“Grand Theft Auto V” PC players have recently complained of a decrease in game performance ever since the release of the 1.28 patch. While Rockstar Games has yet to release a fix for this issue, one user claimed the anti-hacking measures contained in the patch may have caused the degraded performance.

A Reddit user who goes by the name of “Causeless” shared a lengthy post explaining the technical process of the anti-hacking technique, which Rockstar released along with the 1.28 patch for “GTA V.” "On the technical side the game internally uses heavy scripting even without mods, as it is what separates the gameplay code from the engine-level code - so assuming the creators of LCPDFR are correct, both the vanilla game and mods will be heavily affected, as they both go through the same function calls and pipeline to communicate with the engine,” Causeless wrote on his Reddit post.

Causeless determined the possible decline in the PC performance may not actually be intended by Rockstar as their intention was only to safe keep the game from possible modding or hacking. “Assuming it is true, the increased complexity and ‘dead code’ may be part of efforts to try and reduce modding and/or hacking, as the scripthooks cannot be created as easily - the modders reverse-engineering the game cannot easily tell what code is critical and what code is ‘dead,’” he added.

These scripthooks reportedly functions as directives that tell the mods where to find the proper scripting functions to use. However, per Causeless creating these scripthooks would also mean reverse-engineering “GTA V” PC’s binary .dll files.

According to Gamepur, the inclusion of the anti modding/hacking measures with patch 1.28 has caused a decline in “GTA V” PC’s response timeframe. Gameplay is lowered to three frames per second no matter what PC system is running the game. There’s reportedly also that hassle of players having to go through different hoops each time. Instead of gamers having a direct play access, they now have to go through four to five hoops, because of the live decryption and obfuscation methods implemented through these anti-hacking techniques. Rockstar Games has acknowledged the issue but has yet to release a fix.

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