Apex Legends Dev Tracker

Great writing!

About the second part where you name me directly about server stuff.

It is definitely an interesting discussion. What I tried to convey in the article is that using tick rate as a metric is misleading. The notion covers a lot of different concepts with different meaning depending on the tech stack. I am not going to comment on other games because every tech is different and have different design goals (I believe the technical part is an instrument to empower designers).

What I can say is that there is no free lunch. We have 60 players that can land at the same spot of a map and fight with high fidelity engagement. Shall we sacrifice a frame or two for shoulder picking to support this scenario ? So be it. From a design perspective it seems more interesting in our context. We still support high fps clients and we rely on our lag compensation to ensure fairness. I cannot throw money to grow bandwidth on people's connection so this argument seem...

So it's not EXACTLY like your mockup, but I think it's pretty close. I had this thread - and your mockup - open almost the whole time I was working on this. It was a pretty big project. Bigger than I expected, but I'm super happy to see it delivered for S9. The basic system works for any list, so we're discussing improving organization of other items (looking at you charms...). I kept this thread saved so that when the feature finally released, I could come back and thank you for the suggestion and the awesome layout.

You're most welcome. For S8, I did the improved badge tooltips (the addition of your progress to the next tier for multi-tier badges), and this was the next thing I tackled once I learned the badge system. This was quite a bit bigger of a project, but the basic classification system I built could be used for any list of items in the game (skins, charms, etc). Charms are definitely something I'm looking at; there's over 300 now, and scrolling through that long list is a challenge... It's always a thrill to see work you did in the release notes, but what's really cool is when people notice it. The idea for this came directly from Reddit. I'm about to go dig up that original thread and thank the author there for the awesome mockup he did.

Ahhhh look at her go! Love this, what did she think?

Hahaha nooooo I promise!

The real story is that I had been working on this prototype, and we needed to get the name decided to record VO. VO is recorded way ahead of time, and there is no way to emergency add it, because it's all based on voice actor schedules and such. So very early on, we had to come up with a name with the weapon. I am not particularly great at names, so I went to our wonderful and kind writers who I often bother to help me come up with names. We made a short doc, and wrote a bunch of names -- there was an attempt to get my name in in some sort of hidden way, like SEK-197 or whatever ("bow" + "sek" easter egg), but we were thinking probably something like "Hornet" or some tech gun name "Hornet", like we do "M600 Spitfire". Then, the lead writer at the time, made the executive decision to name it after me, albeit pronounced slightly differently. I tried to tell people to maybe also record "Hornet" as a backup in case we don't like it, but he was being v...

I don't usually respond to this kinda comment, and I don't want to be too curt, but the tone you have here doesn't seem to be in very good faith, and maybe it can help be a learning opportunity. You guys seem like you may work in engineering, but definitely not in games. Games are software, but they are also FAR more than pure lines of code. How about assets? What about sound files or animations? There's no trivial "replace all instances" on binary proprietary data compression files. You can try and make tools to do stuff, and I would argue our internal tool for this is really quite incredible for how well it manages most of these assets (the engineer who made it is incredibly smart). But it is a universal truth that renaming the weird mess of asset file code executable VM dependency that comprises game projects is very costly and can cause lots of bugs and be unsafe. Gotta do it with good purpose! I know the tech artist I work closely with was working real late with me for a coupl...

The goal is that they are a lot better off drop! Maybe aren't there exactly, but we'll see and adjust, but the goal is that the P2020 and Moz are getting big buffs

They are mags! Dev names are just silly sometimes :)

Would be nice! Definitely way too much work and WAY too much risk to change all that though! Renaming things in version controlled large software is absolutely abysmal. Tons of stuff stay dev names forever, almost none of the weapons are internally named what they are called in game haha. Some fun examples: spitfire is mp_weapon_lmg, devotion is mp_weapon_esaw, flatline is mp_weapon_vinson, etc. Unfortunately you have to name things when you first make the prototype, before you really know what it will become! One of the silly eternal problems of game / software dev!

I wrote a big comment on it above, but it was mostly as a result of the P2020 and Moz buffs. Long story short, because of buffing the base weapons, we would have to nerf the hopup's power so it wasn't OP -- it's a very strong hopup, the big weaknesses are what keep it in check. Once you do that, it's a pretty lame hopup, because it takes an OK gun and makes it a little better, but not in a way that would make you play differently (just use moz the whole time, no need to swap, not worth swapping to the hopup gun if another gun is out after you break shields, etc.). The hopup only really works as a high risk high reward item, so it just didn't work well anymore. We will be re-evaluating it and trying to see what else we can do with it for the future!

I personally really love the hammerpoints! That's why they've been in since S3 while other things have come and gone :)

However, we really wanted to buff the base power level of the Mozambique and the P2020, and this sort of destroys a lot of the identity of hammerpoints. Hammerpoints really click as a hopup that takes bad guns and makes them incredible, but only in specific situations. It's a very high risk high reward option in many ways. From looting side: are you gonna carry a p2020 around until you find hammerpoints? If you find hammerpoints late, are you gonna swap out your kitted flatline and inventory full of heavy to try and find a P2020 with no attachments or ammo? Do you want to sacrifice a weapon slot for something so situational? From combat side: if the target still has shields, do they have few enough shields you can burn through them and get to flesh before reloading? Are they in range to use the P2020 or Moz? etc.

Once we increased the base power of...

Sorry, we try to cut things down for brevity when possible, and sometimes it gets a little confusing. Let me rephrase! The new marksman weapons category has it's own set of hipfire spread values, which the scout is being changed to. These values are higher spread than the G7 currently has, so the G7 is getting less accurate hipfire. I wanted to note, however, that the 3030 and Bow have better than default hipfire by design, so folks weren't confused why the G7 had worse hipfire than those other marksman weapons. In the future, any new marksman weapons will align with the G7/TT for default hipfire.

Right now we are hiring lots! Trying to keep getting good people to help push Apex onward and upward! Check out https://www.respawn.com/careers

Nuuuu haha we try to catch those but they slip through. The dirty secret is.... internally in code/script it's referred to as a clip ;_; ^{the shaaammee}

Patch notes are usually a translation of documentation of the actual changes, and the setting for mag size is ammo_clip_size, so it gets through sometimes womp womp lol

We gotchu

Slight oversight. We'll fix it!

He's like that in meetings too.

Silence disables VTOL jets, but crypto EMP isn't a silence. Revenant tactical is. If you get tagged by that, no flying away. If the murder bot somehow hits you in mid air, you drop to the ground like a lead balloon.

It's really not a great idea to use her ultimately in a fight. I know our trailers keep showing it because it looks cool, but in a real game you'll just get killed.

Reddit's video player is great if you want to watch the first 3s of your video like four times at random quality settings.