Months of Apex Legends Bugs Have been Triggered By a Single Line of Code

Apex Legends developer Respawn Leisure has revealed {that a} single line of defective code tied to an assault rifle was answerable for a slew of audio and graphical bugs which have plagued gamers in the course of the sixteenth season of the battle royale recreation.

Gamers began reporting the bugs quickly after the launch of Season 16 after noticing lacking rifle sounds, phantom particle results, and disappearing grenades that will fail to blow up, but deal the right amount of injury to close by enemies. The bugs hadn’t appeared in playtesting, however after a preliminary investigation the almost certainly reason behind the lacking results was narrowed right down to a limitation in how the sport’s servers parsed out results. 

In response to the Reddit submit describing the bug hunt, the Apex Legends servers are able to dispatching as much as 128 impact “entries” for every body of gameplay. These entries can embody cease/begin instructions for something from weapon particular sound results, to physics impacts, bullet tracers, and extra. Any impact requests acquired by the server after it hit its 128 entry body restrict can be dropped, which might clarify the lacking sounds and FX reported by gamers. 

This left us with a posh situation that we knew was impacting our group, however was laborious to breed regardless of detailed reviews

The workforce then labored to ferret out which defective course of or asset was inflicting the impact overload. Nonetheless, as famous within the Reddit replace, every new season of Apex Legends sees the introduction of 1000’s of asset tweaks, and code changes. Discovering the reason for the issue can be akin to looking down “a needle in a haystack”.

“This left us with a posh situation that we knew was impacting our group, however was laborious to breed regardless of detailed reviews, had minimal leads internally, and there have been no metrics to show definitively that this restrict was being hit in any respect,” the submit learn.

Ultimately the workforce discovered their needle — a single line of code that was connected to the Nemesis rifle that had been launched in Season 16. The Nemesis was created with a bespoke particle impact, which elevated in depth because the weapon was repeatedly fired.

The workforce found that every participant utilizing a nemesis was sending a “cease particle” impact request to the server for each body that they did not hearth the weapon, even when it was holstered. If sufficient gamers have been working round with uncharged Nemesis rifles, then the onslaught of cease particle instructions was sufficient to overwhelm the server, inflicting results to be dropped.

Fortunately, the workforce have been in a position to push out a repair for the difficulty final Tuesday, although the builders warn that the replace might not have fastened each one of many FX points that gamers have skilled over the course of Season 16.

Anthony is a contract contributor overlaying science and video gaming information for IGN. He has over eight years expertise of overlaying breaking developments in a number of scientific fields and completely no time on your shenanigans. Comply with him on Twitter @BeardConGamer