.

I can remember reading "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Illich whilst in the UK's comprehensive school system.

On retrospect, I don't think I realised the importance of schools facilitating socialisation, rather than just learning.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#82

Post by outworlder »

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.

Not to mention, unless they have a really clever system to do hot code reloading, EVERY SINGLE DEVELOPER AND TESTER would have been plagued by these load times.

I wonder if the watercooler rooms at Rockstar are exceptionally furnished as a result.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#84

Post by blowski »

delusional wrote: post #56
ALittleLight wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a shareholder, I’d be rather happy with the management of GTA - it’s phenomenally profitable. That sounds like proper management to me.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#85

Post by rexpop »

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 never heard that Nabakov quote, but it's terrifically cynical and, I hope, false but, in my experience, not entirely untrue.

Designers' unnecessary desire to delight users staves off the more Kafkaesque user experiences, and we all live in the gap of cops' unnecessary (occasional) sympathy for (some) nominal outlaws (we're all nominal outlaws).[0]

When you mentioned curiosity I thought of a firm where colleagues scoffed at me as I rummaged through conference room drawers, saying, "you're not going to find anything interesting in there." I'm curious about cupboards as well as log traces -- an almost ubiquitously "eyes-glaze-over" boring artifact of modernity that, alongside popularly mind-numbing "code", I am equipped to find interesting.

Is it any wonder, then, in this workplace where such innocent, cheap, curiosity were scoffed at, I was not too long after threatened with the extraordinarily archaic (in our at-will state, at least) legal notion of "insubordination"?

It's a shame, because insofar as "all ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system,"[1] the liberated curiosity of individual contributors is often the only "crack in everything" that's "how the light gets in."[2]

0. "With two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent." (Françoise Bertaut de Motteville)

1. https://how.complexsystems.fail/

2. "Anthem" - Leonard Cohen

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#86

Post by sassy_quat »

NateEag wrote: post #76
sassy_quat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How are you incapable of understand sarcasm? In fact you're arguing from Appeal to Authority now. I just, I don't understand. The weird thing is that your argument is extremely convincing at first glance even though the entirety of your argument is in a link to wikipedia?

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#87

Post by outworlder »

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.

Nah.

We just need to stop this idea that JSON(or similar formats) is an acceptable data storage mechanism. It's fine when interacting with low bandwidth APIs across different systems, where the need for debugging is greater than performance.

But on a shipped game? Just bake this JSON into a better, binary serialization format. No need to parse data that seldom changes over and over again.

It doesn't matter if you can stream json, if you don't need to call strlen, what have you. Just don't parse unnecessary stuff.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#88

Post by hyperman1 »

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.

He did basic troubleshooting with task manager, on an obfuscated executable, with a disassembler and a memory dump, without knowing anything about the code base, and fixed it with in-memory patching. So while I agree introspection can be a godsend, this specific case is not a tooling problem.

Something this blatant is what happens if nobody takes a look. I can imagine they got tons of complaints, but 'it is slow' is nebulous enough to consider it basically unsolvable/normal. Maybe it never got a real bug report, maybe the report never made it past the service desk, maybe management thought it would cause a wild goose chase without resolving anything. But no developer looked into this, as just hitting a breakpoint in the 4 minute pause would insta-fix this.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#89

Post by rvba »

swarnie wrote: post #67
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.

You are probably being sarcastic, or cynical about current corporate business world where nobody cares.

But user experience is important. With faster lpad timea they probably could get more players. More players probably means more money, since there are more chances to convert someone from a player to a paying customer.

Perhaps if someone can endure a 6 minute load time they are more likely to buy something in the game (a fan of the series?), but we could say that those who like fast load times also use their wallets fast. But it is pure speculation - we dont have the data. Also obviously Rockstar doesnt have this data - they couldnt A/B test if load time converts to more sales - their game only had bad load times.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#90

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

switchbak wrote: post #48
alach11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

> 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.

You will quickly shed yourself of this philosophy if you become a business owner. You can test those waters by releasing a non-trivial open source project that gains a non-trivial amount of users.

There will always be at least 100 things that are broken in some way but not impacting the core business. You'll have to pick only 1 to work on. And, if you're unlucky, some frustrated customer may write a blog post about issue #65. An issue that you're fully aware of but haven't prioritized.

Guess what you'll do as a business owner? You'll prioritize that issue since it's now very visible and maybe even throw $10,000 at the customer who took time to do their research; as is what happened here.

> 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.

Or perhaps the need for tests was communicated and the business made the decision to not prioritize it.

You may not like that decision.

Mind that the decision to "not write tests" is never explicitly stated so simply. No one wants to look bad. Instead that decision is expressed through minimizing its level of priority compared to other things.

Still don't like the decision? Well you have three options:

1) Ignore the stated goals of the company and do what you think is right instead. In which case you're acting against the interests of the company that's paying you.

2) Sacrifice your own free time in order to provide your idea of value to the company (that may actually be valuable! but that the company doesn't value enough to prioritize)

3) Do what the company asks with plausible deniability. Also known as kicking the can. Also known as not my problem.

Sometimes doing #1 or #2 could greatly benefit you. Perhaps that thing you're doing (eg: writing tests) will somehow measurably improve the business in the future WITH PROOF so that you'll get get recognized. Or perhaps there's management shake-up and the new leadership perfectly aligns with your philosophy, etc, etc.

But that's rare.

More often than not your attempt at fixing the company's problems behind the scenes will go unnoticed and unrewarded. And if you do get rewarded, often times it's a pittance compared to the amount of time you invested.

My personal philosophy is I simply do not work for companies that don't align with what I value. For example, to me, it's exhausting and unrewarding to work at a company that doesn't appreciate a GREAT user experience.

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