DICE's Frostbite 2

Even a single 580 is far too much faster then my single 460... upgrade do not want!
 
nice article on game play details...



with this little tech tidbit

“We knew that people would think that this demo was running on PC, but the good thing is that it’s all based on streaming,” Bach tells us. “We have a super-powerful streaming pipeline, which makes it possible to stream high-end data through the game so every frame we look at will have fresh data. This means you don’t have to load everything at once; you don’t have to fill the level at the start. In BC2, you have 512 megs of memory; you load it, you play it, done. The objects you saw at the end needed to be loaded at the start, and you think, ‘It took me an hour to get to this point where I can see it, so what’s the point?’

“That’s the whole magic with this. We can have 512 megs every hundred metres if we wanted to, as we can just flush the data out [and replace it] as you move along. I can promise you that the console versions will still look amazing because of the core technology. If you have a 360, we want to use that machine to the maximum.”
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What DICE also wants you to trust is that the Frostbite 2 engine will be just as brilliant as it is in single-player, which would go some way to realising the goal of creating large, open spaces pocketed with dense, tight locations to destroy at will. MP lead designer Lars Gustafsson describes the strength and malleability of the engine as “enabling us to spend less time squeezing the paint out of the tube, and more time painting the picture right”.
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, well, I still have my hopes up, although I'm not sure if there's going to be a significant single player part. The demos so far suggest we're going to get something cool, but I'll still have to wait and see.
 
Oh nice find.
Slide 29:
dicebuffer.jpg


Slide 31:
dicebuffer2.jpg


edit:
dicesssperf.jpg


That's ALU instructions. I guess it's lower on Xenos/PC due to unified shaders...
 
Hmm, so greyscale specular, too? Then again if they use lots of reflections thanks to that environment map ID channel, it might not be as noticeable.

(Human skin for example usually looks better with a very blueish specular; because if you just add white on top of the existing skin tone, the highlights turn yellow, but blue shifts the hue back closer to white, and most metals like brass gold etc. have tinted reflections too)
 
It's an interesting approach, although I have to wonder how it'll look on characters which tend to deform a lot ;)
Thumbs up to Dice for not calling it realtime subsurface scattering though ;)
 
hm... was it on characters in the trailer :?: Too hard to see I suppose.

Guess they could always use it on foliage. :p
 
You don't get to see much of the character's faces. With all due respect to DICE, neither of the Bad Company games had particularly impressive human character faces, and I suspect BF3 will be similarly lacking a bit on this front.
I don't blame them though, making a convincing digital human character requires an exceptionally talented and experienced artist. No wonder Infinity Ward hired Steven Giesler and Guerilla hired Francisco Cortina - both famous in the CG world for their pioneering character work on the first Final Fantasy CG movie and the Animatrix short soon after.
 
The trailer does not use the translucency for skin, though that is something we have been experimenting with. We have some other really cool usages though ;)

Oh and btw, it is "Frostbite 2", not "2.0"
 
That's some crazy stuff in there, I have to say. Very informative, nice images, notes...
 
Loved all those little tricks to avoid doing extra work, reminded of the old good time of software renderers. (if polygon not in light, render it without texture. ;))
 
Yeah, it's all very impressive and also gives me great hope that the console versions will look very similar to the PC.

Also interesting how fat the G-buffer is, 5 x 4 bytes altogether with the Z/stencil. It must be using tiling on the X360 but it fits in 20MB so it only has to re-send once. Gives you the impression that they've layed it out like this exactly with the EDRAM in mind...
 
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