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Comment by indeedmug | Hacker News Reader

Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace. It's probably not a handful. People need to stop pretending that their code is optimized and magically linear all the time. No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. There is no reasonable way for any person to fix things like this unless they are actually looking for it. How many people at Rockstar would be responsible for engine details like this and have the skill to find and fix it?

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.

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Noone is complaining that they did not look through all their code for quadratic footguns. There probably are bunch of places like that, but they don't matter and doing that would probably be just a waste of time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and it makes all sense to dedicate all your optimization on the 1% of code that actually matters the most - but this was the 1% that obviously should have been the target of optimization and was not.

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.

You have customers complaining about everything all the time (and non-customers with a high profile "edgy" title like GTA), so filtering out the actually relevant topics might be hard (esp things like "bad loading time" when it might be the users computer).

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.

> Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace.

Imagine now that 160 Million people use my codebase and have been suffering from this for 7 years.

The problem is not that they suddenly hit this performance drop and solved it in some reasonable timeframe, or it was some rare occurrence affecting .01% of users

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.

> No one looked at this because they didn't know it about.

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.

Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. I definitely shouldn't have said that when I don't work at Rockstar or know anyone who does.

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.

Ok, to be fair I am doing to same thing (asserting opinions without facts).

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.

The bug affected practically every user.

In a completely harmless way

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