Apex Legends is One Bug Cleaner
The hunt for a certain Apex Legends audio bug was a long and strange journey – as many bug hunts are. But what made this one different, though, is the insight offered by Respawn on this particular venture.
“We first noticed the problem soon after the release of Season16 – Revelry with various instances of dropped sound FX, usually alongside particles. For instance, grenades would sometimes not explode even though they damaged players. This had not occurred during our Season 16 playtesting, could not be reproduced internally after initial reports, and was very difficult to pin down using live gameplay videos as the root cause was not always shown in the player’s POV.”
This comes to us from the Apex Legends subreddit, where a massive post details the trials and tribulations our heroic exterminators went through. If you don’t want any spoilers, check this link! And go no further.
If you just wanna figure out what that weird glitch was, with grenades not visually exploding, and some audio clips just not playing, read on.
“A single line of code was identified to be the root cause of the issue. Season 16’s new weapon. The Nemesis has a particle effect that ramps up when heating up, but when it’s uncharged we don’t need to waste resources playing it as the effects are concealed inside of the weapon.”
“Every time the server simulates an input from the weapon’s owner, this particular line of code is executed. Players send in their inputs for every single frame that is run on their client, and it’s the server’s job to simulate all of these inputs. This means that every single player with an uncharged Nemesis would create a “stop particle” “effect” on the server every frame, and this line of code was being called even when the weapon was holstered.”