09:58 AM - March 24, 2012 by Steve_OS
Turn 10 Studios has released another
Forza Motorsport 4 title update.
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With every title update we’ve released for Forza Motorsport 4, our goal has been the same: to create the best experience for the people who are playing the game. This can be anything from updates that add functionality to the game (such as raising the level cap in this title update… more on that in a bit) to correcting post-release gameplay issues that crop up. In the case of multiplayer lobby crashing, the work in this title update to address the issue was the result of several months of painstaking research and investigation.
Essentially what was happening was a slow memory leak when using liveried cars and jumping between lobbies. The leak was only happening when players driving liveried cars would join or leave lobbies at precisely the right moment during the loading of a race (interestingly, this is called a "race condition" in software testing). The leak occurred on all boxes even if the player didn’t have a custom livery, but it was exceedingly small. As the leak got worse over the course of a player’s session, it would cause the box to crash. This resulted in longer load times for everyone else in the lobby with that player as his crashed box timed-out. Unfortunately, the problem was made worse when players would go from one lobby to the next after becoming impatient with loading times, thus essentially "spreading" the memory leak from one lobby to the next.
Because of the extended steps needed to find a reliable reproduction of the problem in our testing lab, our development team put weeks of research and testing into this fix. The result was a problem that was more difficult to diagnose than it actually was to repair. In addition to all our developers’ hard work, I want to recognize and thank our dedicated community members who answered the call put out by our QA team on the FM.net forums, which provided valuable insight into this issue from the player perspective. The data we received was crucial in helping us completely isolate the problem and eventually engineer our solution.
As a result of all this work, we expect lobby crashes to dramatically reduce, resulting in the kind of online experience Forza Motorsport fans have come to expect from the game. |
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To see all the
Forza Motorsport 4 title update details, click here.
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