Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3 & Xbox 360)

[obonicus]

I've also got lots of lag in MP and the pop-in is just about ridiculous. I'm talking the game has a draw distance of ten feet or something.

Anybody know the controls for the 360?

Lag on the 360 version? I found it to be a lot laggier than the PS3 one, myself, though I didn't notice the pop-in on any version (though on the 360 I was getting slaughtered a lot more). The PS3 was surprisingly smooth, considering I'm in Brazil.

As for controls, the 360's controls are swapped (L1 is LT, L2 is LBmp etc.) from the PS3's, which is annoying:

RT - Fire
LT - Zoom/Forward
RBmp - Switch weapon/fire alternate (like smoke in tanks)
LBmp- Switch item

As for the buttons, I don't remember off the top of my head, but they're the same as the PS3.

 

[FirewalkR]

About the game's graphics, I said before I was quite impressed by the cutscenes, and I expanded a bit on the subject on gaf, i'll just paste it here:

Seems to me like they use 3 rendering modes, the weakest is the in-game renderer, then you have some cutscenes in the in-game world, between sections, where the models, or at least the lighting/shading seem a little bit better to me, and then there's the "best graphics mode", used in the first and last cutscenes, where they probably only load a small section where the action occurs and lighting, shading, models (face/skin shaders), textures are all amazing.

I'd like to see some of our tech gurus taking a look at this demo and commenting about the engine.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Well, I think the third kind of cutscenes where the lighting, models and texturing are just amazing are rendered videos rendered using the same engine but with everyhting turned high.

 

[repi]

Well, I think the third kind of cutscenes where the lighting, models and texturing are just amazing are rendered videos rendered using the same engine but with everyhting turned high.

The cutscenes aren't pre-rendered videos, you can wiggle the cutscene camera slightly with the right analog controller
Haven't actually tried it in the demo though, but should work

Seems to me like they use 3 rendering modes, the weakest is the in-game renderer, then you have some cutscenes in the in-game world, between sections, where the models, or at least the lighting/shading seem a little bit better to me, and then there's the "best graphics mode", used in the first and last cutscenes, where they probably only load a small section where the action occurs and lighting, shading, models (face/skin shaders), textures are all amazing.

I'd like to see some of our tech gurus taking a look at this demo and commenting about the engine.

The only thing we do load specifically for the cutscenes & locked scenes are custom animations and of course the audio/dialog. All the other assets such as meshes, textures, shaders are the same that are used in both standard gameplay and cutscenes.

We do however enable DOF post-processing and tweak lighting specifically for the scenes which makes the shader & texture quality stand out much more.

Enjoy the game!

 

[RenegadeRocks]

The cutscenes aren't pre-rendered videos, you can wiggle the cutscene camera slightly with the right analog controller
Haven't actually tried it in the demo though, but should work




The only thing we do load specifically for the cutscenes & locked scenes are custom animations and of course the audio/dialog. All the other assets such as meshes, textures, shaders are the same that are used in both standard gameplay and cutscenes.

We do however enable DOF post-processing and tweak lighting specifically for the scenes which makes the shader & texture quality stand out much more.

Enjoy the game!

WOW! Reply from the devs !:smile: I must say your engine rocks ! The only thing that doesn't look nice is when I shoot a tree to break it, it is as if a different tree model pops in when it breaks. But otherwise I really like the GFX and Audio!

 

[Love_In_Rio]

The cutscenes aren't pre-rendered videos, you can wiggle the cutscene camera slightly with the right analog controller
Haven't actually tried it in the demo though, but should work




The only thing we do load specifically for the cutscenes & locked scenes are custom animations and of course the audio/dialog. All the other assets such as meshes, textures, shaders are the same that are used in both standard gameplay and cutscenes.

We do however enable DOF post-processing and tweak lighting specifically for the scenes which makes the shader & texture quality stand out much more.

Enjoy the game!

repi, very good work, the game ,as well as the engine, is astounding !

By the way, how was working with the famous SPEs ?

 

[repi]

WOW! Reply from the devs !:smile: I must say your engine rocks ! The only thing that doesn't look nice is when I shoot a tree to break it, it is as if a different tree model pops in when it breaks. But otherwise I really like the GFX and Audio!

Thanks. Yea some of the trees are managed differently for different states as an optimization (there are _a lot_ of destructible trees). Hopefully you can live with that for now

repi, very good work, the game ,as well as the engine, is astounding !

By the way, how was working with the famous SPEs ?

We had some tough love going on with the SPUs but moved over most of the heavy jobs to the SPUs such as: animation, decals, particle simulation, ray queries, frustum culling, occlusion software rasterization, havok, audio mixing, GPU command buffer generation, triangle culling, terrain geometry processing and undergrowth generation.

We have pretty good support and knowledge about SPU development and job-based parallelism in general now in the engine so going forward will be very interesting!

Sure it is more complicated to develop for the SPUs compared to the PPU and you have to have a bottoms-up approach in your design & code structure to fully take advantage of them. But oh boy what amount of power you get access to when you do!
This will become very apparent later in the generation.

The PPU isn't the main processor in CELL, it is just the initial helper wheels for the SPUs where all the interesting stuff happens while the PPU chugs on pointer-chasing spaghetti gameplay code

 

[Jaeyden]

What a great job you guys have done on multiplayer. I tried the MP on a whim over the weekend and I loved it. I'm sold...can't wait to play more maps and game modes. Very excited to see what you guys have done with the engine for Mirror's Edge.

 

[Cornsnake]

Dont talk them up to much, wi'll be expecting miracles next. Anyway its always good to hear about developers making the most of underlying hardware. Why did you decide to go with dividing object into parts that can break away instead of something more physics based where the ways an object can break are almost infinite like Red Faction 3 seems to be doing?

The destructable environments in the demo are great though. It allows for lot of different strategies, which makes the gameplay less predictable. Cant wait to start playing this with the clan.

 

[novcze]

hmm I can`t access BC multiplayer at all (PS3 version), NAT type 2, all other games are fine.

Bad Company. AVI (xvid, 11MB)

my second gripe is 5.1 sound, dialog always come from centre, even if I stand backward to other three guys

 

[Tap In]

allegedly, Game Informer mag gave this a 9.25 and 9.25 by their two reviewers.

 

[repi]

Why did you decide to go with dividing object into parts that can break away instead of something more physics based where the ways an object can break are almost infinite

Scale, determinism & consistency.

Having a fixed pre-determined set of fractures allowed us to use it for almost everything everywhere and in both MP & SP with deterministic and reasonably low memory usage and performance.

One early high level decisions for this title was that having consistently destructible objects in a large environment was more important than fewer more highly detailed destructible objects in a smaller environment.

Could also say this was a rare early application of the K.I.S.S. principle, which is something we are usually quite bad at following

 

[RobertR1]

Once I'm done with NG2, I'll spend more time with the demo. Right now I'd buy it for a discount but not sure if it's work $60. When I played MP, the lag was ridiculous. The other games I play don't lag so it's not my connection.

 

[djskribbles]

i've never had lag (ps3 version).

 

[Cornsnake]

Thanks for the reply. Red Faction 3 does looks a lot worse because of their approach, which they dont mind and neither do I. The rest of the industry seems to prefer the same approach as you. Having a totally destructable environment in a game was one of my wishes for this generation. Even if enough destructable objects allows for similar gameplay.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

The thing is that this, like GRID, and COD 4 has got the "addictive multiplayer factor", so count me in.
One more thing repi...more power for the M16!.

 

[FirewalkR]

Repi, whatever you guys are doing is working, because it looks fantastic.

So, you mention cutscenes and locked scenes. In the locked scenes all the assets are the same as in-game and in the cutscenes (i'll assume the first and last one in the demo are cutscenes, since you can only wiggle the camera a bit) you enable some filters. You guys aren't upping the shadow resolution or anything else?

As far as I'm concerned, it looks awesome anyway.

 

[repi]

So, you mention cutscenes and locked scenes. In the locked scenes all the assets are the same as in-game and in the cutscenes (i'll assume the first and last one in the demo are cutscenes, since you can only wiggle the camera a bit) you enable some filters. You guys aren't upping the shadow resolution or anything else?

Yes correct, we increase the shadow resolution for most cutscene scenes as part of the tweaking of the lighting.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Still no information on how to put vehicles in reverse on the 360 version? I swear I've tried all of the buttons.

Never mind. Forward & Brake = backwards.

Cute.

 

[Blade47167]

I am really enjoying the multiplayer. I've only gotten to play around 3 rounds so far but they have been alot of fun. Gonna wait for review scores but I will probably pick this up since CoD4 has grown so very old and boring to me .