A new update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) has begun to roll out for Xbox One owners.
This latest update is heavily focused on improving game stability on Xbox One consoles as crashing has become a common occurrence for many players. This update also optimizes the game quite a bit by adjusting how assets are loaded. You can read the full, detailed notes here.
Stability
- Two changes have been made to reduce crashes related to being “out of memory”.
- We’ve optimized the total memory required by both maps, with a significant reduction in total memory required for Miramar.
- The UI has been optimized to use less resources.
- Even without any memory leaks, there are instances where players would crash due to being “out of memory”. This is mostly due to the huge amount of memory required to process maps. We’ve reduced the total amount of memory needed to process each map by a remarkable amount, which will lead to fewer crashes.
- There are still crashes to fix. Our goal is to prevent crashes entirely, for all our players. We will continue to work as hard we can to improve stability.
Optimization
As we’ve mentioned in previous dev letters, our team is prioritizing making improvements which will increase performance at the start of the game when landing, as well as when driving vehicles, as these have been the most common areas of performance related complaints from our players. PUBG tries to load all resources within a 1km radius of your player to ensure you’re seeing everything you need to see, to properly enjoy the Battle Royale experience. Although, loading all resources within that radius is negatively impacting performance. We’re continually making improvements to the way resources are handled to improve optimization.
We’ve already implemented prediction-based level streaming and elastic control for characters, which are two examples of systems which reduce the loading of unnecessary resources. We will continue to work on and improve the efficiency of these systems, to improve performance. Below are all the performance related improvements we’ve made this patch.
- Character movement has been optimized to use less resources and improve performance.
- In our patch preview, we said that we’re aiming to reduce the total resources required to render characters by 50%. This is still our goal, but requires further testing to ensure stability. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.
- Vehicle location updates have been made more efficient for stationary vehicles to improve performance.
- The position of every vehicle in a 1km of your player is updated very frequently, to ensure vehicle movement is as smooth as possible. Prior to this patch, frequent vehicle location updates were also being requested for every stationary vehicle in a 1km radius of your player, negatively impacting performance. We’ve changed the way locations are updated for stationary vehicles, which will improve performance.
- Vehicle effects have been optimized to improve performance, without affecting visual quality.
- When vehicles were moving, many resources were being used to generate visual effects. We’ve optimized the effects without diminishing their visual quality, to improve overall game performance.
- Bullet impact effects will no-longer consume resources if they aren’t seen by the player.
- When bullets impact any surface, an effect is displayed. Previously, all bullet impact effects within a 1km radius of the player were consuming resources, even if the effect wasn’t directly seen by the player. Due to the sheer number of bullet impacts that can occur in a 1km radius of the player, having all of these effects consume resources was negatively impacting performance. Now, bullet impacts not directly seen by the player will not consume resources, improving performance, especially in close quarters combat.
- Character shadow rendering has been optimized to improve performance.
- While we’ve tried to have each character shadow be an entirely accurate representation of the player, both in shape and movement, this was having a negative impact on performance. We have changed the shape and movement of character shadows to significantly reduce their impact on performance.
- Terrain and grass have been optimized on both maps (Miramar/Erangel) to increase performance.
- We’ve made two additional changes to improve world loading times when landing:
- Parachutes have been optimized, they now use less resources.
- The physics while free falling have been optimized.
- The efficiency of the physics used while free falling upon exiting the plane has been improved. With this change, bullets will no longer be able to impact players in free fall. Players can still be shot while parachuting, this change only applies to free falling players, prior to opening their parachute. As it’s almost impossible to get to the ground, pick up a gun, and shoot someone who is free falling through the air, this change will not negatively impact gameplay, but will improve world loading times when landing.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where sometimes footsteps weren’t heard during or after ADS.
- Fixed a bug where the position of teammates sometimes wouldn’t display correctly on the minimap.
- We will continue to push out updates and hotfixes as quickly as possible, to improve the player experience.
PUBG is one of the most-popular video games out right now and recently reached over 400 million players.
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