If you’ve ever played Apex Legends, you’ll probably question why the game’s audio doesn’t sound right at one point or another. According to Repawn the addition of a Season 16 weapon has been causing a lot of problems such as issues and bugs for the developer that made it super tricky for Respawn to pinpoint precisely what was causing so many issues.
Taking to Reddit the development team updated players on the audio issues and the current update making its way to the game to deal with them. In the post, they explained what was causing the issue and the difficulty they had in detecting it.
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. So, when the weapon gets updated we would simply stop this particle effect if the weapon had no charge.
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.
This immediately explained how this would occur more often at high-level play with the issue being directly correlated to the framerate of each client that had a Nemesis. 14 clients with a Nemesis running at 180fps would be enough to cause FX to begin being dropped. This also explained how this wasn’t seen during internal testing. The builds used for testing might not have had enough holstered Nemesis in play, had a rarer correlation with missing FX, or didn’t have enough clients at that fps – something for us to keep in mind and improve on for future testing.
Amy Thiessen – Community Manager at Respawn Entertainment
The post later went on to note that the update set to fix the Nemesis AR bug won’t fix “all audio and visual concerns raised by the community.” However, Repawn were quick to say that they are still continuing to address any and all bugs they become aware of. This latest patch will likely come as quite literally music to every Apex Legends player’s ears.
