We’re massive followers of Respawn’s new multiplayer shooter Apex Legends, and in our review, Ali even referred to as it “the best battle royale to date.” The game’s been a critical and popular success by any measure, however that’s to not say it’s there isn’t room for enchancment. One YouTuber has dug into Apex Legends’ netcode and says that it seems to be fairly poorly optimized.
A YouTuber named Chris runs a channel referred to as Battle(non)sense the place he analyzes community code and different technical points in games. He ran Apex Legends via a sequence of checks, and measured ping charges, packet information, and server tick-rates. What he discovered was shocking: Apex Legends makes use of an enormous quantity of information in every server replace, leading to low tick charges and in the end a worse multiplayer expertise.
Chris goes into nice element on how he performs his checks, and offers all his leads to the video beneath. The quick model is that whereas the Apex Legends consumer sends information at a reasonably secure common of about 58 updates per second. But when he seemed on the charge at which information is acquired from the server, he discovered that this wasn’t secure in any respect – and that it decreases over the course of a match, right down to round 20 Hz by the tip.
The motive for this, he explains, is as a result of every tick generates a large quantity of information, which then needs to be break up into a number of packets, generally as much as 4. As Chris says, which means that when you could also be receiving 62 packets per second, the game is definitely working at a tick-rate of round 20 Hz.
Chris can’t inform from his checks what information is contained within the packets, so it’s not clear why every tick must comprise a lot info. He means that Respawn could must additional optimize the game to cut back that quantity, which might imply decrease bandwidth necessities and doubtless a noticeably much less laggy expertise.
Winner, winner: The best battle royale games on PC
Of course, Respawn has been fairly communicative by way of the studio’s official web site and on the Apex Legends subreddit, and hopefully the community staff will be capable to tighten issues up because the game evolves. I’m simply glad that this offers me a useful excuse (in the interim, at the least) for my terrible goal.
Source
