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That's insane to achieve that without access to source code. It's also completely baffling that a company would invest such resources building such a complex g

That's insane to achieve that without access to source code. It's also completely baffling that a company would invest such resources building such a complex game and be fine with 6 minute load times, caused by such ... dumbness. Like selling a sportscar with a 5 litre petrol tank.

DanielHB 3y ago
the people maintaining GTA online systems are probably not the same ones who developed the main game (or even the initial GTA online systems) They are probably just adding more content, but the original dev's algorithm for loading that content didn't expect a bazillion new cosmetics
- wwalexander 3y ago
  Yep. The entire game is like this, massive amounts of content clumsily tacked onto something that they clearly didn’t realize would become so popular. This also shows in the interface, where basically every piece of gameplay is triggered by plumbing through the massively overcrowded Quick Menu.
jvmboi 3y ago
My sneaking suspicion is that the real reason that everything is so slow is that noticeable loading or processing times give the software a feeling of heft. It strokes our ego as programmers because if something takes a while to complete then it must be very complicated and important.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  Interesting. I have never thought about it like this. To me it always feels like bliss if something finishes instantly,
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ionwake 3y ago
I cant understand why there wasnt mass firings across managements and a post mortem, aswell as a hiring of the guy who fixed it, 6 figure reward and a new team setup to troubleshoot final build performance problems. But I can understand thats its normal large companies are so incompetent, and at an older age I appreciate it gives a chance to the little guy or company to rise up, for now, until AI starts to catch these issues and large inefficient corporations can finally solidify their place in the hierarchy.
- bena 3y ago
  Because, and I'll say this in the spirit of your recommendations, that's fucking stupid. The problem was sscanf calling strlen. You're going to fire your management and development team because one dev used sscanf where it's probably appropriate? Then hire a guy who may or may not have actual game development experience and give him $100k because he took who knows how many hours to trace through and find this thing. The guy himself the fix would probably take a day to implement. Finding it could have taken longer. You want to call Rockstar incompetent, but you're simply going to ignore everything else that goes right in not only GTA Online, but across all of their games.
  - wruza 3y ago
    It’s not stupid to hire a guy with profiling experience when you have no profiling team that could address an obvious, outstanding, almost game-definitive issue which players hate and often quit after a disconnect. Maybe not this guy, but at least some.
    - bena 3y ago
      And what is that guy going to do the rest of the time? I'm sorry, no company is going to pay someone only to arbitrarily profile their software looking for potential bottlenecks to remove. The only reason this story is notable is that there was a conclusion. He could have easily found nothing to fix. It's just a stupid, knee-jerk reaction to call for the heads of everyone remotely responsible and replace them with the guy who happened to find the issue. And of course it looks like a straight shot from noticing the problem to finding the problem. I'm not going to put in every single dead end. Unless they happen to be interesting or relevant. While the past looks like it obviously leads to the present, it only does that because we've already walked the path.

DanielHB 3y ago

the people maintaining GTA online systems are probably not the same ones who developed the main game (or even the initial GTA online systems) They are probably just adding more content, but the original dev's algorithm for loading that content didn't expect a bazillion new cosmetics

wwalexander 3y ago
Yep. The entire game is like this, massive amounts of content clumsily tacked onto something that they clearly didn’t realize would become so popular. This also shows in the interface, where basically every piece of gameplay is triggered by plumbing through the massively overcrowded Quick Menu.

jvmboi 3y ago

My sneaking suspicion is that the real reason that everything is so slow is that noticeable loading or processing times give the software a feeling of heft. It strokes our ego as programmers because if something takes a while to complete then it must be very complicated and important.

rowanG077 3y ago
Interesting. I have never thought about it like this. To me it always feels like bliss if something finishes instantly,
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ionwake 3y ago

I cant understand why there wasnt mass firings across managements and a post mortem, aswell as a hiring of the guy who fixed it, 6 figure reward and a new team setup to troubleshoot final build performance problems. But I can understand thats its normal large companies are so incompetent, and at an older age I appreciate it gives a chance to the little guy or company to rise up, for now, until AI starts to catch these issues and large inefficient corporations can finally solidify their place in the hierarchy.

bena 3y ago
Because, and I'll say this in the spirit of your recommendations, that's fucking stupid. The problem was sscanf calling strlen. You're going to fire your management and development team because one dev used sscanf where it's probably appropriate? Then hire a guy who may or may not have actual game development experience and give him $100k because he took who knows how many hours to trace through and find this thing. The guy himself the fix would probably take a day to implement. Finding it could have taken longer. You want to call Rockstar incompetent, but you're simply going to ignore everything else that goes right in not only GTA Online, but across all of their games.
- wruza 3y ago
  It’s not stupid to hire a guy with profiling experience when you have no profiling team that could address an obvious, outstanding, almost game-definitive issue which players hate and often quit after a disconnect. Maybe not this guy, but at least some.
  - bena 3y ago
    And what is that guy going to do the rest of the time? I'm sorry, no company is going to pay someone only to arbitrarily profile their software looking for potential bottlenecks to remove. The only reason this story is notable is that there was a conclusion. He could have easily found nothing to fix. It's just a stupid, knee-jerk reaction to call for the heads of everyone remotely responsible and replace them with the guy who happened to find the issue. And of course it looks like a straight shot from noticing the problem to finding the problem. I'm not going to put in every single dead end. Unless they happen to be interesting or relevant. While the past looks like it obviously leads to the present, it only does that because we've already walked the path.