The AT Battlefield Bad Company 2 F.A.Q.

[RavenSEAL]

And watched that BC2 Vietnam movie. Looks really cool, but 4 maps? REALLY? Come freaking on. If it had at least 7 or 8 I'd buy it but with 4 maps, unless it's like 10 bucks I wont touch it.

It is supposed to be 9.99, from what i've heard so far.

 

[MoMeanMugs]

Is anyone else having problems with it constantly crashing to the desktop? I've read suggestions about updating Punkbuster and running as administrator, but nothing seems to fix the issue.

Win 7 x64 Ultimate
5870 Crossfire
Q9300@3.0 GHz

It only happened intermittently, but while trying to play this afternoon, it happened every time. I could play MP for about 5 minutes, and then it would freeze and drop me to the desktop. I updated the 10.9 drivers and Crossfire profile to get rid of the flickering problem I was having with the 10.8's. That seemed to get rid of that issue, but I wonder if it's introduced something else.

 

[minmaster]

It is supposed to be 9.99, from what i've heard so far.

i was expecting $15 as BF1943 is 4 maps and $15 i believe. $10 sounds better.

of course we don't know if they'll even release the PC version. all the demos are on consoles and we all know how 1943 for PC turned out...

 

[RavenSEAL]

By the way...my god, the people @ the EA forums are just a packload of retards. I called some dude off for saying some crap thinking he's all mighty and i get a warning saying my account be permanently banned if i committed one offense. The people who run the EA community site are just idiots. Thank god for anandtech

Anyways, even though i'm on PS3, i hope you don't mind me moving my BC2 discussions over here.

 

[Zargon]

Is anyone else having problems with it constantly crashing to the desktop? I've read suggestions about updating Punkbuster and running as administrator, but nothing seems to fix the issue.

Win 7 x64 Ultimate
5870 Crossfire
Q9300@3.0 GHz

It only happened intermittently, but while trying to play this afternoon, it happened every time. I could play MP for about 5 minutes, and then it would freeze and drop me to the desktop. I updated the 10.9 drivers and Crossfire profile to get rid of the flickering problem I was having with the 10.8's. That seemed to get rid of that issue, but I wonder if it's introduced something else.

I have a 4850X2 and I am currently stuck on 10.4 because of crashing issues

 

[minmaster]

anyone try the new nvidia beta drivers? they made a world of difference on my GTX 460. i'm around 70fps now. i even changed from dx10 to dx11 thanks to the increase in frame rates.

 

[GullyFoyle]

anyone try the new nvidia beta drivers? they made a world of difference on my GTX 460. i'm around 70fps now. i even changed from dx10 to dx11 thanks to the increase in frame rates.

I assume any enhancements being made are for the 400 series. I may never need a new version for my 8800GT.

I had one of those my cart the night they were available, and said "screw it" and went to bed, assuming it would never go through! (plus, I had already splurged for an SSD in the last few weeks...)

 

[minmaster]

well in open areas of the map, dx11 still struggles too much for my tastes. i'm back to dx10. i was at 16x AA and AF at 1680x1050.

 

[GullyFoyle]

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "The music is in the vehicles. Probably wasn't turned on as he was playing. there is music alright "

For how many people does this seal the deal?

Edit: This doesn't bode well for more news (ie, on BF1943, or rumored new maps):

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "Leaving for the airport now See you in 20+ hours!"

 

[AznAnarchy99]

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "The music is in the vehicles. Probably wasn't turned on as he was playing. there is music alright "

For how many people does this seal the deal?

Edit: This doesn't bode well for more news (ie, on BF1943, or rumored new maps):

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "Leaving for the airport now See you in 20+ hours!"

Doesnt seal the deal for me at all. The video looked like a complete reskin. Even when the guy asked him about whats new and he reverted back to saying oh the base battlefield is here. He went on to say how they rewarded the fan base with the VIP map packs. Bullshit, all of that should have been there day 1. Its nothing more than a change of game modes.

 

[Demo24]

Sigh. I can't seem to get any good games in anymore. Since last week I've been plagued by disconnects. I might get a good 5 mins, maybe 30 secs, maybe if I'm real lucky a full hour. I've yet to be able to play for the time I want to without getting a server disconnect. Coupled with the random desktop crash it's really starting to annoy me.

 

[GullyFoyle]

video of vietnam:

http://tgs.gamespot.com/video/6275964/

totally reminds me of laguna presa.

Thanks for this Minmaster. Here's a YouTube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueC51jMnLY4. Check it out at 720P.

 

[GullyFoyle]

Here's the official DICE trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOG4y9L81r0

Yeah, it's all tease.

 

[GullyFoyle]

IGN.com BFBC2: Vietnam Hands-on at TGS

TGS: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Takes You to Vietnam
I get my first taste of the upcoming downloadable expansion.
September 16, 2010
by Erik Brudvig

Battlefield is going back to Vietnam, this time for a downloadable expansion to the well-received first-person shooter Bad Company 2. The add-on, due out this Winter for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, delivers four new maps, a rematch of sorts between the North Vietnamese army and the United States, and a change in the weapon and vehicle options to match the setting. I got my first taste of this huge expansion at an EA press event on the eve of the Tokyo Game Show.

If you've played Battlefield: Bad Company 2 before, then you know exactly what to expect out of the Vietnam expansion. The base game remains unchanged. Sure, you get different tools of destruction and new achievements or trophies to unlock, but the modes and basic approach to a shooter follow the guidebook laid out by Bad Company 2's multiplayer. That means a focus on team play, some objective based gaming, and wide open maps filled with destructible buildings and plenty of vehicles. Squint your eyes a bit while playing the Vietnam expansion and you can imagine you're still playing the original base game.

That, however, would be missing the point. Vietnam is the perfect setting to show off the power of DICE's Frostbite engine. Little straw huts crumble under the might of tank shells. The landscape is lush with trees and shrubs, all of which can be mowed down through machine gun fire. When making a game that puts such an emphasis on destruction, Vietnam is the ideal locale.

I got to play a Conquest game on a map called Phu Bai Valley. Here, each side was fighting over three locations of interest while doing their best to take out the opposition. Helicopters and tanks were in heavy rotation, though I also found that snipers have a ton of places to hide amidst the trees and huts. My favorite moment came when I crashed a helicopter into an armored vehicle, hopping out just before impact. That was a pretty great explosion.

I only got to play a couple of rounds, but what I played was fun. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still a fantastic looking and handling game and this download is going to do a nice job of reminding everyone of just that. New maps are always a welcome addition to games with such a heavy emphasis on multiplayer modes, but this download is going well beyond simply adding new places to fight. It flips the script and puts a fresh face on a game that millions have already tried.

My quick impressions thus far tell me that fans are going to eat this expansion up. If you've grown tired of the Bad Company 2 gameplay, this won't do a ton to get you excited again as the core isn't changing. That said, this is a great way to reinvigorate the community during the holiday flood of new games.

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Misc Links:

More info? www.battlestrats.com
3 Screenshots

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Official Site: http://www.battlefieldbadcompany2.com/vietnam

All four multiplayer game modes from Battlefield: Bad Company 2, including the genre-defining Conquest Mode, will be playable in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. The expansion is integrated with the full game persistence, so no matter what theatre of war you participate in, you will continue to level up your soldier as usual.

KEY FEATURES

• 4 Brand New Maps. From the rice fields of the Phu Bai Valley to the napalm scorched earth of Hill 137, four distinct Vietnam-based maps each bring a fresh visual and gameplay experience.
• 6 Immortalized Vehicles. Skim the treetops in the iconic American Huey helicopter. Drive the sturdy Russian T54 tank and the nimble US PBR "Pibber" patrol boat, plus three more vehicles immortalized in the Vietnam war.
• 15 Characteristic Weapons. Charge into battle with 15 new weapons modeled on their real life counter-parts, including the rare Navy SEAL XM22 machinegun and the characteristic M79 "Blooper" Grenade Launcher.
• Rocking 60's Soundtrack. Listen to 8 radio channels in-game, featuring 49 time typical tracks, including "Ride of the Valkyries" and "Fortunate Son" by CCR.
• True War Dialogue. All-new voiceovers for both American and Vietnamese forces, based on authentic communication from the Vietnam war for maximum immersion.
• New Achievements/Trophies. Collect 10 new achievements/trophies, one for blowing up Vietnamese propaganda speakers. Earn new weapon proficiency stars specific to your skills with the weapons in the expansion.

 

[Termie]

Honestly, BC2: Vietnam sounds pretty darn awesome. Even for $15, I think the added features (new weapons, tanks, music, dialogue) would be worth it. Now, if we were just talking 4 new BC2 maps, I'd feel differently, but this is really an expansion pack in the truest sense.

By the way, BF2: Special Forces, which added about the same amount of value (with more maps though) was about $30 at launch, IIRC, so $15 isn't bad historically speaking.

My only concern is that Vietnam will fracture the BC2 community - I assume you can't have a server running both BC2 and Vietnam maps, since people who don't buy Vietnam would have to get booted every time the server switched to Vietnam (but correct me if I'm wrong). With only 4 maps running on a server, most people will try it once, then decide to go back to the old maps for more variety. While Special Forces was technically pretty awesome (night vision and ziplines, anyone?), the number of players on SF servers dropped quickly to the point where you basically couldn't find anyone playing certain maps (Devil's Perch was my personal favorite, and almost nobody played it, or so it seemed).

Alas, I'll probably buy Vietnam, because I still think the price is pretty good. At $10 it would be a must-have, but I wouldn't count on that.

 

[minmaster]

lol do they really need to put bloom on the rice hats?

 

[GullyFoyle]

Additional BFBC2: Vietnam Video from TGS:

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/31412
http://www.ign.com/videos/2010/09/16/battlefield-bad-company-2-vietnam-versus-tank
http://www.ign.com/videos/2010/09/16/battlefield-bad-company-2-vietnam-chopper

 

[CrystalBay]

That Conquest map with the chopper looked pretty small. If it's $15 or so I'm in , always hungry for more bullet eating...

 

[GullyFoyle]

Comparison of the Vietnam Map shown at TGS with the small Lugana Presa Conquest map: Picture

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TGS 2010: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam Interview G4TV: YouTube.com

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An older post on the Steam Forums by Mikael Kalms on Onslaught Mode for the PC: Not being worked on currently

Read the whole thread for other tidbits.

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twitter.com/thebigb82: "is there any listings of the vehicles in BC2:Nam?"
twitter.com/zh1nt0: "T54 Tank (NVA), US PBR, Huey, jeeps and US tank."

Holy crap, he actually let slip with actual details. He must have been almost asleep at his desk...

The 6 vehicles: 2 Tanks, 2 jeeps, small boat, Huey helicopter. Give up your hopes for flyable jets. Ain't there.

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[AznAnarchy99]

Comparison of the Vietnam Map shown at TGS with the small Lugana Presa Conquest map: Picture

==================================================

TGS 2010: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam Interview G4TV: YouTube.com

==================================================

An older post on the Steam Forums by Mikael Kalms on Onslaught Mode for the PC: Not being worked on currently

Read the whole thread for other tidbits.

==================================================

twitter.com/thebigb82: "is there any listings of the vehicles in BC2:Nam?"
twitter.com/zh1nt0: "T54 Tank (NVA), US PBR, Huey, jeeps and US tank."

Holy crap, he actually let slip with actual details. He must have been almost asleep at his desk...

The 6 vehicles: 2 Tanks, 2 jeeps, small boat, Huey helicopter. Give up your hopes for flyable jets. Ain't there.

==================================================

No jets killed it right there..

 

[Demo24]

Is it just me or does it seem like there are more hackers as of recent? Last few games I've played had very suspicious people with scores like 40/0 or 70/maybe 1-2 deaths. Not like they are sniping, but running around in the action. Ran into some clan guys obviously hacking, I think part of the 'frags2me' clan or something. Sorry but there is just no way you can instasnipe with an 870 on white pass, and go 70/3, or higher.

 

[minmaster]

it's very easy to instasnipe with shotties with the slugs perk.
it's more accurate than sniper rifles it seems.

 

[Demo24]

it's very easy to instasnipe with shotties with the slugs perk.
it's more accurate than sniper rifles it seems.

Yeah, I understand that and I've done it. However not possible to do so, so often as soon as someone appears in your line of sight. Had him multiple times shoot me the split second he appeared from cover, and I wasn't in the same place I was before. Eventually he ended up on my team, and the map changed. He was getting headshots with the vss running, shooting through my body, whilst I shot/c4'd him. It was really just ridiculous and blatant cheating. Incredibly annoying as it just drains the server once you realize you have one on, and no admin.

 

[GullyFoyle]

So how about modtools? by MikaelKalms

Zh1nt0 and you folks have asked about it, so here's a piece on the modtools situation for BC2 PC.

Frostbite 1.5 consists of these components:

* The game runtime
* The editor runtime
* The content processing runtime (aka "the pipeline")
* and some plugins for Maya

The game runtime is distributed outside of EA, but the editor + pipeline + Maya plugins are not.

So let's take a look at some things that would need to be solved before we'd be ready to distribute the editor + pipeline.


Pipeline operation

Let's say that you tell the pipeline to build level MP_003.

MP_003 is represented by an XML file, which references a bunch of other files. These in turn reference other files. If you follow this graph of references, you will find the level layout, heightmap, characters, weapons, vehicles, and all the content that you can see in-game. (The in-game HUD and related stuff might also be in the graph.)

When the pipeline is about to build MP_003, it will first perform a consistency check on all content, and yell if any file that is referenced by any other is not present.

If all files are present, the pipeline will attempt to convert all files referenced by MP_003. It uses the file system journal to determine which files have changed on-disk. Also, and any files that have already been converted have info on which files depend on it (so it has info like: "if file X changes, then files Y,Z,W will also need to be rebuilt").

Building all content for BC2 from scratch takes something like 48-72 hours on a normal workstation. Half that time is spent building common content (such as character animations), half builds level-specific content.

In addition, there's a caching mechanism: if the pipeline wants to build a specific bit of content, it will first check if the pre-built content is already available on a cache server and take the result directly from the cache server instead. The pipeline can also populate the cache if it builds something new.


Pipeline issues

So how does this work in practice? It's not ideal, but it's good enough for us to ship games on it.

The pipeline is a bit overzealous with regards to rebuilding assets - sometimes it rebuilds stuff that it shouldn't need to.

The pipeline will normally crash about 2-3 times during a full rebuild.

You need to have Maya 8.5 (32-bit version) installed in order to convert any meshes.

Any content in the cache expires after 3 weeks. After 3 weeks have passed, that content will need to be rebuilt and re-uploaded by a machine running the pipeline. The effect that this has on day-to-day development is minimized by having one or two machines dedicated to running the pipeline every time any content change is done. By running the pipeline, those machines will populate the cache, thereby speeding up the build process for everyone else. (The output form those content build steps is discarded.)

In short: the pipeline + cache setup works better the more people are using it simultaneously.

If there are content errors, you need to know a lot about the internals of the game engine to figure out what's wrong.

Finally, in its current form, the pipeline + editor expects some specific IT infrastructure in place (most notably the cache server and a Perforce server).
If it's not there then the pipeline + editor will behave strangely.
The first time I tried, it took me about one week to get the full editor + pipeline setup to work properly outside of the DICE office. And that was when I had the option to call any of the other developers to ask for help.

... does this sound bad to you?

Truth be told, this is approximately where the industry average is at for game studios' internal game engines. One of FB 1.5's weaknesses is specifically that its content processing is flaky, and the flakiness gets more problematic as the amount of content goes up. FB 2.0 is much improved in this regard, but FB 1.5 is what we're using for BC2 and that's what relevant in the current discussion (or monologue if you prefer).


Content

Both the pipeline and the editor takes in all content in its raw, original form. Anyone who is to build any content needs the full 80GB of raw data on their machine. We are not comfortable giving out all our animations, meshes etc in raw form.

We are comfortable giving out the processed data - after all, that's what on the game disc - but that data does not plug into the editor/pipeline at all.


Licenses

The game, editor and pipeline all use commercial middleware. It is developed by Havok and several other companies.

The licensing agreement for the middleware allows us to use that code in specific products, on specific platforms.
If we want to release editor + pipeline, we need to license the middleware specifically for this. How much would that be? Perhaps $1M-$3M. I'm guessing wildly here.

Stripping out that middleware would seriously hamper the functionality especially of the pipeline. We use Havok Physics, for instance. Without Havok Physics, the pipeline wouldn't be able to convert any of the physics meshes. We also use Granny. Without Granny, the pipeline will not be able to convert any of the character animations. Etc.

Re-implementing the necessary functionality of the middleware ourselves ("let's make our own physics engine / let's plug in an open-source physics engine") would take literally man-years. Licensing is cheaper in pure $ cost and faster (it works now instead of by 2012).

The pipeline also uses some code that is under GPL. Given that we do not want to release the full source code for the editor + pipeline, we would need to replace the GPLed code with other implementations.

The GPLed code is less of a problem than the proprietary middleware.


Editor

The editor itself is reasonably stable and well-behaving. It is far from obvious how to set up the game logic for a level, but that is easily covered by releasing some example levels which contain the logic setup for the common gamemodes.


Test-running levels

First the level needs to be successfully processed by the pipeline. Then you'd want to be able to test it locally. That involves having a listen server around. We don't have a listen server neatly packaged. There's probably a piracy angle here too but I'm not going to discuss that.


Distribution of levels

Getting levels onto the RSPs server machines would likely not be any problem. However there's need for checksumming levels, so that game clients can know whether or not they have the correct version of level X on their machines. There's a whole bunch of other things (mainly UI-related) which will need cleaning up as well. Not difficult to do, just takes time and I'm listing it for the sake of completeness.

Also, there are some complications wrt when we release patches that affect the base game's content. Whenever we release a patch, all existing levels will need to be rebuilt with a new set of original data. This is because some level-common data is stored inside of the level archives. I'm not sure at the time of writing, but that probably means that the only manageable way for us would be to invalidate any user-made levels when we release a patch of that form.
Then creators of any user-generated levels would be required to run their levels again through the pipeline with the new base content supplied.


So how about just a map editor?

If it doesn't plug into the ecosystem above, then getting it to work involves some serious wrangling. Either it is a light-weight replacement for our existing editor - in which case all the challenges with the pipeline still remain - or it is a separate mode (think Forge for Halo). Developing an extra mod-layer that is sandwiched into the game would easily take 6-12 months.


Synergy effects between FB 1.5 and FB 2.0

So let's say that we would go through the procedure of making mod tools for FB 1.5. How much of that work would be reusable for FB 2.0?
I don't have any firm figures, but the differences between FB 1.5 and FB 2.0 are pretty large by now. Given this and the fact that a fair bit of the FB 1.5-specific problems (where the devil often is in the details) don't apply to FB 2.0, I'd guess that less than half of the work would port over to FB 2.0.


Conclusion

In conclusion, my recommendation to the rest of DICE is not to develop mod tools for BC2 PC. There are too many hurdles to overcome. That energy is better spent elsewhere, be that on BC2 or other titles.

Follow-up message from MikaelKalms

FB2.0 is better suited for modtools, but it is not a shoe-in yet. I will not speculate on whether or not modtools will be released for BF3.

 

[RavenSEAL]

EA forums have gone berserk. In the US forums, the mods have given up and don't do anything, and in the UK forums, they are banning people a minute. The community on the console version is just pitiful, full of mw2 junkies 12 y/o and people that use their mouth more than they use their head.I wish i had my rig earlier so i could buy the PC version. Sigh....