Developer Apex Legends Respawn Entertainment revealed that a faulty line of code tied to an assault rifle was the cause of a series of audio and graphics bugs that plagued players during the battle royale’s 16th season.
Players started reporting bugs shortly after the launch of Season 16 after noticing the lack of rifle sounds, ghost particle effects, and vanishing grenades that failed to explode but still dealt the correct amount of damage to enemies in the area. near the. The bugs did not appear during the demo, but after a preliminary investigation the most likely cause of the missing effects has been narrowed down to a limitation in how the game’s servers analyze the effects. effect.
According to the Reddit post describing the bug hunt, Apex Legends servers are capable of sending up to 128 effect “entry”s for each and every frame of the game. These entries can include stop/start commands for anything from weapon specific sound effects, to physical effects, bullet detectors, etc. Any effect requests that the server receives after reaching the 128 input frame limit will be discarded, which could account for the lack of audio and FX reported by the player.
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The team then worked to figure out which faulty process or asset was causing the effect overload. However, as noted in a Reddit update, each new season of Apex Legends sees the birth of thousands of content tweaks and code tweaks. Finding the cause of a problem is like “finding a needle in a haystack”.
“This leaves us with a complex issue that we know is affecting our community, but is difficult to simulate despite detailed reports, with very few potential customers. capabilities internally, and there are no metrics to conclusively demonstrate that this limit has been impacted,” the post read.
In the end, the team found their needle – a single line of code attached to it The Nemesis Rifle was introduced in Season 16. Nemesis is created with a distinct particle effect, the intensity of which increases as the weapon is fired continuously.
The team discovered that each player using an enemy was sending a “particle stop” effect request to the server for every frame where they didn’t fire the weapon, even when the weapon was holstered. If there are enough players running around with uncharged Nemesis rifles, the onslaught of the particle stop command is enough to overwhelm the server, causing the effects to be negated.
Thankfully, the team was able to come up with a fix for last Tuesday’s issue, although the developers warned that the update might not fix every FX issue players had throughout the game. Part 16.
Anthony is a freelance contributor on science and video game news for IGN. He has over eight years of experience covering groundbreaking developments in many fields of science and has absolutely no time for your bullshit. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
