Apex Legends has released a patch that aims to improve stability of PC players in season 1. The patch was released to help improve stability for PC players who were experiencing random crashes. The previously released patch would create a txt file when crashing that players could chose to submit to help the development team determine the reason for the crash. After receiving many crash logs, the developers of Apex Legends were able to patch a couple of the crashes, most notably a memory error crash.
The crash report (apex_crash.txt) can be found in your “My Documents” folder and can be submitted on the Apex Legends forums. The more crash reports that they receive the better off the developers will be when it comes to identifying why the game is crashing.
The developers have also stated that they are aware of a few other bugs that are causing crashes. However, they don’t have a fix or ETA on them and aren’t even sure if the crashes are caused by the game or an improperly configured computer.
Apex Legends March 22 Complete Patch Notes
In the patch we released on Tuesday, we included a way to better capture information when Apex crashes on PC. The game should now write an apex_crash.txt file to your My Documents folder when it crashes. Since then we got many submissions of apex_crash.txt directly from our fans, searching the Internet, and from the forums.
The good news is they have been giving us great info and revealed a few crash locations, and we discovered that many of these are related. One of the issues appeared to be caused by one part of the program changing memory used by another part. These bugs are the most difficult to find!
As an analogy, imagine you’ve got thousands of robots tasked with painting different parts of an entire city, where each robot is given one of a dozen colors of paint. Occasionally, somebody complains that one of the rooms that was supposed to be red has some blue on the wall, but they don’t tell you which room. Based on that information, your job is to go fix it! This is why it’s been difficult to quickly identify, reproduce, fix, and test fixes.
But the apex_crash.txt files we got from players had a lot of information that we needed. In our analogy, those clues let our engineering team figure out which building had the bug, and a way to temporarily make the robots in that building a million times more likely to interfere with each other. We had never seen the crash in any of our internal testing before, but now we could finally reproduce the bug and that meant we could find it and fix it! To finish our analogy, our robots didn’t interfere even in this temporary test case, and we knew the bug was fixed.
A patch for PC is live now that includes a fix that when we tested locally, improved stability and you will need to update the client to grab it.
This is progress, but we don’t expect this patch to be the end all solution for all the crashes and we still have work to do. There are still some issues we’re seeing from the reports that we’re continuing to investigate to understand and address:
- Other crashes we’ve seen are related to out-of-memory issues. This is much less common. It’s not clear yet whether this is a memory leak in Apex or an improperly configured PC.
- There may be other, rarer crashes still to fix that we just haven’t identified yet.
