PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (a game which we've recently given our Early Access impressions of) has received a big update today, which aims to address some of the issues the community has reported to developers Bluehole Studio and Brendan Greene.
This post on the Steam forums details the update, which was preceded by a hotfix yesterday, where PlayerUnknown wrote: "Today I want to address some of the standout issues you have reported, and what we are doing to improve server performance. First though, in case you missed it last week, here is our plan for updates during Early Access: Weekly updates, to push bug fixes & client performance and stability fixes [then] Monthly updates, to add new content and push balance passes for game-play."
Later this month should see a client optimisation patch arrive for the game, but something that's been improved right now is footstep sounds. "Due to a miscalculation of how much these sounds would be occluded, footsteps ended up being very hard to hear. This has now been fixed, and with the new occlusion system it should be much easier for you to track a player's movement using sound alone." The patch notes also promise more improvements to this area of the game.
Servers are also discussed, as many have been reporting server issues. "This is not any issue with the number of servers we have for players, but rather it is down to the optimisation of the server code," the post explains. "Over the last week, we rolled out daily updates to the servers to improve profiling of optimisation bottlenecks and yesterday these actions finally paid off! We found a issue within the Unreal Engine core code, which led the server to believe that it was being DDoS'ed due to the number of packets being sent between the clients and the server. When this detection was triggered on the server, it would drop 90% of packets received resulting in the lag/rubberbanding seen over the past week. We pushed a hotfix to the servers earlier today which should resolve these issues. We will continue to push daily updates to the servers to further improve both stability and performance."
The post then goes into the nitty gritty about what's happening in this week's patch, and here are the patch notes down below.
Early Access - Week 2 - Patch Notes
Performance Improvements
Client performances have improved when loading buildings from a mid-distance
Server performance has been improved
Sound
Fixed an issue with door sounds playing at low volume
Adjusted volume of wind, rain, and footsteps
Improved the sounds for the buggy
When in rainy weather, you will now sporadically hear thunder sounds
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that allowed players to hide and attack other players from inside a rock
Applied additional fixes to address the issue of players going under the map in certain areas
Fixed several issues with weapon switching
Fixed an issue with the compass direction not displaying correctly
Do you mind these issues being in there, considering it's in Early Access?