Rockstar Implementing Fan-Made Fix for GTA Online Loading Times

[Uskompuf]

Grand Theft Auto Online is notorious for its long loading times so when a fan-made fix managed to reduce these load times by 70 percent there was much excitement and confusion. The programmer who goes by the name t0st investigated why the game could take upwards of 5 minutes to load and found that the game performed nearly 2 billion mostly useless item checks when starting. A fix was created by t0st which eliminated these useless checks and improved loading times from six minutes down to one minute and 50 seconds. The fix was publicly shared online via GitHub and Rockstar has since been in contact with t0st to discuss the fix and have confirmed they will be implementing a version of it in a future update. Rockstar awarded the maximum amount of 10,000 USD for the discovery through their bug-bounty program.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ZoneDymo]

See this is how I want to start my day! Winning all around.

Sure it's silly, a company as big as R* should have never made this mistake but some dude figuring it out AND R* implementing the fix AND him getting rewarded...if only it was like this all the time

 

[Hyderz]

indeed impressive, but sadly i dont touch GTA games, those who do play the game can look foward to faster loading times.

 

[lexluthermiester]

See this is how I want to start my day! Winning all around.

Sure it's silly, a company as big as R* should have never made this mistake but some dude figuring it out AND R* implementing the fix AND him getting rewarded...if only it was like this all the time

Agreed! This is the kind of positive thinking that wins the day.

Rockstar awarded the maximum amount of 10,000 USD for the discovery through their bug-bounty program.

This should be a nice boost to the pocket book, even after taxes!

 

[Tomgang]

Impressive done by the fan/moddet. But I also think that it is a good move from Rockstar to recconice the games fans mods that can improve the game.

Maybe other developers can learn from this. Work together with the community. I mean there has been a lot of bug released games over the years and I have had my fair share of games not running properly or crashing. So I know only to good how annoying and depressing a game can be.

 

[InhaleOblivion]

This is awesome. Glad to hear that they paid him through the bug bounty program.

 

[8tyone]

Bravo R* ; Bravo t0st!

 

[Mussels]

Not only did they use the fix, they paid him $10k for it?

That's awesome

 

[Chomiq]

Glad to hear the guy got paid for it.

 

[Deleted member 205776]

Still haven't created my GTA Online character and it'll remain that way lol. Good thing they at least paid the guy

 

[WHDS]

This should be a nice boost to the pocket book, even after taxes!

Now he can afford 1 new gpu

 

[Deleted member 205776]

Now he can afford 1 new gpu

That's a bit optimistic.

 

[lexluthermiester]

That's a bit optimistic.

Good grief! Damn...

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

Seeing his spec in the og post this 10k dollaroos should be nice surprise for him. Gj R*.

 

[efikkan]

Sure it's silly, a company as big as R* should have never made this mistake but some dude figuring it out AND R* implementing the fix AND him getting rewarded...if only it was like this all the time

There is a good writeup of the details here.
TLDR; Parsing of some JSON data for in-game purchases. The parsing code is flawed in design and the execution time grows exponentially with increasing data sizes. When the developer wrote this, it ran fast with the test data, then gradually got slower over time with more data, but only significantly when the data got really big. That's the thing when you have something with exponential growth that starts very slowly, it takes a while before the problem reveals itself.
I've fixed problems in legacy projects myself that had the exact same type of problem; string parsing with exponential run time.

Impressive done by the fan/moddet. But I also think that it is a good move from Rockstar to recconice the games fans mods that can improve the game.

Maybe other developers can learn from this. Work together with the community.

Yes, there are really only benefits from embracing the fan base. They will provide a lot of QA, improvements and advertisement for the product, all for free!

I mean there has been a lot of bug released games over the years and I have had my fair share of games not running properly or crashing. So I know only to good how annoying and depressing a game can be.

If these companies simply stopped trying to obfuscate/"encrypt" the compiled binaries, removed anti-cheating bloatware and various anti-piracy measurements, numerous games would probably gain a lot of performance immediately (especially loading times), and probably eliminate of a lot of obscure bugs too.

Beyond that, game engines are generally too bloated. And there is no good reason why loading times should be several minutes on a modern CPU and even a SATA SSD. Even a single thread on a mid-range CPU will be able to decompress gigabytes of textures in a matter of seconds, if it takes significantly more than that, then the CPU is probably busy in a "speed-up loop".