Rockstar may have dropped the ball on this one. We reported yesterday that a few new bugs have surfaced since Ill-Gotten Gains Part II launched, and that the game's performance on PC has taken a hit as well. As it turns out, Rockstar, in its overzealous crusade to make GTA Online 110% cheater proof, is willing to sacrifice game performance if it means another layer of security.
Popular work-in-progress mod LSPDFR's development team has called attention to the newest addition to Rockstar's anti-hacking arsenal found in the game's updated code. Rockstar has added 3 MB of dysfunctional code just to screw with prospective modders. Now, for those of you who aren't programming-savvy, in terms of raw code, 3 MB is a lot. To help laymen (we're simplifying here, so any programmers reading this, please restrain your strokes) understand what all this means, reddit user Causeless was kind enough to offer an explanation. See, the way GTA V works is that even the unmodded, base game makes significant use of scripting in order for the gameplay level code to communicate with the engine level code. Mods tunnel their way in between the two, which is why a modding utility called ScriptHook V is needed. ScriptHook acts as an intersection of sorts, directing the modded code to the proper target script in the engine-level.
Rockstar's "solution" to the GTA Online hacks is to fill up the thoroughfare between the gameplay-level and the engine-level with heaps of junk code that modders need to sift through manually, to find out what is actually used and what is just there to mess with them.
This severely impacts performance, resulting in gameplay at 3 frames per second — even on some of the strongest PC systems available today.
Unfortunately, this means that the official game-code that is unmodded also need to jump through the additional hoops, so if your GTA V is chugging, it probably isn't an issue with your high-end shiny PC.
Have you guys noticed the performance drop?
