A GTA online modder says they’ve figured out a way to cut the game’s long load times by nearly 70%, claiming that Rockstar could implement the fix in the space of a single day.
As reported by PCGamer, user T0ST has posted a fascinating blog post detailing how GTA online modder reduced the GTA Online loading screen time from six minutes to one minute and 50 seconds. Also, you can check out the T0ST code for yourself here on GitHub. Of course, be careful, it is only a proof of concept and, as indicated on the page, modifying your game in online mode can lead to account suspension. In any case, users on social networks have reported that they have used the solution themselves and have found similar results.
In their writing of the process, T0ST talks about the game’s single-threaded CPU bottleneck and a “poorly constructed” 10MB JSON file that can contain all of the in-game items and updates that can be purchased from GTA Online. The thing is, when it finds an item, this file checks a full array with 63 thousand entries, and T0ST says it performs this check almost 2 billion times, which is what they think is slowing down the loading process.
T0ST tried to smooth this process and, with some patches, reduced loading time by 69.4%. “This won’t solve everyone’s load times; there may be other bottlenecks in different systems, but it’s such a huge hole that I have no idea how Rockstar has missed it all these years.” says T0ST.
To complete his approach, the coder addresses Rockstar directly, noting that “it shouldn’t take more than a day for a single developer to figure it out,” and offers a set of solutions for the company to implement the solution. There has been no word from Rockstar about seeing the post, but T0ST has had to update the post to ask players to stop submitting the link to the company’s support account, in case it gets in the way of normal requests. Customer service.
In other GTA Online news, Take-Two Interactive recently forced a GTA Online cheat maker to shut down and donate their proceeds to charities.