5 ms·

That doesn't really apply here. I don't even play GTA V but the #1 complain I've always heard for the past 6 years is that the load times are the worst thing ab

That doesn't really apply here. I don't even play GTA V but the #1 complain I've always heard for the past 6 years is that the load times are the worst thing about the game. Once something is known to be the biggest bottleneck in the enjoyment of your game, it's no longer "premature optimization". The whole point of that saying is that you should first make things, then optimize things that bring the bring the most value. The load time is one of the highest value things you can cut down on. And the fact that these two low hanging fruit made such a big difference tells me they never gave it a single try in the past 6 years.

djmips 6y ago
Sure it does apply. These complaints come out after the game has been released. They should have optimized this before they released, while they even designed the system. However that's considered premature optimization, when in fact it's just bad design.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > while they even designed the system See, that's exactly why you're wrong. This wasn't a bad "design". If the fix required to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, then you would have a point and thinking about it "prematurely" would've been a good idea. In this case, both the fixes were bugs that could've been fixed after the game was finished without having to undo much of the work done. The whole point of the saying is that you don't know what's gonna be a bottleneck until after. Yes by optimizing prematurely, you would've caught those two bugs early, but you would've also spent time analyzing a bunch of other things that didn't need to be analyzed. Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow, you're only spending the minimum amount of time necessary on fixing the things that matter.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow I think that we should also stop doing crash tests in cars. Just release the car to the public and analyze human crashes afterwards.
    - handoflixue 6y ago
      You do understand that "my entertainment takes 6 minutes to load" is a very different problem from "my essential transportation kills people"? And therefore call for different approaches?
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Putting aside the bad analogy that the other comment covers, the overall point I was making also covers doing the optimization before game release, but after the game is more or less complete. Rockstar optimizing during the final few months of playtest wouldn't be premature optimization. Premature optimization is about trying to optimize the micro (a given function), while you don't yet have the macro (the game itself). If the function accounts for 0.1% of the performance of the final game, it doesn't matter if you make it 5x faster since that will only make the game 0.08% faster. You could've spent that time optimizing a different function that accounts for 10% of the performance, and even optimizing that function by 5% would make the game 0.5% faster, which is more impactful.
anotherfish 6y ago
We used to start up Quake while we waited then we'd forget about GTAO. Later we'd discover GTA had kicked us out for being idle too long. Then we'd just close it. That should be embarrassing for Rockstar but I don't think they would even notice.

djmips 6y ago

Sure it does apply. These complaints come out after the game has been released. They should have optimized this before they released, while they even designed the system. However that's considered premature optimization, when in fact it's just bad design.

ehsankia 6y ago
> while they even designed the system See, that's exactly why you're wrong. This wasn't a bad "design". If the fix required to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, then you would have a point and thinking about it "prematurely" would've been a good idea. In this case, both the fixes were bugs that could've been fixed after the game was finished without having to undo much of the work done. The whole point of the saying is that you don't know what's gonna be a bottleneck until after. Yes by optimizing prematurely, you would've caught those two bugs early, but you would've also spent time analyzing a bunch of other things that didn't need to be analyzed. Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow, you're only spending the minimum amount of time necessary on fixing the things that matter.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Whereas if you analyze it at the end once people complain about it being slow I think that we should also stop doing crash tests in cars. Just release the car to the public and analyze human crashes afterwards.
  - handoflixue 6y ago
    You do understand that "my entertainment takes 6 minutes to load" is a very different problem from "my essential transportation kills people"? And therefore call for different approaches?
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Putting aside the bad analogy that the other comment covers, the overall point I was making also covers doing the optimization before game release, but after the game is more or less complete. Rockstar optimizing during the final few months of playtest wouldn't be premature optimization. Premature optimization is about trying to optimize the micro (a given function), while you don't yet have the macro (the game itself). If the function accounts for 0.1% of the performance of the final game, it doesn't matter if you make it 5x faster since that will only make the game 0.08% faster. You could've spent that time optimizing a different function that accounts for 10% of the performance, and even optimizing that function by 5% would make the game 0.5% faster, which is more impactful.

anotherfish 6y ago

We used to start up Quake while we waited then we'd forget about GTAO. Later we'd discover GTA had kicked us out for being idle too long. Then we'd just close it. That should be embarrassing for Rockstar but I don't think they would even notice.