14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for fans of DICE’s military first-person shooter Battlefield 4: tests for netcode updates working at 60 and 120 Hz are currently underway on the CTE.
The Community Testing Environment has been a very fruitful initiative, allowing DICE to test out the impact of various tweaks and changes in a quasi-controlled environment, without impacting the huge user base that BF4 possesses.
This in turn translated into patches being rolled out more efficiently, with improvements reaching users faster than using the traditional iteration method. One such improvement refers to the number of updates made between clients and servers, which is currently capped at 30 interactions per second.
Using some of the technology that Battlefield Hardline's maker Visceral Games has developed, DICE is now testing the impact of an increased number of updates on its testing servers, in order to gauge how such a change would impact the performance of Battlefield 4.
For the time being, there is no guarantee that the changes will actually make it to the live portion of the game, but if they do, they will translate into increased accuracy, less time between the moments when the shooting animation is displayed and the damage dealt, and so on.
You can learn more about the feature by listening to YouTube user Battle(non)sense’s commentary in the video below, outlining both the good and the bad parts of an increased tickrate.
