Battlefield 3 announced

#1 : flank him.

if you can't flank a single player. your team ain't s###.

...

You do realize its a one way pipe right?

wish the ingame map is like that, or like BFBC2.

the current "transparent" look cool map is unreadable for me.
i have bad sense of direction, in BFBC2 i constantly looking at minimap when moving and to aim (2d spot) then eyes back to gameplay for 3d spot.

Yeah and it should mark "bush people" with huge red dots :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKgHr8UvNY
 
You do realize its a one way pipe right?

There are three entrances to the tunnel, where only the left entrance (from an attacker POV) will get you into the meat grinders.

If you take the middle entrance you can go into the halls/alleys of the map, there are two exits that flank the end of the railway. the other end of the hallway leads you straight up the escalator basically putting you behind enemy lines in no time.

I'm a support player myself and I always make sure I tell my squad mates (or on skype) to cover the flanks since that definitely increases your lifespan.
 
You do realize its a one way pipe right?



Yeah and it should mark "bush people" with huge red dots :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMKgHr8UvNY

easy...take a sniper and get him?!?!?

never had any problems so far in my games...btw I think the metro map and the map layout is great, the change of outdoor large scale and indoor close combat and then again outdoor medium range is superb...me likes!

sniping those kids with a tactical flash light on in the outdoor section is way to easy though :mrgreen:

balance seems to be rather good imo, team play is again key to win the round. But I agree with those you say that the points you get for arming, disarming and destroying the targets is way to low...this should be increased by about a factor of 5 or so imo! and yeah!!! disarming is way more difficult than arming and should be appropriately awarded...

graphical glitches: there seem lots of screen flashing going on...other than that I did not notice lots of problems so far...what I really like: when people with tactical flash light or red dots run...that depending on the angle of the weapon you get sometimes blinded because of there running movement...cool!

there seems to be some animation glitches, especially when jumping over some stuff...it seems like people getting warped or so...makes sniping them during jumping way to difficult :D
 
Is it possible to unlock certain weapons from the opposing faction? For example, if I play assault enough, will I be able to unlock the M16A4 for the Russians?
 
If these are medium settings then I'm looking forward to some severe performance optimizations from the developer and hardware manufacturers. I find examples like Crysis poor not something that should be aimed for or championed.

Do you really have problems with the game the way it looks now? If it's possible to select options that will further increase fidelity when the hardware is available then that's a good thing isn't it? Also we can have a sneak peek at the future with low frames if we want.

Settings are arbitrary, as has been pointed out. Whatever they're called shouldn't make a blind bit of difference. I just don't understand people who wish that the devs would limit the options to what their hardware is currently capable of, and call that 'maximum'. I thought we wanted value for money and longevity, stuff to look forward to. This attitude boggles my mind, especially on this of all forums.
 
The only thing that gives games real longevity is gameplay. Games that continue to push graphics years after their release make great benchmark programs, not necessarily great games.

Whether the game continues to be a benchmark two years from now is irrelevant. Counter-Strike doesn't continue to be a popular game because of the graphics. It's the gameplay that's important. Battlefield 3 seems to have gameplay in spades.
 
Is it possible to unlock certain weapons from the opposing faction? For example, if I play assault enough, will I be able to unlock the M16A4 for the Russians?
I don't think you ever get the original team-specific weapons for the other team, but it seems like all unlocked weapons apply to both teams. i.e. you don't get the M16A4 but you get the superior HK416 right away anyways ;)

The only thing that gives games real longevity is gameplay. Games that continue to push graphics years after their release make great benchmark programs, not necessarily great games.
I think almost everyone agrees with this, but the two are not disjoint. Graphics *enables* gameplay. As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, muzzle flashes lighting geometry fundamentally changes the gameplay (in a good way), as do flashlights, scope glint, suppression blur, etc. It's all good stuff IMHO, although I really do want smoke grenades back :(
 
There are three entrances to the tunnel, where only the left entrance (from an attacker POV) will get you into the meat grinders.

If you take the middle entrance you can go into the halls/alleys of the map, there are two exits that flank the end of the railway. the other end of the hallway leads you straight up the escalator basically putting you behind enemy lines in no time.

I'm a support player myself and I always make sure I tell my squad mates (or on skype) to cover the flanks since that definitely increases your lifespan.

I am talking about the right entrance when you have to enter some kind of pipe and at the end of it jump down left to meet rest of players that entered thru middle entrance. I had one guy camping at the end of that pipe. He got there after they lost first sector and stayed there till the end of the game. I have seen this before and team usually managed to kill such camper but not this time. He was in prone position with holo and tripoded mg. When you were going down the rubble to enter the pipe you were already dead.

easy...take a sniper and get him?!?!?

...

When you enter that pipe he can see your legs but you still cant see him and its so dark in there that you can see shite till he opens fire. If someone's good enough and camps that spot there is not much you can do (lucky rocket might do the trick but after few deaths no one was willing to try).
 
I think almost everyone agrees with this, but the two are not disjoint. Graphics *enables* gameplay. As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, muzzle flashes lighting geometry fundamentally changes the gameplay (in a good way), as do flashlights, scope glint, suppression blur, etc. It's all good stuff IMHO, although I really do want smoke grenades back :(

Yeah. I think that's why at even the Low settings, a lot of those features remain enabled. If you turned them off, the game would be fundamentally different. I'm just at odds with the idea that a game has to keep pushing more graphics, even years after its release.
 
The thing is, I can almost guarantee that I'll still be playing this a year or two from now, and if a hardware upgrade means I can get even better graphics to boot then I look at it as an added bonus. Some people seem to say that it somehow detracts from the game and that's what I don't understand.

I really think its down to people not being able to cope with having to select anything other than max. They feel entitled to it right here, right now.
 
Yeah. I think that's why at even the Low settings, a lot of those features remain enabled. If you turned them off, the game would be fundamentally different. I'm just at odds with the idea that a game has to keep pushing more graphics, even years after its release.

I rather developers work on their code for current hardware limitations and optimize their game using vetted tricks and techniques. Don't just enable new features they might not have had enough time to learn properly.

I'd prefer if graphical upgrades were released over the course of a game's lifespan. That way you have a good understanding of the tech at hand and your updates are very efficient. It'd be a better experience for everyone.

I'm not saying Dice is doing such, just my thoughts in general.
 
So just an update... I ran BF3 through GPA to grab a rendering trace to check the MSAA stuff and I took a peek at the buffer that determines where to do sub-sample shading and it appears to be pretty good. However the final frame I still can't shake the feeling that the stairs and things like them are not getting AA'd quite as well as they should.

For whatever reason GPA wouldn't let me edit the shader assembly so I couldn't easily test a few hypotheses (like enabling per-sample shading everywhere), so it'll remain a myself. It's totally possible that I'm just crazy and I'm really just looking at worst-case situations where there aren't enough samples even with 4x MSAA to clean up the aliasing. Hard to tell without side-by-side MSAA vs. no MSAA images.

[Edit] Actually looking at this frame a bit more I'm starting to wonder if they are resolving before tone mapping and that might be the issue... hard to tell for sure though, will need more investigation.
 
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So just an update... I ran BF3 through GPA to grab a rendering trace to check the MSAA stuff and I took a peek at the buffer that determines where to do sub-sample shading and it appears to be pretty good. However the final frame I still can't shake the feeling that the stairs and things like them are not getting AA'd quite as well as they should.

For whatever reason GPA wouldn't let me edit the shader assembly so I couldn't easily test a few hypotheses (like enabling per-sample shading everywhere), so it'll remain a myself. It's totally possible that I'm just crazy and I'm really just looking at worst-case situations where there aren't enough samples even with 4x MSAA to clean up the aliasing. Hard to tell without side-by-side MSAA vs. no MSAA images.

[Edit] Actually looking at this frame a bit more I'm starting to wonder if they are resolving before tone mapping and that might be the issue... hard to tell for sure though, will need more investigation.

The MSAA resolve is part of the tonemapping because of performance, rendering pipeline complexity and that compute shader UAVs can't write to MSAA surfaces. So in some cases even though you have 4x MSAA and the gbuffer samples are nicely unique on an edge and the per-sample lighting does its thing you may still not fully see the antialiasing going on due if the HDR difference is too high as 1 bright sample would dominate the other dark ones.

This is the main reason we support both MSAA (linear gamma, pre-tonemap) and post-process based AA (sRGB gamma, post-tonemap). They nicely complement each other
 
repi,

Do I have it right that MSAA and HBAO/SSAO are the most GPU taxing resources in the beta? Motion blur
would be 3rd.

I also noticed that just having post-process AA does a nice job but on fences from angles it looks like there are moving wave patterns. This is evident on the fence along the lower bombsite at the start of the Metro level.
 
The MSAA resolve is part of the tonemapping because of performance, rendering pipeline complexity and that compute shader UAVs can't write to MSAA surfaces.
Right yeah. I got around this when I implemented it by having the compute shader write to a Nx bigger UAV (encoding the fp16 values into 2 uint32's) then during the final composite, the pixel shader can read those values, add them to any other things (other non-compute-based lighting or whatever), tone map and resolve. I agree the performance cost of this is larger than doing it on the fly though, but it might be nice to have the option :) That said, I understand that maintaining both paths would be a pain.

As an aside, the nice thing is that since you guys already save the MSAA mask (which samples need shading) to a texture, you can do MSAA-style bandwidth compression on the compute shader outputs if you want. i.e. in the resolve step you can check the mask and if it's false, only read back sample 0. Otherwise you read back all samples and resolve as usual. That would take a lot of the bandwidth hit away.

So in some cases even though you have 4x MSAA and the gbuffer samples are nicely unique on an edge and the per-sample lighting does its thing you may still not fully see the antialiasing going on due if the HDR difference is too high as 1 bright sample would dominate the other dark ones.
Yeah I think this is what I'm seeing with the stairs example that I linked in twitter. The top of them are lit very brightly (from the sun) while the sides are darker so the tone mapping operator actually undoes some of the anti-aliasing work. Too bad, but indeed you have to make choices of which battles to fight :)

This is the main reason we support both MSAA (linear gamma, pre-tonemap) and post-process based AA (sRGB gamma, post-tonemap). They nicely complement each other
Yeah that makes sense. I'm just looking at the remaining aliasing cases which are all sub-pixel with high contrast. In general most of the edges definitely do look clean.

Thanks for the clarification!
 
Just noticed this from here:
Intel GMA 4500m is not supported. It only supports DirectX 10.0, not 10.1 which is the minimum requirements
That's not an entirely true statement... the game supports G80 and other non-DX 10.1 cards ;) Not that I mind not supporting that chip (or integrated graphics in general), but the statement isn't really technically accurate.

And yes, I'm aware that it's because NVIDIA likes to expose little bits of DX 10.1 through back doors ;)
 
I don't think you ever get the original team-specific weapons for the other team, but it seems like all unlocked weapons apply to both teams. i.e. you don't get the M16A4 but you get the superior HK416 right away anyways ;)


I think almost everyone agrees with this, but the two are not disjoint. Graphics *enables* gameplay. As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, muzzle flashes lighting geometry fundamentally changes the gameplay (in a good way), as do flashlights, scope glint, suppression blur, etc. It's all good stuff IMHO, although I really do want smoke grenades back :(

No, you get the faction specific weapons once you fully max out a given class.

Source: http://gogogamer.net/?p=4212
 
First of all, partly because I'm starting to get the hang of it and partly because I've been playing on servers with only a reasonable amount of snipers: the game is awesome. This map in particular reminds me of Wolf:ET so much. All we need is some vehicle escorts and blowing up bridges!

Also, I'm really enjoying the battlelog. Apart from the windowed mode problem, switching between game and browser is pretty fast; I do have 8gb ram though.

Question: how do I bring up the Q-rose? Q key only spots, I think?

P.S. We need more people in the B3D platoon!
 
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