DICE is still working away at stabilising Battlefield 4 after dropping everything to stop the game from completely falling apart. This new patch, which went live today, is meant to improve stability, eliminate a bunch of bugs and adds an improvement to the netcode.
Bug fixes include a “fix for player tags not always showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members.” Hopefully this will result in less strained friendships and pesky court martials. Of course, it wouldn’t be a real patch without a few teething pains: “We have noticed that players who have SLI enabled on their graphics card may experience graphical flickering. Also, we’re looking into the issue where the revive bar would get stuck on-screen in some instances. Both of these have our attention, and we’re investigating them.”
Dec 16 PC Game Update Notes
- Fix for a crash that would cause the game to stall, resulting in a sound loop. This should eliminate most of the problems relating to this.
- Fix for the SUAV (introduced in the China Rising expansion pack) not exploding when hitting enemy soldiers. While these indeed should be deadly, they were never designed for “roadkilling” opponents.
- Fixed one of the issues related to the so-called “Netcode” (see below for details).
- Fix for an issue where 4x the damage from a vehicle’s minigun would be applied to the chest when a player had the Defense specialization equipped.
- Fix for player tags not always showing when needed to, resulting in players shooting team members.
- Fix for graphical flickering appearing on terrain.
- Fixed the instance where players suddenly would transition into Spectator Mode while playing the Defuse game mode.
- Fix for a Defuse bug where none of the teams would win a round by letting the timer run out.
- Fix for players getting stuck in the revive screen after being killed.
- Fix for players getting stuck in the kill camera after being revived.
- Fix for the game mode specific ribbons being counted twice in the multiplayer progression.
- Made NVidia 331.82 or later driver versions mandatory for all players.
- Disabled DirectX 11.1 on NVidia cards that have outdated drivers.
- Fixed driver version not being properly detected on NVidia Optimus systems.
- Fixed a minor crash that could occur when bringing up the scoreboard.
“Netcode” improvement
- We’ve addressed the so-called “Kill trading”. This refers to when two players fire at each other and, seemingly, both die at the same time. The time window where a bullet could cause damage from an already dead player is now calculated as intended, decreasing the timeframe when players with high latency could get a kill, even though they should be dead according to the server.