Respawn Entertainment has notified Apex Legends fans of upcoming changes. Respawn Entertainment is thoroughly working on multiple improvements, among which servers and other enhancements are also planned. Recently, the Apex Legends lead engineer Ricklesauceur made a deep dive into the servers and netcode. He predicts that multiple improvements are imminent.
In the article, Apex Legends lead engineer Ricklesauceur has submerged deep into the network level of details, giving insight on the online infrastructure, servers, netcode, tickrate, and more. According to the lead engineer, there are numerous topics to tackle, so the post size had to be long and hold satisfying conditions and explanations to alleviate any frustrations.
Speaking for myself, I was surprised to discover that Apex Legends is running on 20hz tickrate. But the interesting part is that the developer has no intentions of increasing it but instead explains that it will help you understand its philosophy.
The tickrate of a server is the number of simulations that the server runs per second. It is a fixed number (see the section about slow-mo). Apex uses a snapshot-based replication model. This mostly means that at the end of every tick, the server saves the world state and replicates it to all clients. This includes a lot of information that allows our weapon, map, and Legends’ design to be of the highest fidelity.
If you’re eager to find out the differences between tickrate, bandwidth, and resource allocation in Apex Legends, make sure you read the full article below. All we know is that changes are coming, and they’re for the greater good.
At the conclusive point, Ricklesauceur discovered that Respawn Entertainment is pursuing the following changes in the near future:
- Using real-time alerting that will allow us to identify problems and respond more quickly
- Implementing tools for identifying servers so we can remove and replace problematic servers rapidly
- Focusing on slow-mo servers—removing problematic servers is one step, but our goal is to make this drastically less common with code changes
- Reducing latency with better optimization of new features
- Fixing hit-reg bugs and building automated detection tools to help us avoid introducing new ones
