Using buildings?

[Dandred]

Just been thinking about a thread I saw in the Dice question section of this site. Is the game engine in Bf2 the major limitation that we can't get into all buildings, or is it more to do with specs?

How long will it be untill we can have a game that works like Bf2 with all buildings open on all levels for use with every player?

What is the major problem? Engine or specs?

I don't know much about engines at all I would like like a decent answer.

I really enjoyed the thread on this forum about blood extras, when can we see a game were when I shoot some one in the arm the arm bleeds, I don't mean the same bleeding animation everytime time I mean you shoot one guy in the wrist and the wrist bleeds, hand, artm ect.........

I think the people who use this forum (mod) would have the best answers

[grolsche]

Re: Using buildings?

Well basically its to do with 2 things. 1) Is the way things are rendered and 2) The way things are culled. Expanding on point 1, every engine does things slightly differently, thats to be expected but each engine has a certain charactersitic, and the company behind the engine choose a technology which will suit. Taking Battlefield 1942 for example, they new that the basis of their game would be around large outdoor enviroments and so the basis of the engine is the rendering of terrain and the rendering of water. To simulate buildings, the engine renders static meshes which are just 3d models. In 42 the buildings were all really small and they didnt really need to do anything fancy. Basically the outside and inside of these buildings were just one static mesh. If you think about an engine like Source or Unreal the basis is on small indoor enviroments for the most part and so the engines are built using a technology called bsp for the majority of the interiors with meshes just to add that extra bit of detail to the enviroment. As you can tell the unreal and source engines are much better at rendering indoor enviroments because they were designed for it. The battlefield engine however was not, but DICE canada decided to do it anyway and led us to the lag maps of iron gator or warlord.

Now to point 2. Basically when a mesh is rendered on any engine, the common way to speed up rendering is for the mesh to get less detail and eventually fade out. This works the same in the battlefield engine but the engine was never designed to fade out big objects. Technically because at all times your still close to it, even though you might be at the other end of the carrier for instance, it still draws the furthest part away at full detail and with all the lightmapping and extra whizzy features on. I believe the normal DICE knew this and thats why the carrier in BF2 is actually 3 seperate pieces so technically the further you get from one piece that fades out or gets less detailed but what you are near stays at full resolution, a very clever trick from them. Also many engines use a technique of "culling" things which are not directly in view. Say for example in the source engine, if you look at a wall which has something behind it, theoretically it should not render anything behind it. You still need to do some optimising to get it to work but beside the point. In the battlefield engine I dont believe it culls objects which are hidden from view because technically at any time you could get in a plane and view it from a higher altitude or something.

Anyway if you wanted to have all buildings open, its possible. I wouldnt add every single room for example, and Id make sure the meshes were cut up and I think this could improve the frame rates a bit. Theres no "soft" optimising you can do like in other engines where you can tell the engine where not to draw things but you can help it by whacking a great knife through meshes. Sorry its a very long post but im not good explaining things short and sweetly