Battlefield 3 announced

[Andrew Lauritzen]

That screenshot is just showing lack of shadowing (shadow maps) from non-sun/dynamic light sources. Considering how many of these there are in BF3, that's hardly a surprise. Render shadow maps for all of these would slow the game to a crawl. Also every other game has this issue too... although some don't even have dynamic lights at all.

Ray tracing occlusion volumes is one "solution", but may not be the way forward here... it would be extremely slow for non-toy scenes, particularly the huge ones that Battlefield employs. And the samaritan solution doesn't really work well for dynamic scenes or objects.

 

[tabs]

Everything is on Ultra on my setup, while taking that screen.

Would you say that's representative of the whole game, or just a spot on a map you found where it did that? Care to point me roughly to where you took it?

 

[fellix]

Would you say that's representative of the whole game, or just a spot on a map you found where it did that?

Well, generally speaking, all specular reflections I've seen outdoors or indoors (incl. the screenshot here) on this map are not occluded by any object.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Well, generally speaking, all specular reflections I've seen outdoors or indoors (incl. the screenshot here) on this map are not occluded by any object.

They are from the sun, just not any local lights. Like I said, that's perfectly normal in most games. You do visibility/shadows on the sun directional light but it's too slow for local point and spot lights.

 

[fellix]

I'm just fine with this limitation, at least for the outdoor scenes, but to have a room all brightly lit from outside that is supposed to be dark is a bit over the top and irritating, me thinks. Dead Island had exactly the same bug in one of the bunkers, where the Sun light was shining inside as if there was no roof. It was later fixed in a patch, so I think DICE could do a similar job here, at least for the affected areas, as a temporal solution. The engine itself could be upgraded at some point later to deal with the issue in a more broad way.

 

[Bludd]

I hope PC will get the UI advances the console versions have so you can easily spot the specs your squad mates have enabled.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

... so I think DICE could do a similar job here, at least for the affected areas, as a temporal solution. The engine itself could be upgraded at some point later to deal with the issue in a more broad way.

Meh, it's mostly hacks and special-cases that can "fix" it, and in a dynamic game like BF3 it's never going to be enough since people can create their own light sources and orient them anywhere (let alone change all the geometry). Sure they could probably hack up some of the single player cases but it's hardly worth their time IMHO.

And it's not really going to be "dealt with in a broad way" in the near future in any engine. We're probably talking 3+ years out before it becomes feasible to do visibility queries for hundreds of dynamic lights (this is basically GI), and that's on high end PCs. Might be some hacks in the mean time, but it's not a simple problem.

 

[tabs]

I guess I must be getting less fussy in my old age as I've only noticed this in a few games recently, but apparently it's in all of them.

Wonder why there's no AO in that screenshot though? Thought that would apply to every object.

 

[homerdog]

If they're doing it right then AO should only apply to particular types of lighting, and specular is not one of those types. So there may be AO there and it's overpowered by the erroneous specular highlight.

 

[tabs]

I wasn't talking about the specular, just the lack of AO in that screenshot on any of the surfaces inside the container. Not sure if it's there on the wall outside or if that's baked into the texture.

 

[fellix]

HBAO can be quite subtle in most situations, in contrast to the more simplistic SSAO.

 

[Bludd]

The attack detection component of my personal firewall gets tripped by Battlelog.

 

[tabs]

Really? Looking at Repi's presentation HBAO is far more noticable than SSAO. Whatever it is though, it's not doing a great job in that screeny.

 

[neliz]

Really? Looking at Repi's presentation HBAO is far more noticable than SSAO. Whatever it is though, it's not doing a great job in that screeny.

I just noticed it on Bazaar too. somehow got into a building with a destroyed wall where I shouldn't be. outside it was nice and clean, inside the floor was black but the water tunnels reflected the outdoor lights.

 

[fellix]

Battlefield 3 lead platform 'switched to consoles' mid-development

 

[Scott_Arm]

The outrage! THE OUTRAGE!

 

[homerdog]

Lol what kind of nonsense trollery is that? They obviously gave plenty of love to the PC version.

 

[almighty]

Lol what kind of nonsense trollery is that? They obviously gave plenty of love to the PC version.

Not from my eyes, loads of aspects of the game stink of console

 

[Malo]

It should read "EA forced lead platform to consoles to push for faster release and maximise profits"

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Yeah I dunno about the use of the term "lead platform" there... sounds to me more like they had everything happily running on PCs and had to spend the majority of the effort leading up to release optimizing the console implementations. Hardly surprising or worthy of a news bullet, and I'd definitely still consider that a "PC lead" game. Console lead is when you develop it all for consoles, then do a half-assed job a month *after* the game is released porting it to run on PC by literally replacing the Xbox 360 rendering abstractions and getting a DX9-style or badly-written DX10-style renderer. That's clearly the opposite of BF3.

Thus I dismiss the article and comment as trolling