An Update on Brink Updates

Just wanted to give everyone an update on where we’re currently at with our upcoming game updates for Brink.

Xbox 360

We’ve been hard at work investigating the lag issues some players of the Xbox 360 version of Brink have reported. We’ve now completed modifications to improve network performance and will be rolling these out in a title update for the game.

This update has been submitted to Microsoft, and we expect it to be available next week.

This title update is also going to fix an isolated freezing issue reported by some German players who should no longer experience that problem once the update has been installed.

PC

A game update for the PC version of Brink is in final testing and we’re planning to release it early next week. This update contains a host of fixes and improvements including the following:

We’ve identified the cause of sound dropping out on certain maps when playing networked games for a prolonged amount of time. This will no longer occur.

Graphical performance has been improved, especially when using Ambient Occlusion. We’ve worked closely with both AMD and NVIDIA, and you should see performance and stability improvements in future driver revisions from both parties.

The server browser is tweaked in this update, as well; among other things, a new filter allows you to display only servers with a certain number of players on them, and full servers will no longer be filtered out completely.

There are some smaller fixes for minor issues including your character’s voice occasionally resetting when deleting another character, and a memory leak when alt-tabbing out of the game.

Finally, the dedicated server is set to get an update at the same time as the main game, which will result in improved CPU performance. We’ve protected certain cvars that previously allowed server admins to accidentally break objectives involving NPCs.

The full changelog will be released alongside the update, so keep an eye out for that.

PlayStation 3

With PSN back online, we’re able to resume multiplayer testing on the PlayStation 3. We’re preparing to bring the changes in the upcoming Xbox 360 title update to the PlayStation 3 version of Brink quickly and we expect to have it out next week. Stay tuned!

In the Meantime…

Until these updates roll out, here’s what you can do to improve your multiplayer experience should you still encounter problems:

• Check your opponent’s network connection / ping:
  • Players with very low bandwidth connections can have a negative impact on the overall network performance of the game.
  • You are able to view other player’s connection quality easily by viewing the scoreboard and determining if this is the likely cause.
  • To view other player’s connection quality, press Start during a match and select the Scoreboard option to display all other players
  • Other Human player bandwidth values are shown on the right hand side of their name as a traffic light value. Anyone that is showing orange or red means they have a bad connection and could potentially be causing the match to become disrupted…

    Note: You can also view the opposing team scoreboard since the problem may be with a player on the opposite team. To do this press R1 for PS3 or RB for XBOX 360 while on the scoreboard

  • Should you see more players showing RED than GREEN on their status, you should exit this game, return to the main menu and attempt to join another game on a new connection.
  • The matchmaking system will then attempt to place you in a more suitable game

Finally, if you have the German Xbox 360 version of Brink and are experiencing freezing issues, you can use the following workaround until the title update is released:

• Turn the Dialogue Volume down completely. You can do this from the main menu or by pressing Start during a match and selecting:
  • Optionen > Audio > Lautstärke der Dialoge
• Move the dialogue volume slider all the way to the left

That’s it for this blog update. More will be coming your way, and in the meantime, we’ll see you online!

-The teams at Splash Damage and Bethesda Softworks