There are two things we can say that will surely happen in this world: the sun will set and rise every day, and GTA players online will suffer horribly long charging times. And what happens when salvation does not come from the great societies? The community decides to stretch their waists and offer solutions, and this is exactly what the modder who answers to the nickname “‘t0st” did, who published a patch that improves the loading times of the game by 70% on the PC.
t0st drew the matter to Rockstar’s attention and noted in a direct appeal in a patch released that “a single programmer can fix the glitch on a work day”. Brookstar noticed a patch that was starting to gain momentum and talk on the net, and did the unbelievable: the company purchased the patch from t0st for ten thousand dollars for the research and programming work it performed, and promised to formally incorporate that patch into GTA during future game updates.
Brockstar commented on the purchase: “After extensive research we can confirm that the t0st player has indeed revealed aspects of GTA Online’s code related to game load times and how they can be improved. Given the results, we will make changes and implement the fixes during upcoming game updates.”
So what is the problem and how does the repair actually work? The simplest way to describe this is that GTA Online’s game code is written inefficiently, and when it tries to read and disassemble certain files related to game loading double and unnecessary actions are performed that only prolong the loading times.
Another problem that caused the delays was a mechanism that looks for duplicate values in the lines of code, and after t0st neutralizes it – loading times are significantly improved. How much have they been improved? The tests show that the charging times have been improved from six minutes, to one minute and 50 seconds after the repair.
You can read the full and detailed technical explanation In the official blog of t0st by clicking here, And if you want to try the update yourself, It is available for download here.
t0st has proven once again what has been proven in the past: moderated communities and players are capable of demonstrating knowledge, talent and solutions, and if a simple user without access to the game’s source code was able to fix the problem for a seven year game – there is no reason the company did not.
This is not the first time in the industry that a company has cooperated and paid fans for the work they have done, but it is a surprising move by Rockstar that in recent years has begun to make life difficult for the moderators community, mainly because quite a few mods allow players to cheat online.