I'm genuinely surprised. Given how long they've left this untouched I thought they didn't care at all.
I'm quite surprised they are even going to patch the game because the level of "we dont give a shit" I thought they had about this issue certainly would have prevented them from doing anything now.
A game video company employees artists, sound effect engineers, and etc. They aren't full of programmers combing over the source code for quadratic footguns.
The issue is that slow loading times was a contentious issue with many, many customer complaints (IMHO it was the #1 complaint) and during many years not once did they spend even trivial effort on trying to look into that complaint, and that's shameful. As the tostercx's article shows, if they had ever assigned any engineer a couple hours to look into why loading is slow with a profiler, that issue would have been easily found; the fix as described was a bit more tricky because the author did not have access to the source code, but within a company that would have literally be done within an afternoon by a single non-exceptional person. But they never cared enough to have someone look into it.
The thing is that this loading time issue probably didn't exist at release as it was part of something that got expanded on over time and only got bad worse by the years.
Assuming somewhat linear growth of the data the loading time would have been at least 4x shorter only half the games lifetime ago (3 years) and 16x shorter 1.5 years after release. After that period they would probably not consider there to be issues in those places in the code so nobody really looked or realized anything was amiss there.
What are you talking about? Nobody knew about it? Is that a joke?
This long loading issue was posted EVERYWHERE and was the reason so many people gave up on GTA v. It’s simply impossible that they didn’t know the issue existed.
That they chose to ignore it is the reality.
But I still think people are demonizing too much Rockstar and are trivializing the bug when it's far from obvious. In my opinion, there is a lot of hyperbole statements about this issue when it's more useful to think if your organization could or would catch bugs like this.
I don't work at Rockstar so it's true I have no idea how this bug was handled.
I just have a hard time believing they didn't know about the bug, and I also have a hard time believing they didn't understand that it was one of the chief complaints from their end users (a simple check of any forum or discussion group is all thats needed).
So, I an only assume short of an actual explanation, that they intentionally sidelined a fix for this bug. Why, is anyone's guess. If you had to ask me, management put all devs onto money making tasks like new items and store support, and fixing quality of life bugs even ones as egregious as this one, was a low priority.
Imagine now that 160 Million people use my codebase and have been suffering from this for 7 years.
The problem is that it’s existed for 6 years, affected anyone and everyone, and would have been caught and resolved by basically anyone who attempted to look into the issue with fairly low effort/experience-needed. That is, the problem is that no one bothered to look into it, despite good reason to do so.
I don't have the numbers but would have imagined that still takes the cake.
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?).
“I want you to improve loading times whatever it takes”
Sometimes you’ve got to go hunting instead of fishing.
This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.