Rockstar Awarded a Fan $10,000 for GTA Online Loading Screen Fix

A Grand Theft Auto Online fan who works with Moniker T0st has released a survey of the infamously sluggish PC load times of the game, a remedy that boosts things up to 70%. And Rockstar appeared to be paying attention: PC Gamer is stated by the company that the solution t0st is genuine and will bring its plans into effect for a potential version of the title.

We may confirm after a detailed inquiry that the T0st game revealed an element of the load time-related game code that could be enhanced for the PC version of GTA Online,” said the firm to PC Gamer. “We have made several adjustments after these inquiries, which will be incorporated in a potential title update.”

In an update of their original article, t0st received $10,000 from the Rockstar bug bounty program for the organization to discover the issue (in spite of the fact that its bounty program typically focuses on security vulnerabilities.)

According to t0st’s comprehensive post outlining the problem and its solution, after finding that it took about six times as long to launch Grand Theft Auto’s online modes to explore the problem.

T0st determined that a major bottleneck was due to a one-threaded loading of a 10MB file by the GTA Online code when released. This would tend to include a list of any object to be purchased with in-game money. The correction is twofold: it cuts both GTA Online’s time to search this list and offers a much more effective way of testing duplicates with a hash table. Together, t0st’s fixes reduced load times on their computer between about six minutes and just under two minutes, an increase of about 70%.

T0st managed to smooth out this process and reduced the load time by 69.4 percent with a little patching. “Well, there might be several other bottlenecks on multiple networks, this will not resolve all load times – it’s such a gaping hole that I don’t know how R* skipped all these years,” T0ST says.

After finishing their piece, the coder sends Rockstar directly and states that “it is not appropriate to solve a single dev for more than a single day” and offers the organization a series of options for executing the solution. Rockstar has not seen a message, so T0ST had to change this message to demand that players stop sending the connection to the help account of the organization in case the usual customer care requests were inhibited.

Rockstar did not say when it launches T0st’s game patches, so it is hoped that fans at GTA Online will shortly see some relief, disappointed by long load times.