Ever since free-to-play MMO shooter APB Reloaded launched on March 31 for PlayStation 4, players have reported frame-rate and crashing issues. In a new blog post today, the developer commented on these problems, revealing that the frame-rate drops are due to new characters loading in, and the crashing is due to a memory issue.
As they add, patches are on the way to improve performance and stability:
Frame Render
As you know APB Reloaded gives you the ability to customize your characters to an unbelievably high level (one of our favorite features), but the downside is that the system creates the custom character textures and shapes in real-time based on each player’s character data, and then pushes the content to everyone else who happens to be in the same district. The code breaks this complex process down into smaller components and spreads the work over multiple frames, but there appears to be an issue with performance on PS4 which causes some of the computations to take considerably longer than expected when combined with real world customized characters and the number of characters that load in and out of a district in a session (especially in Social).
We are right now working hard on a new build that will dramatically reduce this effect, and have been working on fixes we can quickly get in to the first patch. Then we are planning a more extensive overhaul in subsequent patches to eliminate the issue.
Crash
Two thirds of the crashes from the first weekend were due to a single memory issue (again related to the complexity of real world custom characters), and we have identified the cause and are testing a fix in the live environment right now. Once it passes Sony QA we’ll push it out to live which should remove the main stability issue in that first patch.
For the first 30 days of availability, APB Reloaded will remain in a “Soft Launch” mode, which means that public announcements will be limited. If you put 10 hours into APB Reloaded before the first patch, you’ll receive Founders tags as a thank you.
If you’re interested in APB Reloaded, you can grab it from the PlayStation Store (North America, Europe).
[Source: APB Reloaded (1), (2)]
