Months of Apex Legends audio issues caused by 'a single line of code,' Respawn confirms
Today in «making videogames is hard» news: Respawn's journey to track down a bug that caused months of audio issues in Apex Legends. Grenades that don't explode, guns that don't shoot, damage that has no source, and months of agonizing investigation—all apparently caused by a single line of code added in Apex Legends' Season 16 update.
As outlined in a thorough Reddit post(opens in new tab) by Respawn community manager Amy Thiessen, the trouble began at the start of Season 16 in February. The studio had started getting reports of «disappearing nades» in Apex. Respawn soon determined that grenades weren't «disappearing» exactly, but they would sometimes fail to explode despite damaging 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,» the post reads.
Respawn got a better handle on the problem after receiving similar reports about missing gun sound FX and particle effects. «After a preliminary investigation, the primary suspect was found to be the system our servers use to dispatch 'start'/'stop' commands for various effects (e.g. certain sounds, particle systems, physics impacts, bullet tracers, explosions).»
Essentially, something was happening during a match that could overload the server's limit for sound FX or particles, causing some sounds and FX to get dropped.
«From there, the theory was that something may be flooding this engine limitation, requesting thousands of effects every second!» the post says. «But was this a systemic issue or could it be a single entity acting up? Every season update comprises thousands of
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