Creating the High-Tech Audio of Battlefield 2

Creative has done an interview with the audio programmer and the sound designer of Battlefield 2 here at the Stockholm office.

With my squad at my back, I battle my way into deepest Stockholm, Sweden. Mortars and rockets rake the streets, jet fighters scream in the sky above my head. Skirting mines and avoiding snipers, I take refuge in a nearby office. Inside, I find Jonas Kjellström and Henrik Andersson, ice-cool as only Swedish game developers can be, putting the finishing touches to the sound system in Digital Illusions' and Electronic Arts' multiplayer PC masterpiece, Battlefield 2! A perfect opportunity to find out about what explosive audio treats they have planned for us...

It's a good interview and extra interesting in the sense that it focuses on an area often forgotten in other interviews and previews, i.e. audio. It's also always cool to read about people you know and work with (not directly tough, I'm on a different project and in a different area).

Creative pimped their new X-Fi sound card technology in the interview which sounds (hah) quite powerful, but I'm not that well versed in audio technology so I'll gladly leave more in-depth comments about it to Scav.

RalliSport 2 stunt movie

Found a cool RalliSport 2 stunt movie that a clan called TBM (The British Misfits) created. It has some pretty extreme jumps and car destruction from various locations in the game. Fun stuff

Battlefield 2 demo released

The Battlefield 2 demo was released by GameSpot 15 minutes ago, it can be downloaded from here. It contains a single level called Gulf of Oman with 16- and 32-player support.

You can find me on the battlefield as [DICE]Repi.

Update: FiringSquad has a good review of the demo here

Trackbacks

Since Blogger/Blogspot doesn't have TrackBack support, I've just added it trough a seperate (free) service from HaloScan.com. TrackBack is a system that allows everyone reading a post in a blog to see if someone else has blogged about it. Six Apart has a good short beginners guide here.

Don't know if the new trackback link actually works tough, since no one appears to link to any of my posts. Yet at least :)

RalliSport Challenge 1 cars in Xpand Rally

Scav found out that someone reverse engineered my car mesh format that I created for RalliSport Challenge 1 (PC & Xbox) for about 4 years ago. It appears that they are trying to convert all the RSC1 cars from the PC version to Xpand Rally which, obviously, has a quite alive and fanatic mod community.

The format they reverse engineered is called CarMesh (.cm) and is quite basic. Each mesh contains a list of LODs and each LOD has a list of renderable blocks. A renderable block is the smallest primitive inside the mesh and it contains the vertex & index data, a per-vertex deformable morph target list (position and normal), a reference to a shader and an enum to describe which car part the block belongs to used for destruction when disconnecting parts from the car.

Overall the format is quite simple but specific for just RSC1 needs, it shouldn't have been that hard to reverse engineer. But if they would have asked me I would have given them a detailed description to same them some time :)

Update: Fixed link, stuiped typical mistake