Comment by xirbeosbwo1234
4 years ago
I don't think anyone sensible would claim they would never have made this mistake. It's not even surprising that it made it to production. What is surprising is that it lead to a massive and easily-diagnosable slowdown that no one bothered to fix for several years.
I don't find it that surprising because there's a huge lack of awareness in the industry when it comes to profiling tools. Quite often I've seen people trying to speed up programs without once profiling to see where the problem is. More than once I've seen the supposed solution (usually caching or distributing in my line of work) actually slow things down. At times it can be almost impossible to get permission to "waste" time on performance profiling because it's not fixing bugs or adding features.
I kind of expected more from game developers, but I doubt the guys shaving micro second off tight game loops are the same ones writing the asset loading code.
Devs should follow carpentry rules for this: measure twice, cut once.
I'd bet that some combination of "Oh, of course it's slow, it's json" and "I'm too important to work on microtransactions" accounts for a lot it.
Or it may have worked fine in a dev environment and it only became an issue once the game was in production for a certain amount of time.
By that point R* developers had moved on to other projects and the artists may have used a different workflow to validate things and never bothered booting up the "real" game to test things.
This, the article misses the point entirely. Either the author already knew that and used it as an opportunity to show off or has a low level common sense.