BF2S Forums Battlefield 3 - Main Thread

FloppY_ wrote:

Trotskygrad wrote:

pfail........

I've got low expectations for BF3, but hopefully something will go wrong at DICE and the game will actually turn out to be good.

I don't think DICE have ever made a game that didn't have a fundamental flaw somewhere


tbh, I'm not even sure such a game exists... It's just funny how DICE's seem to have more obvious ones

BF1942 was pretty good

Trotskygrad wrote:

pfail........

I've got low expectations for BF3, but hopefully something will go wrong at DICE and the game will actually turn out to be good.

Yeah really, bf2 was only a success because of the DC mod authors. Without the DC mod, bf2 would have been shit or non existent.

Two Additional Battlefield 3 Lectures at GDC '11
Two additional DICE developers are scheduled to give presentations at the Game Developer Conference, and all 3 relate to the Battlefield 3 is some way. Last month we posted about a GDC presentation called "Lighting up your Battlefield 3". These 2 new ones are called "SPU-based Deferred Shading in BATTLEFIELD 3 for Playstation 3"and "Culling the Battlefield: Data Oriented Design in Practice".

The Game Developers Conference is held in San Francisco, California and runs February 28th - March 4th.

SPU-based Deferred Shading in BATTLEFIELD 3 for Playstation 3

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Speaker/s: Christina Coffin (DICE)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Programming, Visual Arts / Lecture
Description: This session presents a detailed programmer oriented overview of our SPU based shading system implemented in DICE's Frostbite 2 engine and how it enables more visually rich environments in BATTLEFIELD 3 and better performance over traditional GPU-only based renderers. We explain in detail how our SPU Tile-based deferred shading system is implemented, and how it supports rich material variety, High Dynamic Range Lighting, and large amounts of light sources of different types through an extensive set of culling, occlusion and optimization techniques.
Takeaway: Attendees will learn how SPU based shading allows a rich variety in materials, more complex lighting and enables offloading of traditional GPU work over to SPUs. Optimization techniques used to minimize SPU processing time for various scenarios will also be taught. Attendees will understand how to technically design, balance and analyze the performance of a game environment that uses an SPU based shading system. Attendees will learn key points of creating and optimizing code and data processing for high throughput shading on SPUs.
Intended Audience: This session is intended for advanced programmers with an understanding of current forward and deferred rendering techniques, as well as console development experience. Knowledge of lower level programming in vector instrinsics, assembly language, and structure-of-arrays versus array-of-structures data processing is recommended.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Culling the Battlefield: Data Oriented Design in Practice

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Speaker/s: Daniel Collin (EA DICE)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Programming / Lecture
Description: This talk will highlight the evolution of the object culling system used in the Frostbite engine over the years and why we decide to rewrite a system for BATTLEFIELD 3 that had worked well for 4 shipping titles. The new culling system is developed using a data oriented design that favors simple data layouts which enables very efficient computation using pipelined vector instructions. Concrete examples of how code is developed with this approach and the implications and benefits compared to traditional tree-based systems will be given.
Takeaway: Attendees will learn how to apply data oriented design in practice to write simple but high throughput code that works well on all platforms. This is especially important for the current consoles.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Doctor Strangelove wrote:

jsnipy wrote:

Trotskygrad wrote:

pfail........

I've got low expectations for BF3, but hopefully something will go wrong at DICE and the game will actually turn out to be good.

Yeah really, bf2 was only a success because of the DC mod authors. Without the DC mod, bf2 would have been shit or non existent.

Considering how terrible their standalone games have been since moving away from DICE, I kinda doubt that.

Did they do anything besides Frontlines:  Fuel of War?  Has anybody else besides them attempted to take on Battlefield with the full breadth of  infantry/armor/air multiplayer combat?  Who has done better?

War Man wrote:

GullyFoyle wrote:

Doctor Strangelove wrote:

Considering how terrible their standalone games have been since moving away from DICE, I kinda doubt that.

Did they do anything besides Frontlines:  Fuel of War?  Has anybody else besides them attempted to take on Battlefield with the full breadth of  infantry/armor/air multiplayer combat?  Who has done better?

They are making a game similar to frontlines fuel of war. It takes place in USA with North Koreans attacking.

Is that that "Homefront" game which seems like a direct copy of BC2 from the trailers?

Doctor Strangelove wrote:

FloppY_ wrote:

War Man wrote:

They are making a game similar to frontlines fuel of war. It takes place in USA with North Koreans attacking.

Is that that "Homefront" game which seems like a direct copy of BC2 from the trailers?

I have some intimate knowledge of Homefront.

Basically its a mashup of everything wrong with CoD4 and BC2.

Trotskygrad wrote:

"The game will also feature vehicle based 32 player online warfare using dedicated servers. "

like you can do shit with 32 players...

Yeah I never play on non-full BC2 servers... 32 is the very minimum for this kind of game to be fun

BF3 better support 64player combat

Doctor Strangelove wrote:

The worst part about BC2 is the spam. Then the lag.

Then the lack of 64 player servers.

If you just go to proper servers there are no lag issues...

Try playing Cold War if you hate spam, lol... that entire map is like the first hill in Karkand BF2

Trotskygrad wrote:

FloppY_ wrote:

Trotskygrad wrote:

"The game will also feature vehicle based 32 player online warfare using dedicated servers. "

like you can do shit with 32 players...

Yeah I never play on non-full BC2 servers... 32 is the very minimum for this kind of game to be fun

BF3 better support 64player combat

yeah I want my fucking 128 player servers like BF2 originally promised...

then a chain of command MIGHT actually work...

lol... DICE can't even make a stable netcode that supports 32player and you expect 128?

pff write better netcode... it's possible.

Doctor Strangelove wrote:

Netcode that properly supports 64 players is extremely difficult.

I can't think of any game that pulls it off. Limiting the max players is a better option. It also means that the actions of a single player has more consequence, and the maps don't either have to be very large and have to be filled to the top with vehicles, further increasing the lag, or so cramped that its impossible to move around without getting blown up. So pacing is also a large issue on servers with high player counts. Also higher player counts are much more taxing on people's hardware. In BF3, DICE is going to be using the Frostbite engine, and many players will expect the game to look good. Having a high player count will prevent DICE (or any Dev really) from putting to many resources into the game as it will end up being to hard on people's hardware. BC2 was originally going to be 40 players across all platforms. This had to be reduced to 32/24, and having the extra people made it so that it was impossible to have reasonable system requirements, and allowing for all the stuff that DICE wanted to put into the game.

It's simply much safer to limit the player count to 32 or so. You don't need to throw so many resources at netcode, nor is proper pacing as difficult to accomplish. Look at the game MAG. It's crap, no one cares about it anymore. It had like 200+ people on a server or something, and it ended up flopping. A large sever does not make for a better game. You can't scale the experience up infinitely and have it still work well.

eh well as for the MAG argument:

crappy design of weapons

crappy design of level system

it's a console game

well yes, while it is difficult, I don't think it's impossible...

Battlefield 3 EA's Big Focus in 2nd Half of the Year
If there was any doubt that Battlefield 3 is coming in 2011 then this should clear it up. EA CEO John Riccitiello said that Battlefield 3 is their "big focus" in the second half of the year. Any bets for a holiday 2011 release?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Riccitiello continued, questioning Activision's leadership and Treyarch's ability: "This management team started with this goal really two and a half years ago and our first entry really was Battlefield: Bad Company, and you'll see a lot about Battlefield 3 next year, which I think is, at least from our perspective, designed to be the one that is the big leap forward; the one that is going to help a lot. I don't know that having two guys that probably don't play the games, in the form of the CEO of Vivendi and the CEO of Activision, come out and say 'Treyarch is our lead developer,' like you could anoint that. They didn't make a 90-rated game; I think it's 86 now. I don't think review scores are the be-all, end-all, but we all know a mid-90 when we see it, but this was mid-80s. I don't think you could anoint them by an executive saying, 'it's so.' The question, I think, really is, 'what developer is going to put forward the next great FPS that sort of follows [what Infinity Ward did]?" It's wishful thinking, and let's hope for Activision's sake they're right. I think it's far from proven that the gaming consumer views a product from Treyarch in the same category as a product from what was Infinity Ward.

As for EA's continued assault on the shooter category, Riccitiello added that "next year we'll make a lot more progress. We've got a couple of third-party games in the form of Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm, and then our big focus is Battlefield 3 in the second half of the year. I'd be shocked if we didn't take a notch out of [Activision]."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

IndustryGamers.com