Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

[rombaft]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I'm running with 512MB RAM. No problem. :)

this is possible because your textures and some other stuff is on low, so those doesn't have to be loaded in.

But many people have for example 1 Gb of RAM and a videocard who can handle all the nice graphics in BF2 , so they put there settings high (offcourse, they have a good vid card) but the amount of textures is to big and there RAM is to small, meaning it has to swap a bit, this swapping from HD to RAM causes the lag .

But this isn't the only point here in this topic, also the many bugs and glitches ........

[<EsP>Fury]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I must say I also agree Vasquez thank you for a very informative post.

I do have a question given the problems you mentioned and the fact that 2 patches and a hotfix have been released.

WHY HAVE THEY NOT FIXED IT YET??

If we just cocentrate on the bugs for example the enemy ID bug the browser problems, load & resource issuses and leave the game balance adjustments alone for now one would think these things could have been addressed by now.

[mrbucket]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I'm running with 512MB RAM. No problem. :)

You can run the game with 512. But what are your settings? What are your load times?

[Jesse]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

OK, I admit, I am a moron, realy, I just looked at the topic title and read extremely fast over the topicstarters post, this fast I actualy thaught he was defending the BF2 code, engine, ....
.................................................. .......
DICE programmers did deliver us a very good game, many features, very good gameplay, but the code is terrrible, wish some other studio made BF2

Ah, now I get it. I thought it seemed a little off the wall, I get ya now though. Misunderstandings do that. :p

Other engines can indeed benefit from the way the maps are designed, epsecially when the game takes place in confined areas or even inside buildings for the most part. I still don't see how you could see what seems like forever in 1942 when comparing it to Battlefield 2, and they still have a clunky engine. With the 1942 engine under their belt, you'd think they could actually improve the efficiency and just build on the main building blocks of that engine (which seems like what they did as a lot of the .con files have a lot of the same variable names and such, with a few extra things to allow for more customization to things).

I don't think BF2 could utilize the way the recent GTA games have loaded their maps simply because of the dynamic gameplay. You have to keep track of all those people across the map, as well as get them to load it all yet still know what's going on around them. Using Vice City as an example, if someone were on one of the bridges where the game loaded the otherside of the city, what would you do if there was a tank rolling your way on that bridge? You obviously couldn't just ignore everything going on in another area of the map as it's rather vital to the gameplay, whereas in GTA the game can just remove everything and spawn something once you get down the bridge a little distance, as they're not important to the gameplay. (except for maybe that cop chasing you)

[Vasquez]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I do have a question given the problems you mentioned and the fact that 2 patches and a hotfix have been released.

WHY HAVE THEY NOT FIXED IT YET??

If we just cocentrate on the bugs for example the enemy ID bug the browser problems, load & resource issuses and leave the game balance adjustments alone for now one would think these things could have been addressed by now.

Well, I don't know the internals of EA/DICE and their method of support (such as it exists...). I know with my team, when we receive bugs and issues from clients we prioritise them, we fix them, and we release to them (there is some process in between all of that, but I ommitted it for clarity).

As a company, we can never fathom the idea of "that's it, we won't fix it". We'd lose customers if we took that standpoint. But games seem to be different and it appears you can get away with alot less customer-service as a games company, thanks to the lack of warranties. Application developers have to respond to their community (as they're not usually being distributed by a publication company such as EA), games have become like movies, where the release dates and laws are laid down not by those who develop it, but by those who control it. And that's a shame.

[The Soup Nazi]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I happen to have a pretty beefy system running Battlefield 2. Here's a quick rundown of my specs before I continue my post:

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD 64 4400+ X2
2GB PC3200 DDR RAM
2x nVidia 7800GT's in SLI mode
23 inch Apple Cinema Display (1920x1200 native)
etc...

With that said, I thought that these specs would give me a great boost of performance from an AMD 64 3800+ and an nVidia 6800GT. I only swapped out the motherboard, video card, and processors hoping to be able to run the game smoothly at 1920x1200. I found that I am now able to do so with all of the in-game settings maxed out, but I still only average around 35 frames per second. Before the hardware upgrade, I was averaging 15 frames per second at that resolution, but lower video quality (on certain maps- others would be much worse). Because the performance was so bad, I had to run at 1024x768 which distorted the picture on my widescreen LCD. (note: why did EA/Dice leave out a widescreen video option? You would think that they would provide support for them considering they require such beefy hardware)

On Wednesday I purchased and installed Quake4 expecting to run into the same issues as I was having with BF2 performance, but was pleasantly surprised when I was averaging about 100 frames per second at 1920x1200 with all settings maxed out. Why is it that two (for the most part) new games react so differently with the same hardware?

For those that have ever been close followers of id will be familiar with their mantra regarding release dates: "when it's done." I believe that this (regardless of the fact that Raven did the actual coding- only building upon id's Doom III engine) mantra is what made Quake 4 run much better overall than Battlefield 2.

Thus I would have to say that the Battlefield 2 code is nothing but a hack. I am also a software engineer (albeit in the Insurance business), but I do understand the many different steps and processes that our code has to go through. Countless use-case testing, peer reviews, and design documents go into our projects to ensure the best possible final production product.

Even though we're not into game design, I feel that many issues that came up during the development underwent significant amounts of hacking to keep the code from breaking. Rather than doing this, what they should have done was realize their defects and fix them the _right way_ regardless of the amount of time that it would set them back. The final product would have been of higher quality and the customers would have (most likely) ultimately been happier. But as was stated earlier in the thread, EA probably put pressure on Dice to release this product as fast as possible, thus the hacked-up codebase.

Edit: In my experiences with the server browser, I still cannot figure out why they would allow it to completely lag client computers the way it does. My PC chokes when I move the selector from server to server.

My $0.02.

[Vasquez]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

Even though we're not into game design, I feel that many issues that came up during the development underwent significant amounts of hacking to keep the code from breaking. Rather than doing this, what they should have done was realize their defects and fix them the _right way_ regardless of the amount of time that it would set them back. The final product would have been of higher quality and the customers would have (most likely) ultimately been happier. But as was stated earlier in the thread, EA probably put pressure on Dice to release this product as fast as possible, thus the hacked-up codebase.

I just posted a thread in "Gaming" to see if anyone was interested in teaming up to write a free FPS, as akind of experience. Regardless of what branch of software engineering one is in, the principles remain the same when it comes to end-results and customer experience.

[LaserCobra]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

Awesome! This is up there with the 'bullet drop' thread!

Thanks!

[amish marauder]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I agree with the OP as well. Very thought out thread. Thanks for the post.

All I can say is my PC is no where near cutting edge and when I first bought this game I only had 768mb DDR333. the game even on lower visual settings lagged badly. I upped my ram to 1.5GB DDR333 and now I play at med. and high settings, everything turned on, 4xFSAA and 8XAF. I can not remember the last time I saw any lag at all. runs butter smooth.

Specs:
2500+
9800Pro
1.5GB Kingston DDR400 @ 333 speeds.

[imported_The 13th Raptor]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

I can tell you that EA/DICE has plenty of betatesters, things such as the red tag bug and server browser laggyness was reported to them before the release of the patch. But nothing was done, and the patch was released. Why they do it, i dont know.

[|^|BigBadBlair]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

So did unzipping the Files work?? (getting back to the begining..)

[Vasquez]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

So did unzipping the Files work?? (getting back to the begining..)

Alas, no. Another posted on this thread tried it. He even tried re-zipping the files with zero compression and the loading times didn't change, which was quite interesting.

[Supernaut6]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

For the guy writing about making an FPS, I recommend the following free open source engines...

OGRE, c++
Realmforge C#
Axiom C#

Axiom is the C# port of OGRE. The Axiom tree has stopped development and control has been given to the people at realmforge. If you want to make a simple program in C#, Axiom is the way to go. It is simple and well done.
Realmforge has almost everything you could want in a game engine. It has a physics engine that you can simply plug in. I would recommend this if you want to build a more complete game.
OGRE is the father of all these engines. It has alot of great features but it is a bit harder to work with. If you need features galore then look no further. OGRE is constantly being upgraded while the people at realmforge are playing catch up with their version of Axiom.

If you have your heart set on C# and you need the advanced features of OGRE, there is another alternative. OGRE can be used in C# via a wrapper.

http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/OgreDotNet

Hope that helps.

[Vasquez]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

Supernaut6,

Thanks for the information, I'll check OGRE out. To be honest, I'd never dream of writing a game engine in C#. C++ is my forte, so I will check it out. Cheers bud.

[Darkfysh]

Re: Why EA is not entirely to blame for the lack of foresight that is BF2

Also, notice how load times are much faster if you have already loaded that map before? (In a bf2 session you haven't closed/quit)