Update: Rockstar Games have confirmed that the fix found by Tostercs on GitHub will be implemented as an official update. Hence, the loading times in GTA Online will be reduced by a precious 70%.
Original Writing:
GTA Online is one of the most favorite multiplayer titles, which has attributed lots of desire and dedication among fans. The game’s undoubtedly popular, but sometimes, watching them loading screens for an extended period of time may drive players nuts. For that reason, a tech-savvy player has found a way to counter the loading times and reduce them by 70%.
It wouldn’t be the first nor the last game in which the player notices something weird and finds a fix that would alleviate the difficulties. In this case, the loading times have been extended due to unoptimized code. Over on GitHub, a user by the name of Tostercs has uploaded the fixed code as proof.
Furthermore, he detailed the changes in a blog, in which he states that one parsing problem was caused by a JSON file with 10 megabytes of size and 63k item entries. Each time an entry is found, the check runs. That continues multiple times, which leads to exaggerating loading times.
With further tweaks and checks, the time investment he put in worked out perfectly. GTA Online load time has been reduced by 70%.
- Original online mode load time: ~6m flat
- Time with only duplication check patch: 4m 30s
- Time with only JSON parser patch: 2m 50s
- Time with both issues patched: 1m 50s
- (6*60 – (1*60+50)) / (6*60) = 69.4% load time improvement (nice!)
All of this because of a JSON file that GTA was struggling to parse due to its size and intensive coding.
