Respawn Entertainment has recently revealed that the cause of Apex Legends’ months-long bugs was actually caused by one single line of code only.
Just like standard program coding, when one line of code has a mistake, the rest of the program gets messed up. The hard part is to look for the mistake in that whole mess of programming code that could be over 100 lines of it. This also happened in Apex Legends and it took months for Respawn Entertainment to find out which one was at fault.
According to the developers, the single line of faulty code was tied to an assault rifle. This problematic line of code was responsible for various audio and graphical bugs which happened during Season 16.
A post on Reddit explained how the missing sounds and FX were happening during the time the fault code was not found yet. It seems to be connected to the servers’ capacity to dispatch up to 128 effect entries for each and every frame of gameplay. Now, if one of those codes were faulty and then it hits the 128-entry frame limit, it would be dropped.
The team members worked really hard to look for the problematic code, but each new season would introduce a new set of asset tweaks that could number by the thousands. This was literally looking for a needle in a haystack.
Fortunately, one of the team members finally found the problem and quickly fixed that. It was a code tied to the Nemesis rifled that got introduced in Season 16. Without the fault code, everything went back to normal. Well, most of it. There may be still some FX issues that have not been hashed out, said the developers, so be on the lookout.
Apex Legends is out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
