Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming

https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-thanks-gta-online-player-who-fixed-poor-load-times-official-update-coming/

by mmhsieh • 5 years ago

1032 321 5 years ago

pcgamer.com

matsemann• 5 years ago

Discussion about the findings two weeks ago:

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

brink2• 5 years ago

For all the amazing things Rockstar has made, for doing what no other studio could do on the Xbox360, it's crazy that they haven't fixed this before now.

dmos62• 5 years ago

doing what no other studio could do on the Xbox360

What's that?

brink2• 5 years ago

GTA5, two console generations later and most games still don't come close.

adwi• 5 years ago

Good on them for acknowledging something a little embarrassing and responding with gratitude instead ignoring to try to save some face.

swinglock• 5 years ago

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

de6u99er• 5 years 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.

bogwog• 5 years 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.

dbbk• 5 years ago

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

whizzter2• 5 years 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?).

jrimbault• 5 years ago

meta comment and completely feeling based : sometimes it really seems like companies, politicians, bureaucracies, don't have a process for acknowledging mistakes and/or lack of knowledge (and/or are seemingly not allowed to).

bendbro• 5 years ago

Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize.

Edit: an anecdote from the professor of my college's startup program (a hundred-millionaire former CEO/founder)- "never say sorry."

lsiebert2• 5 years ago

Ah that's because at many companies if you make a mistake you are a mistake.

Which is BS tbh. Everyone makes mistakes.

I think with politicians and political appointees, it's a little different because that's very much a public trust. Nobody deserves to hold political office, they should instead be deserving of it by being ethical and having integrity.

rubicon335• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if "embarrassing" is the right word here.

This bug has existed for years and has lead to hundreds, if not thousands of people quitting the game citing this exact reason yet Rockstar did nothing.

I think "shameful" is really more appropriate. It's not like they simply didn't know this existed. I think they have known all along it existed and didn't give 2 shits to fix it.

lambda_obrien• 5 years ago

It's a video game, so maybe give them some slack. We're not talking a SolarWinds breach here.

aantix• 5 years ago

The game supports 8 platforms, has virtually miles of terrain, and now Rockstar is suppose to feel ashamed because they didn't fix a big performance issue that affected startup times?

The game probably has tens of millions of lines of code.

I'm glad they shipped. If they can enhance the startup time, great, bonus for them. Additional credit for thanking the third party that uncovered the perf issue.

867-5309• 5 years ago

you forgot to mention that ads are displayed during the loading screen

rectang5• 5 years ago

An alternative possibility: there were 100 bugs of similar consequence, all of which they cared about, and they got 99 of them. This one escaped, because stuff happens.

I think "shameful" is really more appropriate.

When you make an inadvertent mistake in the future, karma is coming for you: people will speculate that you "didn't give 2 shits".

agumonkey• 5 years ago

If so then they still acted in a gentle way that is rare afaik. If they were so careless they'd just lift the fix and ignore the author.

NoPicklez• 5 years ago

I think "embarrassing" could still be the correct word. If you were to ask the development teams responsible they might feel a little embarrassed over the solution being so small (yet technical).

And if they didn't care at all given what you say then why would they care to implement a fix for it all these years later?

awill• 5 years ago

I understand your frustration, but anyone who's run (or been on) a dev team knows you have a million things you could/should be doing, and many, many priorities. Often supporting new launches/features is the priority.

Sure, ideally there would be someone internal advocating for a fix like this on behalf of customers. But Shameful isn't the right word. It's a miss like any other.

monkeypizza2• 5 years ago

Watch out not to condemn them no matter what they do. Sure, they messed up in the past, but given the situation they found themselves in when they saw this report, this response is still good.

You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.

pluc• 5 years ago

This is akin to that guy buying a whole-page ad to complain about his ISP recently, resulting in enough shame to trigger action. It's a bad look for Rockstar considering the income that title generates and at most it was a few weeks worth of dev time. Very interesting to watch the public reaction to this in comparison though, seems to be a lot more sympathy for Rockstar than for ISPs.

seppel• 5 years ago

There probably is a story behind it. Like some developer looked into the bug in the beginning (when when the load time was not that bad because the json file was smaller), saw that the time was spend parsing json, and then, without thinking too much whether this makes sense, wrote in the bug ticket that, to make it faster, they would have to switch from json to something better/faster/different.

Since switching the file format is probably some work, maybe involving many differnt teams and network protocols, the bug was closed because it too much efford.

And then, whenever somebody complained, the old bug was referred which unfortunately never got a proper analysis.

Sad, but I saw this happening many times in the past in some projects. Since the old and wrong analysis will be in many powerpoint slides and heads, it is incredible hard to argue against or get even time to work on such a problem. Usually, you need someone who just takes some time form other projects without telling anyone and ninja fixes the problem to solve it.

lumberingjack4• 5 years ago

They still made like a billion dollars in shark cards so apparently all the people buying shark cards didn't give a shit about the load time issue and that's the real problem.

specialist• 5 years ago

Based on my own experiences, I'm absolutely certain many people over many years tried to get the load time fixed, and then were beaten down for their earnestness.

Just as I'm certain that this unsolicited 3rd party fix was used to settle some old scores.

Corporate politics is a blood sport.

AdamJacobMuller2• 5 years ago

instead of ignoring

as-if that's the worst they could do. Suing the guy, pressing for charges with CFAA or DMCA anti-circumvention. There were far worse ways this could have gone.

sneak• 5 years ago

It is a common misconception that the victim can "press charges" against someone for a criminal matter. This is entirely false.

Only the prosecuting attorney (someone employed by the government) gets to choose when and how someone is charged with a crime. The victim has no say whatsoever in the matter, and indeed the DA can charge someone even when the victim doesn't want them to, or decline to prosecute even when the victim requests it.

dna_polymerase• 5 years ago

If shorter load times there translate to higher conversions in the same way this connection is observed by Amazon [0] this guy just made Rockstar a little fortune. Hiring the blogger outright and giving them a VP of Something Something Role would be more adequate.

[0] https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-...

IshKebab• 5 years ago

"Turns out, they were right." err yeah of course. Nobody doubted them.

saagarjha• 5 years ago

Except some commenters in the original thread ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

atum47• 5 years ago

Epic!!! Imagine doing something for fun and it ends up in production.

ZephyrBlu3• 5 years ago

This is going to be a great point on his resume.

How many people get to say something like, "Reduced GTA 5 load times by 70%"?!

DevX101• 5 years ago

That's pretty amazing by itself. But it was doing it without access to the source code that blew me away.

ZephyrBlu3• 5 years ago

That really is the cherry on top.

Ya know on second thought, it's so unbelievable that he did this whole thing that I wouldn't be surprised if someone reading his resume thought he was bullshitting.

lumberingjack4• 5 years ago

Gamers playing this game have all kinds of tricks to try to bypass the load screen itself because it takes a long time to go through it but the game by design forces you to look at the load screen multiple times just to do one task. One way that I remember was to play in a Solo session that way you don't have to load every time you come out of multiplayer. They even make a GTA online software tool that blocks GTA on the firewall at very specific intervals to force an online session in order to speed up load times.

C19is20• 5 years ago

One.

jamiek88• 5 years ago

Sans source code to boot!

megablast• 5 years ago

One person. Only one person gets to say that.

ascar• 5 years ago

It's truly amazing that he did all this while decompiling the source code, but for engineers working on a large system it's not that uncommon to fix large impact performance bugs.

sellyme4• 5 years ago

Just today I improved performance of an enterprise system by over 15000% by commenting out a "sleep(1);" line I used to debug a race condition!

Might not put that one on the resume.

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

I’m sure ZA/UM is hiring.

mkasberg• 5 years ago

"...without working for Rockstar"

swat535• 5 years ago

Unfortunately he will flunk the interview after failing to invert a binary tree..

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Not worth working there anyways.

therealdrag0• 5 years ago

I know it's tongue in cheek, but shouldn't you use a more difficult example? Inverting a binary tree is trivial. (Example solution: https://leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tree/discuss/111...)

yc-kraln• 5 years ago

Is the resume where all cool accomplishments go after they've faded from the public eye? Your comment struck me as somehow extremely (and unintentionally) fatalistic... that this cool hack will somehow end up churned through the capitalistic society into a bullet point to earn a wage. Actually kind of depressing.

ZephyrBlu3• 5 years ago

Well, what else should the fate of this achievement be? Very few achievements are immortalized.

I don't think it's got anything to do with capitalism, we just tend to forget things quickly.

yNeolh• 5 years ago

I really was thinking that it was intended... I remember watching GTA V on Xbox 360 and being impressed by how good it looked, how it performed in such a "limited" device, so something like this would resonate in a team so good. But it was almost 6 years ago, so probably a good part of that team has moved on to other companies, and the ones left, maybe are in other projects, hopefully, GTA VI.

Glad to see Rockstar addressing this; I will try the update once it is released, and maybe I can play some online games without getting frustrated.

rightbyte• 5 years ago

Maybe scanf didn't redo strlen on the Playstation stdlib.

I mean the PC version was released one year later. Maybe by another team.

SXX• 5 years ago

Game itself had amazing performance on PC when releases, but multiplayer part had lots of issues for years even though they primary profit from it.

imwillofficial2• 5 years ago

I want to see more of this from giant companies. This gives me hope that there are real people amongst the mindless drones in these hulking corporations.

hutzlibu2• 5 years ago

You mean real marketing people, who know that talk is cheap and the small bounty might mitigate some of the negative PR they received because of this?

imwillofficial2• 5 years ago

Don't put words in my mouth. I meant exactly what I said.

A12-B• 5 years ago

I'd like to see this person actually get paid for what is essentially a million dollar fix

Frost1x• 5 years ago

Yup. I'm not deeply familiar with the situation and circumstances but it sounds like this person should be very well compensated for what they did.

The amount of free skilled labor businesses benefit from and abuse while not donating back to society is laughable. It's great they helped the GTA 5 community and a fun read but keep your pride and fame, I'd take cash anyday over a pat on the back.

DavidVoid• 5 years ago

"Just got awarded $10k through their H1 in-game bounty as an exception :)) (usually only for security issues)"

From their blog post about it: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

Tell me that is not cool.. being able to say you had that much of an impact on million of players across the globe. Not to mention, bragging rights and cool achievement you can put on your resume ( that anyone should be able to understand ).

utf_8x• 5 years ago

Not to mention the $10,000 bug bounty...

sim_card_map• 5 years ago

Given how simple this bug is, I was 100% certain they did it on purpose to show more ads.

indeedmug4• 5 years ago

I don't think it was simple. It came down to the odd specifics of scanf making the algorithm O(n^2) which wasn't obvious at all from the programmer standpoint. A lot of people pan Rockstar for being incompetent but in reality, it's a C footgun that any programmer would make.

Edit: I reread the article and I overlooked how there was a second issue of a poorly implemented "hash table" that was a linked list that checked the entire list for dups in every update. Since we don't have access to the source code, it's hard to say if this is poorly implemented piece of code on Rockstar's part or someone else. It could be some deeply buried piece of code that no one ever looked at for years until now.

295310e0• 5 years ago

On the gripping hand, if someone had run a profiler on the code in all of these years, it would have popped out immediately that some investigation was warranted.

bredren• 5 years ago

Then it is not a bug.

dastx• 5 years ago

Imagine how much they'll have lost in revenue because people rage quit due to slow load times. Myself included.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

Yep; we tried to play with some friends over the pandemic, but rather quickly we nicknamed it "Loading Online" and preferred to do anything else where you, well, get to do stuff instead of waiting for loading. Perhaps it was better back when GTA Online was just starting, but last year (whan I tried this) the loading times on good PC hardware were just outrageous compared to any other game.

hnick• 5 years ago

Maybe not fixing it was on purpose, but I doubt the original bug was. They could've just added a more straightforward sleep/delay in the code. If anyone finds it they can say it was accidentally leftover testing code because they needed a delay to see ads in the office to make sure it works.

pityJuke• 5 years ago

t0st's original post has an update that says he got $10k from R*'s bug bounty program.

[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

nickspag• 5 years ago

The original fix’s author updated the post about this: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

Rockstar awarded them 10k for it.

dang• 5 years ago

Recent and related:

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 - Feb 2021 (697 comments)

anonytrary• 5 years ago

It's funny because reducing load times by 70% is almost certainly worth way more than $10k if calculated.

sdfhbdf• 5 years ago

It's a really nice and wholesome use of HackerOne. Nice that they acknowledged and awarded as opposed to some companies that try their best to push a security disclosure out of scope and not pay out a bounty [0] [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9278832

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16000550

rvz• 5 years ago

Rockstar awarded them 10k for it.

The original post, analysis and the actual fix of this bug is beyond impressive. Strangely, Rockstar awarding $10k for that is like someone searching for lost treasure, identifies historical references which leads to finding a ton of it and somehow leaves with 1/8th of it, even though they did 98% of all the work.

For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k. At least Rockstar was generous enough to award them in the first place; so I'll give them that.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k.

No good deed goes unpunished. Rockstar went out of their way to thank this person and send them a check equivalent to several weeks of median developer salary. Can we not shame them for this goodwill gesture?

$80K would be on the order of half of the annual salary of most developers outside of SFBA.

Havoc• 5 years ago

True. I’m glad he got anything at all. Game improvements generally don’t. Think of all the mods that exist just to fix bugs in say Skyrim

yanderekko• 5 years ago

For that detailed effort, analysis and with a fix, I'd say that is worth around $80k.

Do you think the fix is actually worth 80k in terms of additional revenue for Rockstar? I wouldn't be so sure. If not though then no it's not worth $80k.

"I'm a developer and I'm paid a lot to do my job, therefore everything I do must be very valuable" is not the right line of reasoning to use here.

f430• 5 years ago

they could've given him nothing tho so im glad they gave him something. sure it would've been nice if it was more

viraptor2• 5 years ago

He got paid a good month salary for spending a bit of time fixing an issue (which is tricky but not extreme if you know re). I feel like people having strong opinions that's not enough should just open a GFM campaign to give him more and add their own money. It easier to say how others should spend.

httpsterio2• 5 years ago

That's basically 6x the average Latvian developer salary. The country the original developer is from.

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

even though they did 98% of all the work.

You are forgetting the game which Rockstar made. A loading times fix is not 98% of the final product.

gustavpaul• 5 years ago

This reminds me of my 13 year old sibling yelling at our mother when we were teenagers for not buying them the exact item they wanted, but something pretty close. Disappointing.

One should not hold people responsible for acting "non-perfectly". Any behavior exceeding "average" should be met with admiration and gratitude, average behavior with "respect and appreciation", and anything somewhat sub-average with "mild disappointment but no surprise and some understanding".

Having a company spend money they are technically obligated to allocate to share holders, to a developer who, without any pre-existing contract or even verbal or commonlaw understanding, helped them, is way beyond "average response" for modern businesses.

Please, don't hate on the vanishingly small number of counter-examples blazing a trail in this space.

yarcob• 5 years ago

I think this is a great example of a fallacy that's pretty popular on HN: That work should be rewarded based on "value created" rather than effort.

I don't think this line of thinking is helpful. Should Amazon increase the price of their VMs if you made more money with them? Should a doctor charge a lawyer a higher price for a flu shot because their time is worth more?

Of course not. Because in all these cases, the clients would just go buy someone else's service.

Of course it is helpful to consider the value of the work you produce, and you can use that in negotiations. But you are not entitled to a higher rate just because your client is big or successful.

If the developer had offered a two day consultation for $80.000 to Rockstar they would most likely have declined and said, sorry, for that money we can hire someone else to do a lot more performance improvements.

If you want to get paid based on value created, you need to negotiate. But you don't have a moral right to get more money for the same effort just because your client is rich.

nootropicat2• 5 years ago

Rockstar awarded them 10k for it

that's insulting tbh

Quillbert182• 5 years ago

How is that insulting? They are under no obligation to give them anything at all.

dmix2• 5 years ago

Note: he lists his address as living in Latvia.

Still I’d give him more for the significance and PR. But these things tend to be fixed rather than subjective for a reason.

https://github.com/tostercx

xwdv• 5 years ago

The only reason he got paid at all IMO was the widespread exposure the original article got. When you find something this significant you’re almost obligated to do a song and dance and tell the world about it, so you can get the attention you need and be paid.

Frankly for an introvert with no public online presence or audience that’s just not very appealing. There’s easier ways for software developers to make $10k: just wait for two paychecks.

jgwil2• 5 years ago

I think the author was motivated by intellectual curiosity rather than money. Thankfully he was enthusiastic enough about it to share it with the rest of us.

sundvor• 5 years ago

That's fantastic. Hopefully a few coffees as well, from that amazing write up. :)

tinus_hn2• 5 years ago

Hot coffee is banned at Rockstar

user32456• 5 years ago

That's awesome! I didn't think Rockstar would act on it.

rocky1138• 5 years ago

Imagine a world where companies open-sourced their most boring bits of their software so we, the users, could fix the problems we find with them or extend them in new ways without having to rely on the parent company to get around to it.

lupire5• 5 years ago

Microsoft essentially does this. They call it Shared Source.

Most companies won't do more due to competition or embarrassment.

varispeed• 5 years ago

It used to be a practice in the 90s that companies would insert Sleep instructions or other means to delay program execution e.g. to make appearance of heavy computations being done or to make people buy a "pro" version that was without such elements. Given how frankly stupid is the error, could there be some merit to that? For example to give themselves some ammo for the next versions - if they won't find anything to improve they could pull the rabbit out of the hat and said hey we optimised our code and it loads much faster, buy the new version!

lupire5• 5 years ago

They still do that today.

It's why TurboTax is so darn slow and hard to use, wasting user's time.

kylewatson• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they found a faster turbotax made people trust it less. You want to see it chugging away to "find your deductions" and "catch your mistakes".

Ironically the hardest thing I needed TT to do this year was handle my wash sales and it didn't even blink as it imported the 1099s. Wait, maybe it didn't handle them correctly... See what I mean? Now I better double check.

viraptor2• 5 years ago

[citation... wanted] I mean I know it happened, but beyond one or two famous examples which get repeated on tdwtf, was it really a practice? (As in something done regularly, and not in shareware which had explicit visible delays)

fao_• 5 years ago

Did you actually read the code. I think if they were going to do that it would be a literal sleep instruction rather than a naievely used way of looping over data

edit: Akchually, the DRY method of doing this would be to make a function like:

    /* Remove this when it's time for a performance improvement! */
    function Optimize(int N)
        /* do stuff N times (so you can limit the amount of performance improvement) */
    end

and then put that in the places you want to be able to optimize in the future

thepasswordis• 5 years ago

"Please hold while we look up your account..."

LinuxBender• 5 years ago

Off topic: Has Rockstar considered also making improvements to their identity management? Currently you can get the account details of any player from their social club. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_fdhCXlPI0

aligray2• 5 years ago

Can’t imagine how many hundreds of thousands of hours of people’s lives have been wasted just sitting and waiting for it to load. Oof.

bluedino• 5 years ago

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

LukeShu• 5 years ago

I was curious:

    (10 seconds)*(5 million)*(365) = 564.1 years

If I add on "/(human lifetime)", Wolfram Alpha uses 72.6 years, which it attributes to a 2019 UN estimate.

    ((10 seconds)*(5 million)*(365))/(human lifetime) = 7.775 lifetimes

Xevi• 5 years ago

Didn't they shave off a couple of minutes?

vlasev• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the bridge story in Margin Call [1]. Or if you'd rather read it, here's the script [2], just search for "Did you know I built a bridge once?". Or condensed:

"It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and 12 feet above the Ohio River. 12,000 people used this thing a day. And it cut out 35 miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That's a combined 847,000 miles of driving a day. Or 25,410,000 miles a month. And 304,920,000 miles a year. Saved. Now I completed that project in 1986, that's twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that's 6,708,240,000 miles that haven't had to be driven. At, what, let's say fifty miles an hour. So that's, what, 134,165,800 hours, or 559,020 days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g

[2] https://imsdb.com/scripts/Margin-Call.html

dcfccortex• 5 years ago

As much as author deserves a much bigger reward IMO, I feel like the value of this on their resume / CV is much more than 10k

t-writescode• 5 years ago

I would hope Rockstar is considering interviewing them.

kirubakaran• 5 years ago

I'd say he has already passed the interview. What else do they need to know?

NwtnsMthd• 5 years ago

The horrendous load time was one of the reasons I stopped playing GTA Online. But at this point I don't think I'll ever pick it up again.

Cool fix, nonetheless!

mdoms2• 5 years ago

It's the one and only reason my friends and I stopped playing. I hope they take this patching opportunity to resolve a few more load time problems, because even a 70% reduction isn't really enough in my opinion. The load times in GTA are at least 5-10x longer than most games I play.

joshu• 5 years ago

not the constant barrage of modders?

effingwewt• 5 years ago

We used to call it Loading Screen Online. Really was a shame because I made some long-lasting friendships from that one game, many of whom I still play other games with.

Had they bothered to fix this early on as many of us begged them to do from day one of online's release, many of us would have stuck around far longer.

Oh well actually the shark card garbage coupled with ever-increasing item costs, as well as releasing the casino ~5 years late probably would have made me stop anyway.

kasper93• 5 years ago

Don't get overexcited. On "normal" CPU the improvement is more like 30%, still huge, but don't expect GTA Online to load instantly after the patch.

torgian2• 5 years ago

Thanks, but we won’t give you anything.

pugworthy• 5 years ago

Actually they did

TheRealSteel• 5 years ago

The article has been updated to note that Rockstar gave him ten thousand dollars :)

meowster• 5 years ago

Please don't pretend to be someone you're not.

torgian2• 5 years ago

Nice, good that they gave him something. I didn’t think they would

pixelpoet• 5 years ago

Love the comment someone made on his buy me a coffee page: "Please fix Cyberpunk!"

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj• 5 years ago

This is really cool to witness. A random guy fixed a really obscure bug that millions of people have been complaining of since the game launched.

marecile• 5 years ago

Good job on the person who found they could reduce GTA Online's abysmal loading times; it shows how greatly they could improve the game. Keep in mind Rockstar has almost 0 interactivity with its fanbase and doesn't listen to any feedback. So the possibility of negative attention forced them to do something about it.

wuwuno• 5 years ago

What I find extraordinary is that none of the developers who play the game never bothered to fix this problem.

If I was a developer at Rockstar and played this game I would have have spent my own time to fix this problem just so that I didn't need to sit around and wait every time I played the game.

gbrayut• 5 years ago

Reminds me of a Windows installer I working on many years ago, that seemed to take a long time using CPU but otherwise not doing any real work. Turned out the SDK we were using tried to update the progress bar every kilobyte or something like that, and our near-gigabyte sized packages filled the message loop with a bunch of pointless updates (30.001% -> 30.002% but both displayed as 30%).

Once the vendor fixed the issue it shaved a few minutes off the install time that had previously just been a UI glitch (processing the large backlog of progress bar update messages).

easton• 5 years ago

This must be why when you turn off the progress bar for Invoke-WebResource in PowerShell your download speeds become reasonable, as otherwise it updates the terminal every byte and takes a million years to download stuff that takes a second in Firefox or via wget.

strogonoff• 5 years ago

Turned out the SDK we were using tried to update the progress bar every kilobyte or something like that, and our near-gigabyte sized packages filled the message loop with a bunch of pointless updates (30.001% -> 30.002% but both displayed as 30%).

Had a similar situation with an Electron app I worked on. App’s window was getting very stuttery at some point during a long-running operation done by a third-party library, even though it happened in a background worker thread and wasn’t supposed to block the UI (which simply showed the progress of the operation).

Turned out, that third-party library called my progress notifier function (in which I used Electron’s IPC to notify the GUI) on increments that were fairly spaced out most of the time, but really frequent during some operations. Mere overhead from IPC calls and GUI updates added up to a point where everything lagged, even though the operation itself wasn’t that intensive. I wrapped my progress notifier in a throttler, which I frankly should’ve done much earlier, and that solved it.

fomine32• 5 years ago

NPM had similar story

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974929

neilv• 5 years ago

I wonder how much money the load time slowdown has cost Rockstar -- given their revenue from "Shark Cards", which are bought by players who want the fun of playing with all the expensive in-game items without spending time grinding for them.

What's the correlation between being averse to spending time on less-fun aspects of the game (to the point that you'd pay Rockstar extra money to get only the more-fun time)... and being averse to waiting for long load times, when you just want to play a quick session of more-fun?

Given Rockstar's investment in a steady stream of new big-ticket in-game items, and their huge revenue from that, I wouldn't be surprised if the slow load times cost them many millions.

lumberingjack4• 5 years ago

Red Dead redemption has the same load time issue I bought that game for five bucks. Which was rockstar's cry for help in a dying online game.I tried it out for about 15 minutes realized it suffered the same issue turned it off and never turned it back on

lumberingjack4• 5 years ago

You have to be joking me. after years of launching solo sessions to bypass this ridiculous loading time they fix it now lol WTF

lefstathiou• 5 years ago

The scale of this fix is mind boggling.

Millions of people play this game every day. This lone man, driven by his love of solving puzzles, is single handedly unlocking potentially hundreds of millions of hours of “lost time” across the globe.

triggercut• 5 years ago

Not to mention the huge amount of cumulative energy consumption on those wasted cycles.

winrid• 5 years ago

More like, opened up more time for them to play! :)

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

I like that Steve Jobs was calculating people "killed"(lifetimes wasted) by slow start of OS to motivate engineers. We need more people like him.

est• 5 years ago

Hopefully Rockstar use a real JSON parser instead of handwritten strlen and offsets inside nested loop for a megabyte sized json.

zelon88• 5 years ago

I've found that when writing something like this which iterates over and over many millions of times a helpful test can be to place a simple counter in your loop. If you have an algorithm which you expect to loop only one million times and it loops ten million times, that is something you want to investigate.

xyst• 5 years ago

I am actually impressed R* followed up with this. I thought it would be sent to the backlog blackhole. I guess the social media impact really pushed it up the chain.

glad to see I am wrong. many GTAO players will definitely be very happy once the new update is live.

reverendhomer• 5 years ago

"You forget a thousand of bugs every day. Make sure this is one of them"

lars_francke• 5 years ago

The author mentions he might need help with a W8 form: I've filled out plenty of those. I can't find any contact information for him to offer help.

If you're interested feel free to reach out and I might be able to help you. Contact details in my profile.

diveanon• 5 years ago

Wasn't there an ad shown on that loading screen?

JoeyBananas• 5 years ago

None of the programmers at rockstar who had familliarity with the codebase and the platform ever thought "There's no reason these load times should be so long, I'm going to look into this"

xroche• 5 years ago

Yeah, that’s gonna take a while… To be fair I had no idea most sscanf implementations called strlen so I can’t blame the developer who wrote this. I would assume it just scanned byte by byte and could stop on a NULL.

Darn, I got the exact same issue ten years ago, with sscanf on Linux/glibc. The sscanf was forcing the huge XML mmaped file region to be entirely read.

The reason behind is that the glibc library was using some "smart" streams (to have generic functions for file/string streams, I guess) that basically all do strlen as first step to buildup this stream structure.

cosmotic• 5 years ago

Imagine being a developer at rockstar whom could have fixed that bug but didn't because no one ever prioritized that ticket.

Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming

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