by nickspag on 3/15/21, 10:48 PM
by adwi on 3/15/21, 10:12 PM
Good on them for acknowledging something a little embarrassing and responding with gratitude instead ignoring to try to save some face.
by ZephyrBlu on 3/15/21, 10:16 PM
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%"?!
by lefstathiou on 3/16/21, 2:45 AM
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.
by pityJuke on 3/15/21, 10:47 PM
by gbrayut on 3/16/21, 12:31 AM
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).
by imwillofficial on 3/15/21, 10:18 PM
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.
by neilv on 3/16/21, 1:42 AM
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.
by matsemann on 3/15/21, 10:11 PM
by A4ET8a8uTh0 on 3/15/21, 10:25 PM
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 ).
by wuwuno on 3/16/21, 12:27 AM
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.
by varispeed on 3/15/21, 11:02 PM
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!
by NwtnsMthd on 3/15/21, 11:21 PM
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!
by rocky1138 on 3/15/21, 11:01 PM
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.
by aligray on 3/15/21, 11:09 PM
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.
by pixelpoet on 3/15/21, 11:43 PM
Love the comment someone made on his buy me a coffee page: "Please fix Cyberpunk!"
by atum47 on 3/15/21, 10:16 PM
Epic!!! Imagine doing something for fun and it ends up in production.
by kasper93 on 3/15/21, 11:33 PM
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.
by dcfccortex on 3/15/21, 11:13 PM
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
by IshKebab on 3/15/21, 10:16 PM
"Turns out, they were right." err yeah of course. Nobody doubted them.
by yNeolh on 3/15/21, 10:16 PM
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.
by est on 3/16/21, 4:03 AM
Hopefully Rockstar use a real JSON parser instead of handwritten strlen and offsets inside nested loop for a megabyte sized json.
by LinuxBender on 3/15/21, 11:05 PM
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
by lars_francke on 3/16/21, 7:46 AM
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.
by xyst on 3/16/21, 5:51 AM
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.
by xroche on 3/16/21, 4:55 PM
> 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.
by brink on 3/15/21, 10:12 PM
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.
by zelon88 on 3/16/21, 4:22 AM
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.
by JoeyBananas on 3/16/21, 12:31 PM
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"
by cosmotic on 3/16/21, 8:39 PM
Imagine being a developer at rockstar whom could have fixed that bug but didn't because no one ever prioritized that ticket.
by reverendhomer on 3/16/21, 6:40 AM
"You forget a thousand of bugs every day. Make sure this is one of them"
by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj on 3/15/21, 11:45 PM
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.
by marecile on 3/16/21, 12:03 AM
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.
by lumberingjack on 3/16/21, 1:43 AM
You have to be joking me. after years of launching solo sessions to bypass this ridiculous loading time they fix it now lol WTF
by diveanon on 3/16/21, 10:37 AM
Wasn't there an ad shown on that loading screen?
by torgian on 3/15/21, 11:35 PM
Thanks, but we won’t give you anything.
by A12-B on 3/15/21, 10:24 PM
I'd like to see this person actually get paid for what is essentially a million dollar fix
by sim_card_map on 3/15/21, 10:42 PM
Given how simple this bug is, I was 100% certain they did it on purpose to show more ads.