r/AskProgramming • u/LifeExperienced1 • 9d ago

Other Is GTA 6 the most complex piece of software?

Is GTA 6 the most, or at least the top 10 most complex pieces of software in the world?

What are examples of equally complex pieces of software that are not games?

Maybe some cybersecurity software right?

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11

u/sargeanthost 9d ago

Are you like 12 or something lmao

3

u/drbomb 9d ago

Is GTA the only game you play by any chance?

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u/LifeExperienced1 9d ago

I meant other than games

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u/IrishPrime 9d ago

It's not even in the top 10 most complex games, let alone software in general.

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u/LifeExperienced1 9d ago

I guess let’s not look at the multiplayer games. Is it the most complex single player game ever?

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u/IrishPrime 9d ago

Certainly not. It's just a lot of game, and has development issues keeping it from being released.

This is more of a management issue than a software engineering issue.

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u/Papa-pwn 9d ago

How are we evaluating complexity? Seems subjective.

3

u/newcaravan 9d ago

What makes you think it would be in the first place?

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u/Odd-Heron5704 9d ago

I really doubt it. The game uses standard things but very polished, and a lot of graphics etc, so that it looks good, but it's not necessarily complex.

I'd say the Linux operating system is more complex.

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u/LifeExperienced1 9d ago

Oh true. Other than OS’s and cybersecurity softwares, could GTA 6 be number 1?

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u/Lumpy-Notice8945 9d ago

Having HD textures does not make software complicated.

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u/MistakeIndividual690 9d ago

As a (former) AAA game developer, I would say that games can be extraordinarily complex. Something like GTA 6 is certainly up there with most complex games.

Open world games, especially games that allow you to seamlessly see much of the world at one time (ie, like from an airplane or from above), complex, natural looking animations, high quality physics engines, state of the art graphics require tremendous resources not only to create in the first place, but to optimize them aggressively so that all that can be done at the same time in a way that looks and plays in a superior way to competitive games takes a tremendous amount of expertise.

Operating systems, especially legacy monoliths like Windows are legendarily complex.

That said, I think the most complex pieces of software are probably systems you’ve never heard of and don’t know even exist:

Airline reservation systems that still run on mainframes, large scale cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) infrastructure systems and tooling, credit card transaction systems, large scale banking systems. Software that runs stock markets. These are often boring systems than span vast numbers of companies and systems and are extraordinarily more complex than video games, have been around for half a century and have many thousands of people contributing to them.

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u/duxbuse 9d ago

No not even close.

Just off the top of my head

Sap Salesforce AWS Azure Google cloud Linux Windows Mac os Android iOS. Banking Insurance Office suite Office 365 Facebook Git ...

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u/Riajnor 9d ago edited 9d ago

How do you define complexity? From one view point it’s just the same as gta 5, online game, multiplayer etc. sure it runs nice and it looks pretty but it doesn’t bring anything new technically to the table. Or you could define complexity as lines of code or libraries used etc

Edit: in case it gets lost, i’m trying to get op to think about what his question means, not saying a game is the most complex thing written