DICE has made due on their promised netcode improvements to the military FPS Battlefield 4, announcing that a new patch will be rolling out across all platforms this week with PC and last-gen consoles already getting a taste as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One await later releases.
This marks the first update developed in the Community Test Environment (CTE), a new initiative by DICE to gain community feedback on in-development patches before handing them out to the public. DICE had also used additional telemetry data gathered on the CTE to further enhance changes.
The patch also adds the "High Frequency Bubble" for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which will allow server updates in the player's immediate vicinity to happen more often. Essentially the goal is to create a smoother and more "correct" player experience, at least according to the
Battlelog post. The feature is turned off by default, and has three different levels: Low, Medium and High.
More on the feature including future plans for the fourth mainline Battlefield and complete patch notes can be found at the
Battlelog post.
Posted 07:17pm 04/6/14
The play of words is remarkable. Once these guys are done here they should join an Australian political party.
Posted 07:20pm 04/6/14
Posted 07:37pm 04/6/14
Posted 07:38pm 04/6/14
I'll admit, recently I had a session of BF4 after not touching it for a good 3 months...and yes, it has been improved 10-fold, but still I can't help but think that it is all a bit farcical from both DICE and EA.
Overall, just a very disappointing experience after initially showing such potential when it was first compared to the half-baked game that was BF3.
Posted 06:49am 05/6/14
Posted 07:04am 05/6/14
Cool, so the essentially upped the tick rate ;p
Posted 09:40am 05/6/14
It's my understanding and experience that BF4 suffered as player numbers increased and could become an entire map duration rubber bandathon on the full 64 player servers.
Would have been more interested in seeing the performance differential on a fully raging 64 player conquest large map.
Posted 10:03am 05/6/14
Yeah, I've been ragging hard on BF over the past few months so I wasn't going to keep going, but yes you are correct.
Their test environment can't get any better and even then it takes 30-50ms for the game alone to do its calculations. It's clear that something very wrong has happened early in coding the networking on the engine. Something so fundamental that it can't be fixed completely without ruining everything else. Let's face it, in WoW you can have 300 players on your screen and the tick rate is still stupidly high, all while using far less than 1/1mbps.
It only brings up more questions, what happens when half the server is inside this so called bubble? Maybe it's the new way to dos someone, just get a pile of people to follow him around in Battlefield.
Posted 10:30am 05/6/14
They do all this fancy graphics business, but don't bother to make substantial progress on their netcode. Sort of shows where their priorities are. Fancy looking game that sells on hype and pre-release. Excellent netcode doesn't sell a game in the pre-release or even the first big week of sales, so why bother eh?