‘Apex Legends’ developer reveals ‘single line of code’ to blame for audio bug

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Respawn Entertainment has revealed that a “single line of code” was responsible for a months-long audio glitch in Apex Legends, though it has since been fixed.

As detailed on Reddit (via PC Gamer), Respawn Community Manager Amy Thiessen explained that, since February, the developer has noticed that certain sound effects such as grenade explosions or gunfire aren’t playing. play.

Respawn speculated that the bug was related to the fact that only 128 effects can be run per server frame, and that a faulty effect was using up all of those spaces, causing players to miss sound effects.

However, Thiessen admitted that trying to find the cause “meant finding a needle in a haystack”, as “thousands of changes” were made with each season update.

Apex Legends. Credit: Respawn Entertainment

Respawn’s metrics system also failed to spot the issues, leaving the studio with “minimal in-house leads” despite recognizing that the issue was affecting players.

Eventually, Respawn was able to confirm that the effects were being cut by creating “unrealistic test cases”, such as 50 characters firing their weapons at the same time. After even more testing, the studio found that “a single line of code has been identified as the root cause of the problem.”

The culprit was the Nemesis, a weapon that was added to Apex Legends in February. According to Thiessen, the weapon has a line of code that stops the pistol’s particle effects when the weapon is unloaded, but due to a bug each player carrying a Nemesis was creating a “stop particle” effect at each picture.

After identifying the issue, Respawn was able to release a fix last week. However, the anecdote is a reminder that making games is a lot harder than it looks, as Thiessen pointed out, “one minute of players playing Apex equals 10 testers playing the game for a year!”

In other gaming news, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 will receive a major update next week (May 10).

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