"How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%"

[dieseltech20]

Get away from the ancient P2P setup and load times should no longer be an issue. 

[Unspoken OH]

On 3/1/2021 at 1:17 AM, RedDagger said:

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

 

Fairly technical blog post of someone reverse-engineering GTAO to see what's causing them long load times.

 

 

 

I think that fix will be part of the next-next gen GTA. I can't wait.

[AirWolf856]

R* will never fix this in GTA V because when GTA VI comes out they will say "See how much faster it loads than GTA V!"

[Gaffa]

Hell, they should just take a page out of Forza Horizon's book (and others) and just copy their system. 

When you load that game up, when you go into the freeroam world, you're either playing online with other people, or offline with NPCs whilst waiting for the online portion to load. When it does, there's no loading screen or transitioning, the NPC vehicles are de-spawned with a much more limited number of NPC vehicles spawning and instead, there's now online players around the world. 
If you're online with other players and "find a new session", again there's no loading screen... you get control of your vehicle again in the world, you can customise it, buy a new one or whatever - whilst the game finds a new session and at that point, all it does is de-spawn those players and spawn a load of new ones. 

 

This is all happening with up to 71 other players in that session. 

 

Mind you, I get a strong impression that one of Rockstar Games' new patents is to go for a similar sort of system. I'm not hopeful we'd see that in the Expanded & Enhanced, but definitely in the next title release. 

[Gridl0k]

^ interesting stuff

 

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/gta-6-online-grand-theft-auto-rockstar-games-ps5-xbox-patent/

 

Worth remembering how much the landscape has changed since 2009-2012 in terms of network though. AWS, Azure, Docker, Cloudflare, all sorts of vast improvements. 

 

And yeah playing Forza Horizon is like playing on a different planet to GTAO.

[Ash_735]

And here we have Rockstar THANKING the PLAYER who found this, PLAYER, not Hacker, Modder, Coder, etc, but a GTAO PLAYER:

 

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

[The Fixer]

8 minutes ago, Ash_735 said:

And here we have Rockstar THANKING the PLAYER who found this, PLAYER, not Hacker, Modder, Coder, etc, but a GTAO PLAYER:

 

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

 

This  guy has my respect and gratitude 

[Georges_563]

Wow can't believe they fixed the loading times after 7 years and not them but a fan 

[AirWolf856]

Wow, I can't believe that R* is going to fix this.  This means we won't have time to surf the web on our phones while we wait for GTA Online to load. 

[Pedinhuh]

Just now, AirWolf856 said:

Wow, I can't believe that R* is going to fix this.  This means we won't have time to surf the web on our phones while we wait for GTA Online to load. 

They already fixed it, my dude.

[pingli]

They even paid the guy, so that's nice. 

[CuteFaceJay]

LETS GOOOOO!!!!!

They should run a promotion or something. Now with 70% less loading and 70% proceeds between a timed windows go to that legend who fixed it! 

[Mdc]

How rockstar took my fix, implemented it on Xbox where it wasn't even wanted and f*cked the entire game... Hope this dev gonna hold their hand through fixing that one as well lol

[poland stronk]

On 3/7/2021 at 9:11 PM, dieseltech20 said:

Get away from the ancient P2P setup and load times should no longer be an issue. 

 

There will be an issue if the game is using same shaningans described by tostercx.

 

What the guy discovered:

1. A function would recalculate the length (as in count how many alphanumeric characters including whitespaces/spaces are there) in 10mb of JSON (which is a lot) and it would do it 63 thousand times (the file lists 63k items and it will only get bigger)
2. It would be done with one CPU thread (so if you have 12-threaded CPU the game would only use one, this calculation would take roughly the same time for single-core processor with same clock-speed)
3. Another function would create an array and compare every item player owns with the one from JSON (instead of hashing which is a lot faster).

 

This thing has nothing to do with connectivity. In fact this is the main reason why this issue became viral. Everyone was thinking it was the client connecting with anti-cheat or master server storing every on-going session, it isn't trying to connect you with other players to create P2P session. The game was busy counting letters in a text file for f*ck sake. Imagine if the game was mining crypto during that time or if some of the mod menus would inject miner into loading screens replacing the current crap.

 

C* got caught red-handed by the guy who does not have access to source code, he was dealing with encrypted code so he had no idea what the functions, variables, arrays or objects were representing. And he still figured out it was a f*cking JSON with bunch of language built-in functions (built-ins come with the compiler, they are included so programmer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel so to speak). He even included PoC how to fix this sh*t so C* devs had only to copy his code and replace the existing one. Most people would assume this whole issue would require rewriting thousands of lines of code. tostercx basically wrote a 100-line script. Any mid dev knew what was the issue. But lead devs were tasked with more important things liike making Oppressor Mk2 so this crap was left hanging in JIRA with low priority.

 

Lesson for the day: 

Don't expect any AAA company to fix their sh*t unless it is critical (like viewing source code for 3rd party software which would result in milions of fines each day). Rockstar is including the fix because ignoring this would make them look like clowns to any developer looking for work.

Edited March 16, 2021 by poland stronk

[xDFaTaL]

Todays patch fixed load times.  loaded online in about 30 seconds

https://www.techspot.com/news/88932-rockstar-implementing-fan-discovered-fix-gta-online-boost.html

 

Edited March 16, 2021 by xDFaTaL