I took my time re-writing the most important parts of the article, and ill be releasing the rest soon. Enjoy!
Armed with a Veteran Team, Powerfull New Engine, and a Bold Vision, Dice Unveils its Most Ambitious Game Ever.
Lighting Up The Sky:
Bad Company 2 featured dynamic lighting, but the process for getting everything correctly light and shadow was time consuming. Frostbite 2 comes equipped with power full new features like defined lighting, real time radiosity, and dynamic shadowing that allow the art team to use pre-calculations to get the lighting up and running in a fraction of time. The left image highlights the light sources - the sun bouncing into the alley and the fluorescent light. The middle image shows the light probes that control how light affects dynamic objects such as vehicles and characters moving through the alley. One probe contains more lighting information than an entire level from bad company 2. The right image shows the finished environment that realistically blends all light sources together in real time.
Destruction 3.0:
Bad Company was the first battlefield game to introduce destructible walls and objects, and Bad Company 2 upped the ante with fully collapsing houses. Given the features popularity , DICE wanted destructibility in Battlefield 3, but with dense urban environments, it needed to deliver real-time devastation on a much larger scale.
With the Frostbite 2 Engine, nothing on the battlefield is safe from destruction.. In the demos we watched, an earthquake ripped apart the city streets, and a seven-story structure collapsed in a plume of dust particles and rubble. When an RPG is fired at a building, the force of the explosion causes rippling splash damage as it would in real life, breaking windows throughout the blast radius and tearing concrete into hundreds of pieces. In theory, DICE could use the engine to destroy a replica of the Burj Khalifa in Downtown Dubai the largest building in the world.
"We're only starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with the engine," says art director Gustav Tilleby.
The power of the destruction is awe inspiring, but don't expect Battlefield 3 to play like the shooter equivalent to the natural disaster racing game Split/Second. "It needs to be believable," stresses executive producer Patric Bach. "You can't have a earthquakes all over the place while you're running and gunning. We want to have set pieces that fit the map. Set pieces can be more than big explosions and big animations. We have some cool things up our sleeves."
Ant:
Like the lighting techniques, the character animations looked believable in Bad Company 2, but involved a laborious process on the developers' part. After finishing the project , DICE entertained middleware solutions from companies like Havock and Natural Motion before discovering the ANT Technology that powers EA Sports games like FIFA. The system wasn't build for war games, but it essentially operates with a series of plug-ins that anyone at EA can create and use. With the goal of pushing the physicality and believability of the soldiers in Battlefield 3, DICE integrated the system into Frostbite and started adding it's own variances to adapt the technology to the combat zone.
Using the rapid prototyping afforded by the ANT engine, DICE is creating two separate sets of animations for AI characters and multiplayer for the first time. The AI Characters now move and act with more profound sense of purpose, and the developers can rapidly condition their behavior with a convenient waypoint technology that issues directives depending on the character's location and the action happening in the vicinity. The ANT technology also enables DICE to ditch the ugly gliding soldier animations that plague every multiplayer game on the market. Soldiers still have responsiveness required in online fragfests, but they now move it a degree of realism, turning their heads and guns before their bodies, transitioning aggressively into and out of cover, and blending animations seamlessly between sprinting and dropping to the deck. "All of a sudden it's about what we want rather than "can we build it?"" says lead animator Tebias Dahl.
Here is a List of the BF3 Details:
-Aiming for CY Q4 2011 release
-Concept for BF3 has been in the works for years, waiting on proper tech to seamlessly come together
-Frostbite 2.0 is the culmination of this tech, entirely re-written
-Lighting sounds neat, one "probe" contains more lighting information than an entire BFBC2 level.
-Level destruction is going to be "believable" but basically everything is destructible.
-Character animations powered by ANT, what EA Sports uses.
-AI characters and multiplayer characters have different animation sets
-No more "gliding" animations that look off, animation realism is a focus
-Captured their own war audios (bullets, tanks, helicopters, etc) at different distances to ensure realism
-Better audio cues for certain actions, more easily able to listen for threats
-Plan on better, more immediate post release content
-More unlocks than BFBC2
-Dice trying to find a good balance between customization of your character and not having "pink rabbit hat(s)"
-4 classes
-Will talk about squads "later"
-Looking into a theater mode but can't talk about it
-Will have co-op
-There will be a kill-cam but it can be turned off
-BF3's team is almost twice as big as the team for BFBC2
-They want the pacing of the single player mode to be balanced, with highs and lows. Makes the comparison to a song vs a guitar solo.
-Part of the single player mode takes place in Sulaymaniyah - Iraqi Kurdistan.
-"Fuck" will be used often, so M rated for sure
-There will be an earthquake in a level. The destruction sounds very impressive. 7 story building collapses, looks very well done
-Significant narrative that goes with the SP mode
-More than one setting, you're not in the middle east for the whole game
-PC version is lead version
-Why 64 players for PC only? No complains from the console crowd.
-No mod tools at release. Maybe none down the line either. Frostbite 2.0 is complex and mods tools would have to be dumbed down, so does Dice really want to put their time to that or would it be better spent elsewhere?
-Original story, not based on Bad Company at all.
BF 3 - Info
Jorge Chevere
