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On top of the new content such as the Hardcore mode, Title Update 6.1 brought several fixes to bugs and glitches. These fixes also included improvements to several audio issues youve been experiencing since the very beginning of your journey in The Division 2, such as delayed and/or no gun sound despite shooting from your weapons, audio distortion or no game sound at all.
We wanted to take some time to give you some insights on how the Audio-tech team approached these very complicated problems throughout these months.
Data patching on PS4
One of the clever features of the PS4 is the ability to download a base data image the first time and then overlay it with successive delta data patches. This greatly reduces the download size of data patches, but for the game to stream in audio assets efficiently they all need to be next to each other in the data image.
What we discovered happening as we updated the PS4 version of the game over a few months was that several groups of audio assets were drifting apart from each other as they got updated, and this impacted disk I/O performance for audio in a negative way. At first, we couldnt see this from our workspaces because in development we generally make a completely new disk image as we work, so this drift was not apparent to developers - just to our internal testers and players.
After some debate we eventually did some straight A/B tests in the lab, and it got the irrefutable proof that the delta patching itself was creating problems for audio asset streaming. Since then weve updated our data patch authoring system so that it re-patches all the audio assets whether they have changed or not. It does make those data patches slightly larger, but it ensures the audio assets are all grouped together no matter what.
Memory Fragmentation
Lets highlight a very important concept: in The Division 2 we have a much greater number of audio assets compared to the first game. One of the challenges the team had to face was to use the same amount of memory on the current gen consoles, while also having a smaller memory budget to work with due to other factors such as, for example, characters or world animations and other background systems taking memory allocations overtime.
To best leverage the memory budget that we had, we had to be very aggressive with what we load and unload while the game is playing. As soon as that memory budget is full, to load a new audio asset in you need to unload an older one, and with The Division 2 we had do most of that twice as quickly as compared to first The Division game.
To give you a better idea on how memory allocation works, just imagine when you start the game, everything looks like a nice open car park with all the used spaces tightly packed. A bus-sized vehicle might leave its place, and then a car could move into that empty spot. What happens in that case is that the new bus wont be able to park in that same spot as that car has filled some of that area up. The new bus will have to park further on, thus making the car park less tightly packed than it was earlier, and therefore lose a little of its capacity overall. We call this type of degradation memory fragmentation.
For any memory allocated and freed directly from Snowdrop, we have a system that keeps track of it all and prevents fragmentation occurring. However, our audio asset management is done through middleware and works somewhat differently. How it works is fair if our game engine was reserving dedicated parking sections in memory for all our different data types, but it doesnt play nicely with our more modern, dynamic memory allocator. For example, what was happening was that a player could be running the game for a couple of hours and eventually get to the point where switching to a different gun would result in no weapons fire - the audio assets for that weapon could not be loaded in anymore. Fragmentation had set in, and so the only solution was to reserve a dedicated parking section for audio assets at start up and hand this over to the middlewares asset management system.
Microsoft Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos
We were one of the very first companies to work with Microsoft Spatial Audio and while there was nothing wrong with the technology itself, a lot of sound peripheral companies on Windows 10 werent ready for us. For instance, we had a couple of cases where a whole range of headsets that were going full silent while using Dolby Atmos through Spatial Audio, despite functioning as intended while working in stereo mode.
Unfortunately, despite having tried many headsets, no one could have known that with that combination, some headsets would have not worked properly. This happened because some companies didnt have our game and we didnt have their headsets.
Despite all the efforts made to fix these issues we noticed coming up during the Private Beta, there were still a few headsets that were still not playing nicely with Microsoft Spatial Audio. We did a large amount of mitigation to resolve these issues, such as publishing a workaround and allowing the game to reboot its audio mix when in and out the clients window.
In August we received a firmware update for Xbox One that made the Microsoft Spatial Audio playback system slightly heavier on the CPU, and since The Division 2 is running right on the edge of this consoles maximum performance, this small change upset smooth playback for anything that was spatialized by it. It was a tough decision, but for the sake of the players it was decided to deprecate Microsoft Spatial Audio on this platform and revert to standard 7.1 surround until further notice.
Pre-Emptive asset preloading
In The Division 2, there is a constant stream of content loaded in and out, which stress the capabilities of all the platforms we support, especially the consoles. As a result, the file I/O gets easily swamped. We need to ensure an optimal data transmission flow with the hard drives, since were not just talking about audio assets, but also animations and other game processes that are running in the background. A slight delay in loading assets, sometimes just milliseconds, and you could experience frame rates problems, freezing animations, audio de-synchronization and other issues.
Weve done adjustments but those didnt always work due to different factors such as what system you were playing on and how old your console or hard drive was. These are issues that didnt come up with our Development Kits, since they run in different conditions compared to, for example, retail game consoles. At the end of the day, we shouldnt consider these as traditional bugs, since there isnt code at fault, rather an issue of hardware robustness and longevity.
Sometimes there are peak moments in terms of data traffic, and we have to consider the level of importance of some assets over others. For the loading system to work properly, we need to set priorities. We worked hard with the balancing team trying to rebalance the priorities because there were not just audio issues, but also textures problems where, for instance, a player could walk into a basement and no textures were loaded in. The player could be left standing in an empty void.
Part of the work with assets priorities went through preloading assets pre-emptively, allowing that specific chunk of data to be already available before its needed. An example of pre-emptive assets preloading can be experienced in the first tutorial mission while hearing the first mortar strike. Without that preloading, you would have heard the big mortar explosion with a quite significant delay of several seconds. Of course, when the player is funnelled in by the game, or watching a cut-scene, its easy to predict what needs to be cached, but in emergent, open world play this is absolutely not straightforward.
Moving forward
In the 6.1 update, thanks to the continued effort with pre-emptive asset preloading, internal testing and your reports, we mitigated different audio issues. However, were aware the work is not over, as more potential scenarios require specific tuning since there are many variables to take into account. As a result, you still might experience missing game sounds from time to time.
We appreciate your reports as they help us identifying more scenarios, which is why we look for every possible detail you share with us, such as when and where that specific audio issue happened. If you encounter more instances where you are experiencing audio issues, please let us know through our Player Support forums or the Ubisoft Support website.
/The Division Team
We wanted to take some time to give you some insights on how the Audio-tech team approached these very complicated problems throughout these months.
Data patching on PS4
One of the clever features of the PS4 is the ability to download a base data image the first time and then overlay it with successive delta data patches. This greatly reduces the download size of data patches, but for the game to stream in audio assets efficiently they all need to be next to each other in the data image.
What we discovered happening as we updated the PS4 version of the game over a few months was that several groups of audio assets were drifting apart from each other as they got updated, and this impacted disk I/O performance for audio in a negative way. At first, we couldnt see this from our workspaces because in development we generally make a completely new disk image as we work, so this drift was not apparent to developers - just to our internal testers and players.
After some debate we eventually did some straight A/B tests in the lab, and it got the irrefutable proof that the delta patching itself was creating problems for audio asset streaming. Since then weve updated our data patch authoring system so that it re-patches all the audio assets whether they have changed or not. It does make those data patches slightly larger, but it ensures the audio assets are all grouped together no matter what.
Memory Fragmentation
Lets highlight a very important concept: in The Division 2 we have a much greater number of audio assets compared to the first game. One of the challenges the team had to face was to use the same amount of memory on the current gen consoles, while also having a smaller memory budget to work with due to other factors such as, for example, characters or world animations and other background systems taking memory allocations overtime.
To best leverage the memory budget that we had, we had to be very aggressive with what we load and unload while the game is playing. As soon as that memory budget is full, to load a new audio asset in you need to unload an older one, and with The Division 2 we had do most of that twice as quickly as compared to first The Division game.
To give you a better idea on how memory allocation works, just imagine when you start the game, everything looks like a nice open car park with all the used spaces tightly packed. A bus-sized vehicle might leave its place, and then a car could move into that empty spot. What happens in that case is that the new bus wont be able to park in that same spot as that car has filled some of that area up. The new bus will have to park further on, thus making the car park less tightly packed than it was earlier, and therefore lose a little of its capacity overall. We call this type of degradation memory fragmentation.
For any memory allocated and freed directly from Snowdrop, we have a system that keeps track of it all and prevents fragmentation occurring. However, our audio asset management is done through middleware and works somewhat differently. How it works is fair if our game engine was reserving dedicated parking sections in memory for all our different data types, but it doesnt play nicely with our more modern, dynamic memory allocator. For example, what was happening was that a player could be running the game for a couple of hours and eventually get to the point where switching to a different gun would result in no weapons fire - the audio assets for that weapon could not be loaded in anymore. Fragmentation had set in, and so the only solution was to reserve a dedicated parking section for audio assets at start up and hand this over to the middlewares asset management system.
Microsoft Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos
We were one of the very first companies to work with Microsoft Spatial Audio and while there was nothing wrong with the technology itself, a lot of sound peripheral companies on Windows 10 werent ready for us. For instance, we had a couple of cases where a whole range of headsets that were going full silent while using Dolby Atmos through Spatial Audio, despite functioning as intended while working in stereo mode.
Unfortunately, despite having tried many headsets, no one could have known that with that combination, some headsets would have not worked properly. This happened because some companies didnt have our game and we didnt have their headsets.
Despite all the efforts made to fix these issues we noticed coming up during the Private Beta, there were still a few headsets that were still not playing nicely with Microsoft Spatial Audio. We did a large amount of mitigation to resolve these issues, such as publishing a workaround and allowing the game to reboot its audio mix when in and out the clients window.
In August we received a firmware update for Xbox One that made the Microsoft Spatial Audio playback system slightly heavier on the CPU, and since The Division 2 is running right on the edge of this consoles maximum performance, this small change upset smooth playback for anything that was spatialized by it. It was a tough decision, but for the sake of the players it was decided to deprecate Microsoft Spatial Audio on this platform and revert to standard 7.1 surround until further notice.
Pre-Emptive asset preloading
In The Division 2, there is a constant stream of content loaded in and out, which stress the capabilities of all the platforms we support, especially the consoles. As a result, the file I/O gets easily swamped. We need to ensure an optimal data transmission flow with the hard drives, since were not just talking about audio assets, but also animations and other game processes that are running in the background. A slight delay in loading assets, sometimes just milliseconds, and you could experience frame rates problems, freezing animations, audio de-synchronization and other issues.
Weve done adjustments but those didnt always work due to different factors such as what system you were playing on and how old your console or hard drive was. These are issues that didnt come up with our Development Kits, since they run in different conditions compared to, for example, retail game consoles. At the end of the day, we shouldnt consider these as traditional bugs, since there isnt code at fault, rather an issue of hardware robustness and longevity.
Sometimes there are peak moments in terms of data traffic, and we have to consider the level of importance of some assets over others. For the loading system to work properly, we need to set priorities. We worked hard with the balancing team trying to rebalance the priorities because there were not just audio issues, but also textures problems where, for instance, a player could walk into a basement and no textures were loaded in. The player could be left standing in an empty void.
Part of the work with assets priorities went through preloading assets pre-emptively, allowing that specific chunk of data to be already available before its needed. An example of pre-emptive assets preloading can be experienced in the first tutorial mission while hearing the first mortar strike. Without that preloading, you would have heard the big mortar explosion with a quite significant delay of several seconds. Of course, when the player is funnelled in by the game, or watching a cut-scene, its easy to predict what needs to be cached, but in emergent, open world play this is absolutely not straightforward.
Moving forward
In the 6.1 update, thanks to the continued effort with pre-emptive asset preloading, internal testing and your reports, we mitigated different audio issues. However, were aware the work is not over, as more potential scenarios require specific tuning since there are many variables to take into account. As a result, you still might experience missing game sounds from time to time.
We appreciate your reports as they help us identifying more scenarios, which is why we look for every possible detail you share with us, such as when and where that specific audio issue happened. If you encounter more instances where you are experiencing audio issues, please let us know through our Player Support forums or the Ubisoft Support website.
/The Division Team