PC Patch Live Now: An Update on PC Crashes

[EA_Atic]

Hey!

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.

Those of you still experiencing crashes, please submit your apex_crash.txt file to our forums here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Crash-after-update-Season-1/td-p/7704502. Our customer service team is helping us gather the info and it’s super helpful to our team.

(Source)

[BotWeston]

Any update on the audio cutting out for a good 15 seconds at a time?
Well done with the crashing issue!!

[JMUTowlee]

Thank you for the update, patch just in time for the weekend! I'm crossing my fingers that I can go all weekend crash free.

[HYZZZRRR]

my menu is still locking, for 4 seconds after that it appears that the connection to the server has dropped, I hope it at least does not crash

[PotatoPotahtoh]

Oh my goodness I can't wait to hop on after work and test this out! Thanks for the update @EA_Atic 

[warslag]

As a PC gamer, I'm really impressed with how slick the whole management of Apex Legends is. 

I cannot recall another PC title with a similar level of conscientiousness displayed by the entire team. Very professional indeed.

:eahigh_file:

[Bongstockings]

FINALLY

[Wardonio]

Playing all evening after the patch and (don't want to jinx it) i haven't crashed a single time. Thank you !

[The18thFret]

Thank you Respawn!

These random crashes are literally the only issue I have with the game stability wise. Will get back later to see if it's worked.

[The18thFret]

3 games in and no crashes so far. So that's a good sign!

Although before this patch, the random crashes would happen maybe twice a week, so it's not like it was every single game or anything crazy. But Hopefully this patch makes the game even more stable.