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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#161

Post by astrange »

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.

Rockstar doesn't publish new games very often, so if they have deadlines they're internally-set ones.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#162

Post by LegitShady »

xwolfi wrote: post #94
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 work in a company where that can happen. In fact we had just a case today. For the last 20 years, our ever growing C# monster application used across the world to make millions, literally, had random crashes. Comes with volume spike, usage spike, we never quite knew: everything would display a red cross, the gdi handlers would reach 10k and bam. For 19 year we just looked at it in defeat. For the last year, bit on…

2 hours lunch are you guys hiring?

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#163

Post by badlucklottery »

terafo wrote: post #159
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?…

Game was out for almost EIGHT YEARS by the time this bug was fixed. There can be no reasonable explanation for them not fixing that. 5 minute load every time you try to go into multiplayer. The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. This bug was a reason why I never played GTA online, for example.

>The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering.

The players who are still there are used to it so the value is likely near zero. It's the sort of thing that's 100% worth fixing before launch or soon after so you don't lose players in the first place. But the fix loses value every day it goes unfixed because you're already lost those load time-sensitive players. Keep in mind that years after release it still makes Rockstar/Take-Two millions per day (https://www.thegamer.com/gta-5-rockstar-2-5-million-per-day/) so I guess a lot of players just don't care.

For the record: I'm surprised anyone is willing to tolerate that shit.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#164

Post by Bjartr »

badlucklottery wrote: post #163
terafo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game was out for almost EIGHT YEARS by the time this bug was fixed. There can be no reasonable explanation for them not fixing that. 5 minute load every time you try to go into multiplayer. The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. This bug was a reason why I never played GTA online, for example.

>The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. The players who are still there are used to it so the value is likely near zero. It's the sort of thing that's 100% worth fixing before launch or soon after so you don't lose players in the first place. But the fix loses value every day it goes unfixed because you're already lost those load time-sensitive players. Keep in mind that years after release…

Lots of people cite long load times as why they stopped playing GTA5. They are certainly making bank, but they also certainly left money on the table because those players who left could have still been there and spending money.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#165

Post by darylteo »

terafo wrote: post #159
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?…

Game was out for almost EIGHT YEARS by the time this bug was fixed. There can be no reasonable explanation for them not fixing that. 5 minute load every time you try to go into multiplayer. The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. This bug was a reason why I never played GTA online, for example.

Performance issues are one of those things that are easily waved off with broad explanations like "well there's a lot of assets to download", "their internet connection may be slow" etc. it may not have been clear to anyone at that stage that it was a "bug".

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#166

Post by nkellenicki »

azemetre wrote: post #102
Griffinsauce wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming curiosity was the problem instead of a lot of other possible factors like bandwidth.

I wasn't blaming this problem solely existing due to being incurious but more of lamenting how corporate environments don't encourage people to be curious.

That may have been your intention, but your statement of "environments where people aren't curious" comes across as putting the blame on the people themselves. As has been stated elsewhere, often times engineering is lacking in bandwidth to do anything but meet the deadlines.

I don't disagree that the "environment" itself could do more to further making improvements outside of the assigned work - initiatives such as 20% time, cafe days, etc. exist in other companies. But I don't put the blame on the curiosity of the people themselves.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#167

Post by Laforet »

thewebcount wrote: post #153

I've noticed similar stupid problems playing Portal 2 with a friend. Downloading the maps takes a really long time, but I've got a decent internet connection and so does my friend. It appears that when his machine is loading, my machine has no network activity whatsoever, and then once he's loaded the maps, then my machine will start loading them and his machine has no network activity. The game has a number of other…

I had to do a double take when reading your comment before realizing that you were probably referring to the Mac version of Portal 2. If that is the case then it's not unexpected, for OSX routinely break compatibility between major versions unless the developer is able to keep up with the changes.

This is not to say things are that things are that much better on the windows side. While most 32bit binary run fine in WoW64, driver issues become more common as the games get older.

Another major issue is 3rd party services bundled with the games that are no longer available. I can name more than a dozen of games published around 2010 that are no longer available for purchase because the original build depends on the deprecated Games for Windows Live service and would refuse to launch without it installed.

Microsoft abandoned GFWL around 2018 and turned off the online installer at a later date so you would have to download an offline installer from some dodgy non-official website. Thankfully it still works with current versions of windows as long as you still have the physical copy of the game, and the backend of GFWL is partially working with achievements still being synchronized with Xbox Live accounts. But who knows how long that's going to last?

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#168

Post by tonmoy »

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.

If I recall correctly the Dev team didn’t notice this as they were using a test JSON which was not very complicated. Only when the game was in production did the complex JSON cause the long loading times

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#169

Post by chii »

darylteo wrote: post #165
terafo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game was out for almost EIGHT YEARS by the time this bug was fixed. There can be no reasonable explanation for them not fixing that. 5 minute load every time you try to go into multiplayer. The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering. This bug was a reason why I never played GTA online, for example.

Performance issues are one of those things that are easily waved off with broad explanations like "well there's a lot of assets to download", "their internet connection may be slow" etc. it may not have been clear to anyone at that stage that it was a "bug".

The underlying organizational problem then becomes the fact that performance isn't priority number 1. I would suspect that if the perf was taken seriously, some time spent on profiling would immediately reveal this issue.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#170

Post by firefoxd »

Another take:

Dev 1: Hey, I think we can improve the load time by fixing X, Y, and Z.

Dev 2: that's neat, create a ticket so we can keep track of that.

Product 1: hey, what's this ticket about?

Dev 1: oh, that's to speed up the load time. It's a quick fix.

Product 1: was that in the requirements?

Dev 1: No, but it will be a huge improvement.

Product 1: ok, I'll mark it as Tech debt, and put it in the back log.

~~ Many Month Later ~~

Dev 3: hey, did you know we can improve load time by updating X, Y, and Z?

Dev 2: Oh yeah, we even have a ticket for that. Let's let Product know it's still an issue and maybe they'll prioritize it.

Product 2: Was this part of the requirement?

~~ years later ~~

Product 3: hey, there's this old ticket here. Do you think it's still relevant?

Dev 35: I'm not familiar with that, but it's too old, most likely not relevant any more. We can delete it.

....

Dev N: Hey, I think we can improve the load time by fixing X, Y, and Z....

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