Top all-time · #984
meh.
Personal blog · nee.lvgamesprogramming
meh. is a personal blog at nee.lv about games and programming. Since 2021, 70 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%68 people · 69 mentions · first linked 2021-02-28
What Hacker News says?
JSON didn't save them: This is the same studio that handrolled a JSON parser with accidentally quadratic time complexity, making most players wait 3 to 10 minutes to load GTA Online, for 7 years, until a player got tired and found the root cause. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2”Submitted How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% as a story · 3883 points
HN discussionfunnily enough, there was an infamous bug in GTA5 for a long time that was related to using JSON : https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2”Submitted I cut GTA Online loading times (2021) as a story · 476 points
HN discussion> Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more. I don't think repariability is something you need to put effort into build into a product, it's something you put effort into taking out of a product. Apple's engineers definitely have things like what Louis uses for his repairs: board views, schematics, diagnostics software. Louis gets these things from illegal…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks”Submitted I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) as a story · 215 points
HN discussionI don't think you've been following this story. If you looked into the technical details [0], and surrounding context, you would understand why your comment isn't particularly insightful. For example, terrain has nothing to do with this bug and it isn't a complex fix that interacts with "millions of lines of code." A single run of a profiler would have caught this. I also think it's relevant to note that GTA V has s…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming”Submitted I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Just got awarded $10k through their H1 in-game bounty as an exception :)) (usually only for security issues)" From their blog post about it: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming”Submitted How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe original fix’s author updated the post about this: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... Rockstar awarded them 10k for it.
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming”Submitted Cutting GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussiont0st's original post has an update that says he got $10k from R*'s bug bounty program. [1]: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed load times, official update coming”Submitted I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat one's actually a good argument for open source software, in my experience. While the cargo-cult culture exists everywhere less experienced users are involved, in FOSS land there's a decent chance some developer or power user (any developer, not just a project member) will stumble upon the problem and either figure out the real issue themselves or coordinate with the project devs to do so. I've done this many, m…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “AirPods don't “just work””Submitted I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers Especially given the poor record of video game companies to take security seriously [0]. Even Rockstar's cash cow game [1], there was the lowest of low hanging performance fruit available that was not addressed by any ongoing effort. Why should I believe that any game company rushing to push some release out the door is going to take their kernel patch ser…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Thank You, Valve”Submitted How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy favorite example of this is the GTA Online insane loading time issue that ended up being due to poor handling of a 10MB json file (and was finally tracked down by someone outside their org). Took a 6 minute load time down to just under 2 minutes: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Why fastDOOM is fast”They read stuff off disk 1-4 bytes at a time and malloc() in a loop, then deserialize which calls its own malloc(). Its tiny malloc()s all the way down, and strlens for sure https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... The result is usually one CPU core running at 40% with sporadic disk access while you stare at Loading progress bar.
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “The computers are fast, but you don't know it”This was a good read and great work. Can't wait to see the performance tests. Your write up connected some early knowledge from when I was 11 where I was trying to set up a database/backend and was finding lots of cgi-bin online. I realize now those were spinning up new processes with each request https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface I remember when sendfile became available for my large gaming for…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server”GTA Online fix to reduce loading times [1]. Rockstar awarded the guy 10k$ [2] 1: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... 2: https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-thanks-gta-online-player-wh...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “EU court rules no EULA can forbid decompilation, if you want to fix a bug”You are missing that each update takes AGES while it tortures your disk for patching the files (on my machine it takes 15min or so, and that's on an SSD). So I agree that this is careless and reminds me of the GTA5 startup time that was fixed by a dedicated player who finally had enough and reverse engineered the problem (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... ). I still find these thing…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB”Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years. Years . Eventually some enterprising hacker disassembled the binary and profiled it. 95% of the runtime was in `strlen()` calls. Not only was that where al…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons”This was a great read. I wonder if the reason for the game client surprise crashing could be investigated the same way? Do the executable integrity checks run during runtime? What if one of those fails while it’s running, do you get a different disconnection message? I feel like this should be rewarded in the same way as the GTA V takes forever to load-writeup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “A decade-old Steam bug”This is unfairly downvoted IMO, because I think you're actually hitting on a very important point. Linux users tend to be enthusiasts, people who love software, and also primarily interact with a community where the "developer/user" is the most important figure, the one whom everything is designed around. In the Linux community, at least unless a project has a toxic developer (there are a few), bug reports are Alway…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Developing Games on Linux: An Interview with Little Red Dog Games”> They may well be optimizing for a median gaming PC instead. This is how you get games that could run good if the user got more control over the model LODs, post processing effects and even render scale, but the developers/project management didn't care. What's worse, a lot of modern games have great ability to scale back and run on lower end hardware when necessary, but the companies behind them only care about th…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Godot 4 Beta 1”This logic doesn't hold up. > Memory tends to play tricks and we remember older games looking better than they actually did We compared what League of Legends, Valorant, and Inscryption look like now with what those other games look like now . There's no rose-tinted glasses involved - this is an apples-to-apples comparison. > Those games you've mention run on advanced and heavyweight fragment and vertex shaders to c…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Godot 4 Beta 1”https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “GTA 5 source code leaks online”Not sure GTA 5 is the right example to list here. Remember https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times... . At least for a while they didn't optimize at all.
Comment linking /2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
on “Helldivers 2 on-disk size 85% reduction”
