Games By Matthew Humphries Jun. 3, 2014 4:31 pm
The most important aspect of any online first-person shooter is as little network lag as possible. You want the game to be low latency. The higher the latency, the more chance that the bullet you fired won’t hit its target, or the bullet you swear you dodged actually ends up being a head shot.
In the case of Battlefield 4, you expect an experienced developer like DICE to get networking right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t keep improving the experience. And that’s exactly what they’ve managed to do with the latest update for the game.
The so-called Netcode patch is being made available to PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game. What it does is to add a “High Frequency Bubble” around each player. Inside this bubble’s radius the client gets updates from the server much more quickly. So that means a lot less lag when fighting up close.
As the video below shows, the experience is much smoother and the network delay is reduced by as much as 62 percent.
The High Frequency Bubble feature is turned off by default, but you can enable it in the options and choose between Low, Medium, and High settings. Basically, if your Internet connection averages faster than 1Mbit, you can choose the High setting. Lower than that and you need to experiment with Medium and Low to see what works best.
Remember, Battlefield 4 has servers that can handle up to 64 players, and the High Frequency Bubble will only be rolled out to some of them as DICE continues testing. However, all 48 player servers will now use it.
DICE fully intends to continue tweaking and improving upon the Netcode patch in the coming months, and it hasn’t forgotten about PS3 and Xbox 360 players who also got some networking tweaks in an update.
More...
In the case of Battlefield 4, you expect an experienced developer like DICE to get networking right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t keep improving the experience. And that’s exactly what they’ve managed to do with the latest update for the game.
The so-called Netcode patch is being made available to PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game. What it does is to add a “High Frequency Bubble” around each player. Inside this bubble’s radius the client gets updates from the server much more quickly. So that means a lot less lag when fighting up close.
As the video below shows, the experience is much smoother and the network delay is reduced by as much as 62 percent.
The High Frequency Bubble feature is turned off by default, but you can enable it in the options and choose between Low, Medium, and High settings. Basically, if your Internet connection averages faster than 1Mbit, you can choose the High setting. Lower than that and you need to experiment with Medium and Low to see what works best.
Remember, Battlefield 4 has servers that can handle up to 64 players, and the High Frequency Bubble will only be rolled out to some of them as DICE continues testing. However, all 48 player servers will now use it.
DICE fully intends to continue tweaking and improving upon the Netcode patch in the coming months, and it hasn’t forgotten about PS3 and Xbox 360 players who also got some networking tweaks in an update.
More...
