How a Random Programmer FIXED GTA 5

Grand Theft Auto 5 is an incredible game, but after MANY MANY years of Grand Theft Auto Online taking over 6 minutes to load, a random programmer by the name of t0st took matters in to their own hands and diagnosed the issue.

In this video, we talk about how a programmer fixed the infamous Grand Theft Auto Online loading screen by OVER 70%. Not only is this a programming marvel, it shows how reverse engineering can be done by anyone.

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TimeStamps
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0:00 Intro
0:35 Pre-Investigation
1:54 Investigation
4:16 Profiling
5:57 Disassembly
7:15 Problem 1
8:35 Problem 2
9:57 Putting it Together
11:20 What We Can Learn
12:38 Outro & Thank You

[CodingWithLewis]

Spent a while on this video! I love being able to tell stories of developers doing incredible things!

Stay tuned, we are also building incredible things as well :)

[wekono]

lets have some claps for this guy. He is helping the small indie company called Rockstar Games fix the game

[zern]

Im surprised, they paid him $10k rather than suing him for $1m for reverse engineering their code.

[alangamer]

The embodiment of "FINE, ILL DO IT MYSELF"

[timovc]

Crazy (in a good way) that Rockstar still payed 10k although it wasn't a Bug Bounty programm. I mean good for Toast but kinda unexpected from such a huge company tbh

[krishp]

I wonder if AI software testing companies will come out that automatically scan each commit to a code base (such as GTA's source code) to find inefficiencies lime this

[MrKB_SSJ]

So problem number 2 occurred because the programmers forgot that a hashset can check for a string in constant time rather than using an array which will take linear time in worst case ! Somebody skipped DSA classes

[nitinravi]

For the fix he did, he deserved 10 times more. 6-15 minutes times the number of concurrent players will be a huge number of people not being able to play a game for a significant amount of time. R* probably got a lot of business(shark cards) through that. He was really paid a pittance.

[RoyaltyInTraining.]

Some people say that a CS degree is useless in the workplace, but optimizing your program like this is exactly what it teaches you. This is a perfect example of turning algorithms with O(n²) and O(n) time complexity into O(n) and O(1).

[Android-]

Exceptionally well researched and well explained video Lewis🌟
Great editing.
And thanks for inserting a progress bar for the sponsorship section 😂 that's new!

[thetechq]

The unique check was probably useful in development to remove duplicate values. Since the json file was likely small initially the performance hit may not have been seen as a problem.

[ControlAllDa]

He deserved more than 10k for sorting that mess out tbh

[Polinize]

I just did the math on how much time Toast essentially saved millions of gamers, and it is absolutely insane. If you take the relatively faster load time of 6 minutes(before the patch). Then do some relatively simple math. That would mean that the average monthly player base of 2.5 Million players around the world spent a combined 28.5 YEARS JUST LOADING THE GAME. After the patch Toast cut that in HALF and then some, bringing the collective load times of the entire community to an EVEN 10 YEARS. That is absolutely INSANE. That is even more insane if you use a higher timed loading average such as the ten or fifteen minutes some players experienced. It is amazing how much one person can accomplish. Big thanks to toast, and a very well put together video by Coding with Lewis. If I messed up my math, please feel free to correct me. Although it is some pretty simple math, mistakes can still happen. Much Love, Peace Out.

[emptydata-xfps]

“What can we learn”: we learn that if the source code was open source this bug would’ve been found within a few months of release.

[Leonx]

I wish there was a rough estimation of how much time he collectively saved for everyone.

[adityaroshan]

And seeing how a kind programmer, is helping to make us understand the work of toast teaches me of community.

[dutmala]

Awesome video, good explanation! Toast is an legend for this

[HarmonicaMustang]

This reminds me of a PowerShell script I was given to fix/optimise by a client. I'll obfuscate the details for confidentiality.

In short, it needed to check if an array of objects existed in the cloud before either creating them or skipping them. The original code queried the cloud for a list to compare against for every object, which made the script crash as the query took a minute to run every time, and the array consisted of hundreds of objects.

I instead queried the cloud once, storing the result in an array, and then iterated against that array which made the process a lot faster and more stable.

[nonzzro]

Honestly surprised that Rockstar didn't see 15 minute load times as a problem and they must've had one hell of a product for people to be willing to wait that long

[AI-Idiot]

my pc back in 2017 used an HDD, and it took a little over half an hour to load GTA V, plus a little over 20 minutes to start up, and another 5 minutes to log in epic games