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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#121

Post by ssharp »

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.

Certainly there has to be some portion of the potential audience who would have become microtransaction purchasers who didn't because they were turned off by the long load times.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#122

Post by wizzwizz4 »

sassy_quat wrote: post #86
NateEag wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sharing knowledge and understanding doesn't have to be an argument.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#123

Post by baby »

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.

Shows that dogfooding is one of the best thing you can do for your product. I remember reading a story about Valve when they were working on Dota 2, I think Gabe said that every day after work they would play for hours and couldn't stop.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#124

Post by baby »

asdff wrote: post #115
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

Probably nothing. Loading times in rockstar games on consoles have always been this bad. GTA4 was just as bad too.

You're probably wrong. I remember e-commerces trying to quantify how many millions of dollars they would lose when clicking would take too much time on their websites.

EDIT: things like https://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cos...

> Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#125

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 »

sreekotay wrote: post #113
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw this. Developers should advocate for their craft and for quality, and business metrics should hold an adversarial position to balance things out. We definitely should not be accepting the narrative that developers just do what they are told and don't push back on what we know is good for product - we are in a unique position of power, we should recognise this and use it for the betterment of the industry as a w…

Very much agree with this. That said given the quality of what they have put out, I'd surmise the issue here is morelikely they don't feel the same pain on load times? Bandwidth too good, rigs too powerful, dev envs overpowered, etc. to enable developer velocity can often also mask real world problems. Hell, even hot reload can mean you don't see load as often and are able to easily rationalize as "not that big a dea…

I very much agree with you as well actually.

One of the things that I've instituted at my work is our methodology for acquiring test phones for our product (WhatsApp for hospitals, basically). We go to a supermarket and buy the most eye-catching box of the budget phones available in the phone aisle.

We've squashed so many bugs and performance problems this way. It's cheaper, it instils empathy in product decisions, and our customers love the user experience as a result.

Similarly, one of my first big decisions after joining was to wean ourselves from our AWS addiction using Kubernetes. This also allowed us to design a dev env that fits on a modern machine comfortably, but can scale to entire Hospital Trusts in production. Once again: focusing on portability now means we can sell our product on-prem and hybrid, because we designed our developer UX this way.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#126

Post by unwind »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #70
Joker_vD wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All of the above, I guess.

It wants to reuse code in fscanf(), but for that it needs a FILE * interface. But to create that, it needs to implement EOF-handling, and to do that it needs to provide a size, so it has to call strlen().

I had no idea. :|

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#127

Post by madrox »

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.

This was discussed a bit in the original post [1] but I believe this comes down to the problem being sufficiently deep in the stack that there was an assumption that this wasn't something that could be improved on. I'm sure the loading code looked good.

It took someone who didn't know what that code looked like being curious about what was actually happening.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#128

Post by dusted »

First of all, I find it an impressive skill to be able to do this on a binary blob.

Secondly (optimistic version), it really shows that they (management) didn't care, that nobody ever made a ticket to fix loading times, since this would be trivial do find with a normal profiler on a debug build.

Secondly (pessimistic version), nobody at rockstar had enough skill and/or professional pride/sense of ownership to find this out themselves.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#129

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 »

blowski wrote: post #118
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw this. Developers should advocate for their craft and for quality, and business metrics should hold an adversarial position to balance things out. We definitely should not be accepting the narrative that developers just do what they are told and don't push back on what we know is good for product - we are in a unique position of power, we should recognise this and use it for the betterment of the industry as a w…

Sounds like an extremely false dichotomy. There is also the solution that you set up your own company, or convince your manager your time is best spent on this. I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with…

> There is also the solution that you set up your own company, or convince your manager your time is best spent on this.

This is the definition of a flippant comment. Why should society require we become the lord of our own domain or a political chameleon just so that we can advocate for decent standards? Should people who live on flood plains "just move" when the tide comes in? Ridiculous.

Understanding the bigger picture includes understanding the developer's point of view.

> I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with the system without making any actual improvements and call it “paying down technical debt”.

Sounds like those super-clever managers didn't understand what the hell was going on to me. Perhaps they should've held their nose and tried to learn about their product so they can understand and communicate that bigger picture they speak of instead of abdicating their adversarial role and leaving dev teams rudderless.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#130

Post by havblue »

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.

You would think that the more time people spend playing the game, the more money the game makes. I would think online loading metrics would be a similar problem for whomever is responsible for input latency.
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