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I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

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Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#171

Post by [deleted] »

s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #103
blowski wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#172

Post by tomschlick »

firefoxd wrote: post #170

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. ~~ Man…

That's why you stop asking permission to make quick fixes and just submit the PR. Obviously there is a balance here but if you can't "steal" a few hours in a week from the product driven roadmap to do so then there is something wrong in the engineering culture.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#173

Post by azemetre »

nkellenicki wrote: post #166
azemetre wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean at the end of the day we’re products of our environments.

If SWEs can only work on features and do nothing else that is still a sign of poor project management. Just accepting that fate is worse for your growth I’d wager.

But idk, I never worked in an environment that encouraged curious people either. I suppose the closest for me was working at Comcast but that was only one manager with a small team of 4 people and no real deadlines.

I feel like two separate thoughts came from replies to my comment. One advocating for engineers to push back and care about their crafts, the other absolving the choices that were clearly made by people as some mechanized process that could never be changed.

The only thing I’m wondering is what the replies would be like 10 years ago on HN.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#174

Post by ungamedplayer »

asdff wrote: post #149
baby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's ecommerce. This is a video game and a unique one at that, so there are other factors at play. I don't think many people go "game took forever to load, guess I'll play for less time then." There could even be a bullwhip effect, a long load time might make you want to stay playing for a longer period of time.

> I don't think many people go "game took forever to load, guess I'll play for less time then."

Ive quit some online games that take too long to load. Matchmaking times that are too long make me quit games.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#175

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

tomschlick wrote: post #172
firefoxd wrote: post #170

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. ~~ Man…

That's why you stop asking permission to make quick fixes and just submit the PR. Obviously there is a balance here but if you can't "steal" a few hours in a week from the product driven roadmap to do so then there is something wrong in the engineering culture.

Do any orgs explicitly ask the engineers themselves decide how to allocate a certain percentage of story points in a given sprint?

Product people are great for selecting which features to build out and which bugs to address, but are poorly equipped to decide how to prioritize things like: performance optimizations, bugfixes that haven't (yet) been reported by the end users, code refactoring, paying down tech debt, modernizing tooling, misc quality of life improvements for the engineering team, etc.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#176

Post by greggman3 »

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.

There's a attitude, arguably backed by sales, that load times don't really matter.

All of the Source games (HL2, Portal, Alyx, etc...) have arguably bad load times. They all sold great! GTA sold great even with it's previous load times.

It's just not a priority for most teams. In Rockstar's case it happened to be easy to fix but in most cases it's not so easy because the engineering team didn't want to deal with it.

AFAIK, Source, and maybe Unreal/Unity are built in such a way that by default, if you need to start the level over you have to re-load it entirely. They have mutable state spread all over the place and have no way to mark what's important (needs to be saved, what's not (can be zeroed), and/or they haven't bother to put all mutable state in a single places so either it can be restored from memory or loaded by just loading a tiny bit.

There's zero reason HL:Alyx should take 15-30 seconds to restart a level you're already in when clearly less than 1k of state has changed since you started the level. But, fixing that would require a major re-design of the Source engine. Slow load times don't affect sales. So almost no one does it. Easy just to let each gameplay programmer do whatever they want and to restart just reload the level.

I put up with it for some games (the ones mentioned above for example). But I've also quit a few recently. Games where you die a lot and to add to the frustration it takes 1-2 minutes to load again only to get killed in 5-20 seconds. That frustration means trial and erroring to figure out what to do gets a punch in the face and so I stop playing what might have been a good game otherwise.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#177

Post by Drew_ »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #175
tomschlick wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you stop asking permission to make quick fixes and just submit the PR. Obviously there is a balance here but if you can't "steal" a few hours in a week from the product driven roadmap to do so then there is something wrong in the engineering culture.

Do any orgs explicitly ask the engineers themselves decide how to allocate a certain percentage of story points in a given sprint? Product people are great for selecting which features to build out and which bugs to address, but are poorly equipped to decide how to prioritize things like: performance optimizations, bugfixes that haven't (yet) been reported by the end users, code refactoring, paying down tech debt, mo…

My last org did exactly that. The team lead that runs sprint planning was always an engineer. Product management is still there for direction and context, but the decision maker was always an engineer. I don't think this is particularly special way to do it, but I might be wrong.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#178

Post by Drew_ »

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…

Them making a lot of money doesn't prove that they couldn't have made more money. Everyone knows better performance means better conversion which means more $$$.

Re: I cut GTA Online loading times (2021)

#180

Post by lmm »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #175
tomschlick wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you stop asking permission to make quick fixes and just submit the PR. Obviously there is a balance here but if you can't "steal" a few hours in a week from the product driven roadmap to do so then there is something wrong in the engineering culture.

Do any orgs explicitly ask the engineers themselves decide how to allocate a certain percentage of story points in a given sprint? Product people are great for selecting which features to build out and which bugs to address, but are poorly equipped to decide how to prioritize things like: performance optimizations, bugfixes that haven't (yet) been reported by the end users, code refactoring, paying down tech debt, mo…

My first job worked like that. We explicitly had a 25% stream of technical improvements. It worked pretty well.
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