5 ms·

I'm genuinely surprised. Given how long they've left this untouched I thought they didn't care at all.

de6u99er 6y ago
Tbh: Looks more like they haven't been aware of it. This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  No it won't. It's ridiculous to blame a few devs for this. C/C++ has unknown quirks like this.
bogwog 6y ago
They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. AFAIK they've just been adding content to the online portion for the past 7~8 years, and you don't need engine programmers to do that.
- rubicon33 6y ago
  The fact that they didn't make this a priority to fix shows exactly how much this company actually cares about it's customers and it's reputation. It's unbelievable that despite the quite public outcry about the issue NOTHING was done until some 3rd party guy figured it out for them. I'm quite surprised they are even going to patch the game because the level of "we dont give a shit" I thought they had about this issue certainly would have prevented them from doing anything now.
  - indeedmug 6y ago
    Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace. It's probably not a handful. People need to stop pretending that their code is optimized and magically linear all the time. No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. There is no reasonable way for any person to fix things like this unless they are actually looking for it. How many people at Rockstar would be responsible for engine details like this and have the skill to find and fix it? A game video company employees artists, sound effect engineers, and etc. They aren't full of programmers combing over the source code for quadratic footguns.
    - rubicon33 6y ago
      > No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. What are you talking about? Nobody knew about it? Is that a joke? This long loading issue was posted EVERYWHERE and was the reason so many people gave up on GTA v. It’s simply impossible that they didn’t know the issue existed. That they chose to ignore it is the reality.
      - indeedmug 6y ago
        Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. I definitely shouldn't have said that when I don't work at Rockstar or know anyone who does. But I still think people are demonizing too much Rockstar and are trivializing the bug when it's far from obvious. In my opinion, there is a lot of hyperbole statements about this issue when it's more useful to think if your organization could or would catch bugs like this.
        rubicon33 6y ago
        Ok, to be fair I am doing to same thing (asserting opinions without facts). I don't work at Rockstar so it's true I have no idea how this bug was handled. I just have a hard time believing they didn't know about the bug, and I also have a hard time believing they didn't understand that it was one of the chief complaints from their end users (a simple check of any forum or discussion group is all thats needed). So, I an only assume short of an actual explanation, that they intentionally sidelined a fix for this bug. Why, is anyone's guess. If you had to ask me, management put all devs onto money making tasks like new items and store support, and fixing quality of life bugs even ones as egregious as this one, was a low priority.
    - lupire 6y ago
      The bug affected practically every user.
      - dean177 6y ago
        In a completely harmless way
- chc 6y ago
  "They had never gotten any programmer with the requisite expertise to take a look at the code in nearly a decade of opportunities" sounds more or less like a verbose phrasing of "They didn't care."
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    I mean someone probably looked at it briefly and said it was unfixable. Then management said don't waste anymore time on it.
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    Why would they care? The game made > $800 million. Players loved the game despite load time issues.
    - Brainlag 6y ago
      Because the could have made twice as much.
    - paulmd 6y ago
      Haha, oh kiddo. It was $6 billion as of two and a half years ago. GTAV is the most profitable entertainment product of all time.
      - ramblerman 6y ago
        Even more than WOW? I don't have the numbers but would have imagined that still takes the cake.
dbbk 6y ago
Seems most likely that they had just never dedicated the time to investigating the slowdown.
whizzter 6y ago
Frankly it might've just gone unnoticed however strange that sounds. Not privy to any details but a probably scenario is probably something like this. 1: Some dev gets tasked with implementing the system, at the time there probably wasn't that many ingame purchases so that 10mb json maybe was a 500k file tops? So going by the O(N2) factor it would've buzzed by in a second (probably faster since being smaller there would've been more cache hits giving another factor or 2). Being at about a second or less they don't even consider optimizing it since it's not noticed among all other assets being loaded. 2: The content/ops teams adds more IAP over the years (it's a datafile so that devs don't have to implement everything), since they're adding big models,etc they don't notice too big changes and probably just chalk it up to bigger models,textures,etc. 3: Engine devs (those most often tasked or obsessive about optimizations) might be running a cut-down server for most testing (not noticing the huge loading time) and probably presume it's other assets if testing in a full env. So in reality it's probably just an organizational oversight rather than "bad developers", now considering this public "shaming" they received they might actually place some people in an production optimization role for a while and optimize other parts if it's possible (the question is.. will they find it worthwhile to keep up in a longer period?).
- konschubert 6y ago
  That’s why you sometimes need a task force of as few people as possible. “I want you to improve loading times whatever it takes” Sometimes you’ve got to go hunting instead of fishing.

Tbh: Looks more like they haven't been aware of it. This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.

aaomidi 6y ago
No it won't. It's ridiculous to blame a few devs for this. C/C++ has unknown quirks like this.

bogwog 6y ago

They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. AFAIK they've just been adding content to the online portion for the past 7~8 years, and you don't need engine programmers to do that.

rubicon33 6y ago
The fact that they didn't make this a priority to fix shows exactly how much this company actually cares about it's customers and it's reputation. It's unbelievable that despite the quite public outcry about the issue NOTHING was done until some 3rd party guy figured it out for them. I'm quite surprised they are even going to patch the game because the level of "we dont give a shit" I thought they had about this issue certainly would have prevented them from doing anything now.
- indeedmug 6y ago
  Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace. It's probably not a handful. People need to stop pretending that their code is optimized and magically linear all the time. No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. There is no reasonable way for any person to fix things like this unless they are actually looking for it. How many people at Rockstar would be responsible for engine details like this and have the skill to find and fix it? A game video company employees artists, sound effect engineers, and etc. They aren't full of programmers combing over the source code for quadratic footguns.
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    > No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. What are you talking about? Nobody knew about it? Is that a joke? This long loading issue was posted EVERYWHERE and was the reason so many people gave up on GTA v. It’s simply impossible that they didn’t know the issue existed. That they chose to ignore it is the reality.
    - indeedmug 6y ago
      Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. I definitely shouldn't have said that when I don't work at Rockstar or know anyone who does. But I still think people are demonizing too much Rockstar and are trivializing the bug when it's far from obvious. In my opinion, there is a lot of hyperbole statements about this issue when it's more useful to think if your organization could or would catch bugs like this.
      - rubicon33 6y ago
        Ok, to be fair I am doing to same thing (asserting opinions without facts). I don't work at Rockstar so it's true I have no idea how this bug was handled. I just have a hard time believing they didn't know about the bug, and I also have a hard time believing they didn't understand that it was one of the chief complaints from their end users (a simple check of any forum or discussion group is all thats needed). So, I an only assume short of an actual explanation, that they intentionally sidelined a fix for this bug. Why, is anyone's guess. If you had to ask me, management put all devs onto money making tasks like new items and store support, and fixing quality of life bugs even ones as egregious as this one, was a low priority.
  - lupire 6y ago
    The bug affected practically every user.
    - dean177 6y ago
      In a completely harmless way
chc 6y ago
"They had never gotten any programmer with the requisite expertise to take a look at the code in nearly a decade of opportunities" sounds more or less like a verbose phrasing of "They didn't care."
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I mean someone probably looked at it briefly and said it was unfixable. Then management said don't waste anymore time on it.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Why would they care? The game made > $800 million. Players loved the game despite load time issues.
  - Brainlag 6y ago
    Because the could have made twice as much.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    Haha, oh kiddo. It was $6 billion as of two and a half years ago. GTAV is the most profitable entertainment product of all time.
    - ramblerman 6y ago
      Even more than WOW? I don't have the numbers but would have imagined that still takes the cake.

dbbk 6y ago

Seems most likely that they had just never dedicated the time to investigating the slowdown.

whizzter 6y ago

Frankly it might've just gone unnoticed however strange that sounds. Not privy to any details but a probably scenario is probably something like this. 1: Some dev gets tasked with implementing the system, at the time there probably wasn't that many ingame purchases so that 10mb json maybe was a 500k file tops? So going by the O(N2) factor it would've buzzed by in a second (probably faster since being smaller there would've been more cache hits giving another factor or 2). Being at about a second or less they don't even consider optimizing it since it's not noticed among all other assets being loaded. 2: The content/ops teams adds more IAP over the years (it's a datafile so that devs don't have to implement everything), since they're adding big models,etc they don't notice too big changes and probably just chalk it up to bigger models,textures,etc. 3: Engine devs (those most often tasked or obsessive about optimizations) might be running a cut-down server for most testing (not noticing the huge loading time) and probably presume it's other assets if testing in a full env. So in reality it's probably just an organizational oversight rather than "bad developers", now considering this public "shaming" they received they might actually place some people in an production optimization role for a while and optimize other parts if it's possible (the question is.. will they find it worthwhile to keep up in a longer period?).

konschubert 6y ago
That’s why you sometimes need a task force of as few people as possible. “I want you to improve loading times whatever it takes” Sometimes you’ve got to go hunting instead of fishing.