Comment by tshaddox
4 years ago
I didn’t follow the original story or comments about GTA, but based on the description in this article, I wouldn’t be surprised that this sort of problem could happen to any coder of any experience level and I wouldn’t give them any grief, but I would be surprised that the problem would be live in production for a very long time without ever having been profiled. Surely seeing JSON parsing taking more than 70% of the time would have made it onto someone’s radar?
I would bet that a lot of games receive a lot less development effort after release. Most of the devs probably got moved on to something else (sequel, or maybe a completely different title).
GTA Online is a live game that pulls in over half a billion USD per year in revenue. They release new content on a regular basis. It's actively developed, they just don't care (my guess would be that defects were filed against this on a regular basis and fixing it was never prioritized)
Or get 'made redundant', burn out or move in to a different industry vowing never to do a release crunch ever again...
The problem was reported in the comp.lang.c newsgroup on Usenet in 2002. This very discussion mentions the GNU C library bug report that has been around since 2014. It was reported in RapidYAML in 2020. This problem has been noticed in production, several times over, and yet still lives to this day.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26302915
You'd be surprised. In the companies I worked for so far, it's usually my radar that bleeped over ridiculously inefficient code that was present for years in the codebase. That is, some developers would be aware something is off with performance, but they didn't bother to do anything about it. Hell, sometimes even management would know users complain about performance, but the feedback didn't percolate down to developers.
Sure, I get priorities and "good enough". But really, about half of the order-of-magnitude wins in performance I achieved were on things you could find and fix in few hours if you bothered to look. The other half tends to be unfortunate architectural decisions that may take a few days to fix, so I get why those don't get done.
The premise of the post is wrong, from what I read here and on reddit the people were rightfully complaining about the lack of reaction of Rockstar, not the initial bug that could happen to most people.