Frostbite games do look very pretty and generally have good performance. Bioware have no one to blame other than themselves considering how much time they had for Anthem and that they had experience with Dragon age running on Frostbite before.
Amy Hennig Talks More About Struggling With EA's Frostbite Engine
- Thread starter iroboto
- Start date
Frostbite games do look very pretty and generally have good performance. Bioware have no one to blame other than themselves considering how much time they had for Anthem and that they had experience with Dragon age running on Frostbite before.
Are those presentations public yet ?
OW ended up being a game I dropped, but certainly the biggest impression they had on me was just how solid and polished the experience was right from the getgo with the UI and the overall flow and seamlessness of matchmaking - not being locked to a matchmaking screen, letting me do whatever the heck while waiting in between matches, for example
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It seems like game devs like to fork whatever engine they are working on and just continue working on their branch and never rebase to the main branch. But maybe things are changing, there were 174 external patches to UE4.22 (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-22-released).
Instead of complaining about it after the fact maybe they - as in both them and EA - should have fixed the engine. Frostbite 3 is as old as the current generation of consoles. And if you don't like it, go for UE4 (but I assume EA is forcing people to use Frostbite 3). Ffs they have an entire team dedicated for Frostbite development (Frostbite Labs iirc), just fix the tools or use UE4/Unity.
Management didnt allow devs from either team to work on those issues. Most likely.
Don’t know the internal politics first hand, but if they were reallocating engineers to other EA games, then there’s a resource problem, and then it’s prioritization of features - also what other games in the EA portfolio share enough features to make it a priority worth spending time on.
BioWare certainly had enough modifications for Inquisition and Andromeda for rudimentary RPG-lite subsystems (inventory, crafting, stats), but taking things to an open world beyond a large map while requiring streaming systems for any sort of backtracking with online syncing between 4 people was beyond their schedule.
BioWare certainly had enough modifications for Inquisition and Andromeda for rudimentary RPG-lite subsystems (inventory, crafting, stats), but taking things to an open world beyond a large map while requiring streaming systems for any sort of backtracking with online syncing between 4 people was beyond their schedule.
Do you honestly not think there are loads of people all around the world within EA fixing Frostbyte every day?
Well yeah, better blame EA rather than the engine then. It makes no sense to me that the "engine" is blamed here, it was built for linear FPS games. EA wanted to use it for anything else but apparently didn't have the foresight to develop the engine/tools further, did they expect for it to just "magically" work?
Not fast enough, apparently. If you read the Kotaku piece, it says Bioware had significant issues with the engine even back in 2011, that's 8 years ago. This whole thing reeks miscommunication/mismanagement all over.
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DavidGraham
Veteran
Most importantly, it states FIFA also had problems with the engine in 2016, EA transferred valuable engineers form the understaffed BioWare to help rectify FIFA's problems.
Ultimate Team has been around for years before that.
I bet if someone tried to make FIFA with idtech it'd be a massive undertaking. Piece of shit engine? Nope. Everything is time management. Adding features takes time. Adding tools takes time. Writing documentation takes time. Those are management problems.
Ike Turner
Veteran
Baking has always taken hours/days (that Kotaku anti-Frostbite crap is getting annoying..). Id Software had a whole GPU render farm (in house CUDA based light mapper) for baking Rage. UE4's Lightmass is slow as utter shit. Unity is now finalising its GPU Progressive lightmapper based on AMD Radeon Rays which is more than 10x faster than CPU baking and updates in real time in the viewport for fast iteration...and It's not as if EA didn't already port FLUX (the Frostbite Path Tracer) to DXR more than a year ago to for real-time GI iteration in the Frostbite editor viewport and final baking.....But some bollocks article says that Frostbite is shit and responsible for all of EA's (and Bioware's) failures.. so it must be true.. /s
The problem of Frostbite is the tools. The engine was very specialized and a good engine for Battlefield but not a good general engine like Unity or Unreal Engine or for example for exclusive game Decima Engine. Naughty Dog explain their engine is tailored to do the game they release and not usable for other style of game. The guy of Embark studios* said the tools of Unreal Engine are better than Frostbite.
* Studio created by ex DICE employee.
DavidGraham
Veteran
People need to realize that at this point, we had countless DEVELOPERS complain about frostbite from all over EA, not normal people, not amateurs, but actual game makers with hands on experience, that can't be all vaporware or baseless rumors, all those anecdotal evidence from the people in charge converge to confirm one fact: Frostbite sucks as a general engine, and requires much more hand tuning to get results than other engines.
DavidGraham
Veteran
Yes, but obviously the engine needs a lot more of those to get anything done, more than many other engines apparently.
When so many people who used it complain about it. I feel that we can't escape that conclusion.
This is an ex DICE developer:
People need to understand rendering is only a part of game engine. Tools are very important and he reason people use Unreal Engine or Unity.
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But even then you can't really blame the engine, they had all the time and money to do anything, either improve it, write a new engine, use UE4 etc. This has been an on going problem for almost a decade, no excuses.
What do you mean by can't blame the engine? That's almost apportioning a humanity to it. It's a lump of code that doesn't work. You can fairly say, "it doesn't work." the reasons why it doesn't work are then a deeper topic, but there's nowt wrong in voicing a criticism of the engine experience.