GTA Online Modder’s Fix Implemented: Receives 10K

One of the biggest issues with gaming now in the modern-day, at least it seems this way with cloud gaming, is the load times of games and consoles. Speaking as someone who has turned on an Xbox One in the last month, I’m still waiting for it to get to the home screen (I am joking). Some games alone are notoriously long in their load times. Red Dead Redemption 2 is horrendously long but makes up for that in very few in-game load times once the world has been woken up. Equally, games like Watch Dogs: Legion, Fallout 4, and most importantly here, GTA 5, can take quite some time.

It makes it no surprise then that someone would try to fix these issues when they get out of hand: Grand Theft Auto Online. Monday it was announced that Rockstar will be implementing the work of Tostercx, or T0st for short, who recently noted the rather technical aspect behind reducing a 6-minute load time and improving the time by nearly 70%. That’s down to 1-minute and 50-seconds.

The long and short of it is, the 10MB .JSON file within the game’s files features 60,000+ item entries, with poor optimization all over the place. Every time the file finds a new item, there is a check that runs repeatedly, with T0st estimating the checks are run as high as 1.9 billion times. With a further issue of loading the Online section with 4-minutes of high CPU usage on a single core, out of T0st’s eight. Hopefully, that’s simple enough to keep you up to date. For a more detailed rundown on how the .JSON parses itself to death and CPU fry, check out the link above.

Since this discovery by T0st, Rockstar has confirmed the newest update released Monday will reduce times. With T0st noting in an update testing the patch themselves, the load time is down to that 1:50-ish mark which it should be. Still quite long in some respects, but not an entire Rush song in length.

Along with this update, and it is a happy bit of news, is Rockstar giving T0st $10K as a reward for finding this issue. If you know anything about tech giants, they put aside a reserve for things like this, most commonly for security issues. Though, call me a Grinch if you must, for a company that makes hundreds of millions from this one game mode over the course of several years, I’d have said they could have spared a little bit extra. This fix might entice several players to jump back in after all.