repilogue

DICE at GDC'11

2011-03-10T00:41:00.003+01:00

Game Developers Conference was good this year! More & better in-depth technical talks then last year and was a major event for us at DICE as we did a big showing of BF3 to the press and had 5 talks about Battlefield 3 and Frostbite 2 topics at the conference.

All the slides from the presentations are now up on http://publications.dice.se as PowerPoint, PDF and (in some cases) Keynote files. Many of them include speaker notes but if you are only interested in quickly glossing over them the below embedded slideshares can be good.

If you have any feedback or questions about any of the topics feel free to add a comment, send a mail or a tweet to @repi (me), @ChristinaCoffin, @Daniel_Collin or @ZigguratVertigo (Colin Barre-Brisebois)!

DirectX 11 Rendering in Battlefield 3

SPU-Based Deferred Shading in BATTLEFIELD 3 for Playstation 3

Culling the Battlefield: Data Oriented Design in Practice

Lighting you up in Battlefield 3

Colin Barre-Brisebois - GDC 2011 - Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and Convincing Subsurface-Scattering Look

5 Challenges Feedback

2010-08-01T21:40:00.005+02:00

Thanks again to everyone that contributed feedback to my 5 Challenges in Interactive Rendering talk in the Beyond Programmable Shading course! Had a lot of fun discussions and pretty much all of the feedback fit nicely into the selected challenges and topics.

Feels great that we as an industry are not completely trying to go in different directions and actually seem to care the most about many of the same topics. If you don't agree, please leave a comment :)

Will follow up with some of you that sent long detailed emails of your inner wishes & secrets next week now that I'm back from Siggraph.

Here is a list of everyone (I hope!) that directly gave feedback on what the challenges should be or topics of interests, thanks! This is a great list of people to follow on twitter as well.

Christina Coffin (@christinacoffin)
Colin Barré-Brisebois (@ZigguratVertigo)
Daniel Collin (@daniel_collin)
Flavius Alecu (@flawe)
Sander van Rossen (@logicalerror)
Rob Jones (@bobvodka)
Steven Tovey (@nonchaotic)
Colin Riley (@domipheus)
Joe Tidmarsh (@mrjovis)
Stephen Hill (@self_shadow)
Federico Bianco Prevot (@nocturndragon)
Stefan Boberg (@bionicbeagle)
Noel Llopis (@snappytouch)
Björn Knafla (@bjoernknafla)
Andrew Richards (@codeandrew)
Juan Manuel Alvarez (@the_naicigam)
David Luebke (@davedotluebke)
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (@jrk)
Pat Wilson (@pat_wilson)
Rachel Blum (@groby)
Brian Karis (@briankaris)
Matt Collins (@matt_c_)
Sam Martin (@palgorithm)
Aaron Lefohn
Andrew Lauritzen
Luca Fascione
Steve Anichini
Simon Taylor
Matt Swoboda
Cody Ritchie
Mattias Kylen
Oscar Carlén

Oh and if you still have thoughts about what the 5 major challenges are and/or didn't have time to discuss it before, please do send a tweet (@repi), post a comment or send an email. Always interesting to discuss & hear people's thoughts and ideas on the topic!

See you, if not sooner, at GDC 2011 (San Francisco) and SIGGRAPH 2011 (Vancouver).

SIGGRAPH 2010 talks by DICE

2010-08-01T19:58:00.006+02:00

SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles was great! Lots of good real-time talks & research this year as well as a huge amount of old friends & new people to meet up with and talk to.

Many of the courses now also have course sites set up for them now the material for the talks can be found, highly recommended reading:

Advances in Real-time Rendering

Beyond Programmable Shading ("my" course)

Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production

Stylized Rendering in Games

We had a big presence at SIGGRAPH this year and all the DICE talks, except for the Mirror's Edge one, can now be found on both publications.dice.se (including the .ppt files for them) as well as embedded in this post.

Hope to upload the Mirror's Edge talk by Henrik Halén from the Stylized Rendering in Games course later on, we need to sort out some permissions for that one first.

Here are the slides for 5 of the 6 DICE talks at SIGGRAPH 2010 embedded:

5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering

Bending the Graphics Pipeline

Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields

A Real-time Radiosity Architecture

Stylized Rendering in Battlefield Heroes

DICE talk schedule for Siggraph'10

2010-07-05T22:49:00.006+02:00

We have a record amount of DICE-related talks at Siggraph this year, 6 of them to be precise!

Stylized Rendering in Games course (Monday, 26 July):

Cartoon 3D for Battlefield Heroes - Henrik Halén

Style and Gameplay in Mirror's Edge - Henrik Halén

Advanced Techniques in Real-Time Hair Rendering and Simulation course (Wednesday, 28 July):

Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields - Robert Kihl

A Real Time Radiosity Architecture for Video Games - Per Einarsson

Beyond Programmable Shading course (Thursday, 29 July):

5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering - Johan Andersson

Bending the Graphics Pipeline - Johan Andersson

The slides & material for these presentations will be posted directly after Siggraph ends on http://publications.dice.se as well as on this blog.

We'll have a contingent of 4-5 DICE people at Siggraph + hopefully some EA friends, send me a tweet (@repi) or a mail (repi at dice.se) if you want to meet up for some interesting technical discussions and food/beer!

Gathering feedback: 5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering

2010-06-28T10:20:00.005+02:00

One of the talks I'm doing for the Beyond Programmable Shading course at Siggraph 2010 is about 5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering. And to be able to give good examples of major challenges we have going forward for the next 5 or even 10 years, I thought it could be a good idea to gather some feedback & content from the internets.

In other words, I'm lazy and crowdsourcing parts of the presentation :)

Getting broad feedback would be very useful to get a better understanding of how we as an industry would like to go forward and what problems & challenges are the most important to solve first.

If you are a game developer or working with interactive rendering in any other field, I would very much appreciate any feedback you have on the topic and specific challenges you would like to solve in the next 5-10 years and why those challenges are important for you, and I'll try to include that in the talk.

If you also have ideas of how it should be solved or pictures/movies that clearly demonstrate what you would like to achieve - that would be even better!

The challenges can be anything from rather small things such as the lack of a programmable blending stage that makes rendering decals together with Deferred Shading more difficult, expensive and awkward.

Or things like the major challenge of doing full-scene dynamic glossy reflections in arbitrary environments which can't be done accurately & generally today at all and where different types of raytracing may or may not be the way forward in the long term (with their own set of issues and problems of course).

Feedback about challenges is also not limited to only 'rendering features' per say, for example another key challenge is to develop great programming models for these massive data-parallel machines to empower developers broadly & utilize future hardware efficiently.

If you have any feedback - please either post in the comments here, tweet to me at @repi or mail comments/feedback/examples to me at repi (at) dice.se.

Thanks!

STHLM Game Developer Forum talk

2010-05-28T21:43:00.007+02:00

I held a talk at the new Stockholm Game Developer Forum mini-conference yesterday, did an updated version of my "Parallel Futures of a Game Engine" (v2.0).

Quite a lot have happened within 6 months since the first version of the talk; such as us having released Battlefield: Bad Company 2 with great success (5 million copies sold!), Intel killed Larrabee as a discrete GPU, AMD released more details of Fusion as well as interesting work experiences that I myself & our team have had. For example: porting DX11 compute shader to pipelined SPU SoA vector intrinsics.

So just had to update the presentation a bit and gear it towards the senior game developers in the audience instead of IHVs / platform providers that were the main audience in the first one.

Parallel Futures of a Game Engine (v2.0)

View more presentations from repii.

(.ppt version to download is available on http://publications.dice.se)

Thanks to The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) here in Stockholm for hosting the new conference and to everyone helped organized it. Was a great show up of world class senior game programmers here around the Stockholm region and think this was the start for something big.

See you next year!

BTW, don't miss Niklas Frykholm's (Bitsquid) slides from the same conference about Practical Examples in Data Oriented Design, very related and good stuff!

Battlefield guest blogging

2010-02-19T13:53:00.005+01:00

Did a guest blog post on our much larger Battlefield franchise blog about the PC graphics features & workings of Battlefield Bad Company 2 that is in Beta and soon to be released.

Bad Company 2 PC Graphics Details

If you have any more hardcore tech questions or comments feel free to post them here on this blog instead of the BF blog.

The collected knowledge of DICE

2010-02-15T18:27:00.003+01:00

We have created a page on the DICE homepage as a central repository of all of our publications, i.e. public talks, presentations, thesis papers and so on. It is available here:

http://publications.dice.se

I will continue to post my own talks here on this blog as well, ideally with some more detailed supplemental information. But is good to finally have a place where we can put content from all other talented people at DICE and from more disciplines.

Will tweet out and updates (@repi) and look into if it would make sense to add an RSS feed later.

Update: An RSS feed is now available on the site: http://publications.dice.se/rss/rss.xml

AMD DX11 interview with yours truly

2009-11-16T19:50:00.005+01:00

AMD did an interview with me about our work with Frostbite 2 and DirectX 11 which is now available online on the AMD game website.

The interview became longer than we expected, so the full interview in an easier to read PDF format is also available here (recommended version).

AMD was also nice enough to put up a small Frostbite info page, nothing too fancy but good to have.

"Parallel Futures of a Game Engine"

2009-11-11T21:15:00.006+01:00

I held one of the keynotes at the Intel Dynamic Execution Environment Symposium today (what a lovely concise conference name!). It's an internal Intel conference but as I'm an external speaker, I'm able to make my slides public.

I called my talk "Parallel Futures of a Game Engine":

Game engines have long been in the forefront of taking advantage of the ever increasing parallel compute power of both CPUs and GPUs. This talk is about how the parallel compute is utilized in practice on multiple platforms today in the Frostbite game engine and how we think the parallel programming models, hardware and software in the industry should look like in the next 5 years to help us make the best games possible.

It was a good and healthy process, while preparing this talk, to gather up both my own and our collective thoughts and experiences that we've had over the last few years. In order to try to build up and present a reasonably coherent vision and idea, which I think I succeeded with.

The talk is a bit of collection of some old material together with some new thoughts and conclusions about parallel programming models.

If you have any comments, ideas or further thoughts I would love to hear them!
Add a comment here, send me a mail or contact me on twitter (@repi)

Parallel Futures of a Game Engine

View more presentations from repii.

Siggraph'09 - Parallel Graphics in Frostbite

2009-08-14T13:03:00.005+02:00

This slides for my Siggraph'09 talk "Parallel Graphics in Frostbite - Current & Future" can be found together with the rest of our Beyond Programmable Shading course at this permanent course site. Or embedded below:

Parallel Graphics in Frostbite - Current & Future (Siggraph 2009)

View more presentations from repii.

Had a lot of material for this presentation that I wanted to talk about, but only 35 minutes to do it on, so crammed in a lot of text within the slides and talked it through in quite a quick pace. If anyone has any questions about the material I covered, please leave a comment or send me an email!

One request that I've gotten from a bunch of people already is to see a higher resolution version of our job graph picture, it is such a big graph that it isn't really possible to what the jobs are and do in a single fullscreen view. So I've uploaded the full 5400x5200 png image now, but understand that it might still not be very obvious of what the different jobs do or why the dependencies are setup the way they are as this is just an dot graph dump straight out of the engine (rendered using GraphViz).
This specific job graph picture is also a bit old and a lot of jobs have rather weird non-ideal dependency structures which is something we are working on to improve.

Here is the full resolution job graph picture:

Hexagons = SPU-jobs.
Rounded boxes = PPU-jobs.
Dotted circles = group jobs that don't execute anything, only synchronize a group of jobs.

Oh and btw, this slide is still valid (for now):

Tweeting

2009-07-27T17:35:00.002+02:00

I infrequently post on this blog nowadays, except for the occasional talk/presentation that I do.

However, I do quite frequently ramble semi-random musings on Twitter which can be found on twitter.com/repi.

Currently working on the slides for a talk in the Beyond Programmable Shading course at Siggraph'09 in New Orleans about parallel graphics (what an anti-oxymoron!) and some new experimental compute-shader-based rendering techniques in Frostbite.
The slides should be up online together with the rest of the course material on the day of the course (6 Aug, Thursday) and I'll upload them here as well, just might be followed up with some interesting discussions.

I will also participate in a panel in the end of the Beyond Programmable Shading course lead by Kurt Akeley, should be great fun!

GDC'09: Your Game Needs Direct3D 11, So Get Started Now!

2009-04-10T17:21:00.006+02:00

As I mentioned, I was invited by AMD to their GDC'09 talk Your Game Needs Direct3D 11, So Get Started Now! to share some of our thoughts, goals & details about Direct3D 11 and our port of Frostbite to D3D11.

This was all quite very last minute and I wrote my slides while at GDC just the night before the talk :) But think it went well and it was fun to present together with AMD again and on a very current topic. A lot of game developers are planning to support DX11 (in some cases going directly from DX9 to DX11, which makes sense), but few have started working on it yet so would be great if our talk was of any help.

AMD should have the slides up soon on their website together with their other GDC presentations. In the meantime, here is the slides for this talk embedded.

Big thanks to Bill Bilodeau for inviting me to his talk!

Your Game Needs Direct3D 11, So Get Started Now!

View more presentations from repii.

Update: The rest of the AMD slides from GDc'09 are now available here

GDC'09: Shadows & Decals - D3D10 techniques from Frostbite

2009-03-31T18:54:00.006+02:00

Daniel's and mine GDC'09 presentation titled Shadows & Decals - D3D10 techniques from Frostbite that was in the Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D for PC full day tutorial is now online! (pdf)

The rest of the tutorial slides can be found here

I talked about our shadowmapping technique which I creatively call Single-pass Stable Cascaded Bounding Box Shadow Maps (SSCBBSM?). It uses a combination of bounding box slice selection, geometry shader & instancing rendering to maximize shadowmap resolution usage and render with as little CPU overhead as possible.

Daniel talked about Decal Generation using the Geometry Shader and Stream Out which is a technique to project and generate decals directly on the GPU to avoid having to duplicate mesh vertex & index buffers into system memory or have to do the vertex & triangle projection on the CPU. It is a pretty cool usage of the GS and something we think will enable more intricate geometry processing than just standard decals in the future.

Shadows & Decals: D3D10 Techniques in Frostbite (GDC'09)

View more presentations from repii.

I also did a list minute presentation in the AMD talk Your Game Needs Direct3D 11, So Get Started Now! about our experiences, motivation and goals of porting & supporting Direct3D 11 in Frostbite. Slides should be up soon!

The parallelism shift and C++'s memory model

2009-01-15T21:49:00.006+01:00

Johan Torp (who now works at DICE) wrote this great master thesis (pdf) about programming for parallelism and the C++/C++0x memory model.

It is a great and exhaustive read of the topic at 134 pages. Recommended for programmers or researchers that are fully serious about parallelism and/or interested in the changes & improvements C++0x brings to the field.

Abstract:

The first part of the thesis is an overview of the paradigmatic shift to parallelism that is currently taking place. It explains why processors need to become parallel, how they might function and which types of parallelism there are. Given that information, it explains why threads and locks is not a suitable programming model and how threading is being improved and used to extract parallel performance. It also covers the problems that await new parallel programming models and how they might work. The final chapter surveys the landscape of existing parallel software and hardware projects and relates them to the overview. The overview is intended for programmers and architects of desktop and embedded systems.

The second part explains how to use C++'s upcoming memory model and atomic API. It also relates the memory model to classical denitions of distributed computing in an attempt to bridge the gap in terminology between the research literature and C++. An implementation of hazard pointers and a lock-free stack and queue are given as example C++0x code. This part is aimed at expert C++ developers and the research community.

Conference slides

2009-01-14T20:10:00.003+01:00

Found the neat site slideshare.net which can freely host & embed presentations (up to 100mb per presentation).

I've uploaded a few of the (public) external presentations that I've done the last couple of years. Planning a new talk for GDC this year (focused on DX10/11 rendering) and hopefully another one for the Siggraph real-time rendering course as well, should be interesting as always!

The Intersection of Game Engines & GPUs: Current & Future (Graphics Hardware 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: dice frostbite)

Terrain Rendering in Frostbite using Procedural Shader Splatting (Siggraph 2007)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: siggraph splatting)

Don't miss the course notes for Siggraph course.

Frostbite Rendering Architecture and Real-time Procedural Shading & Texturing Techniques (GDC 07)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: amd dice)

My Graphics Hardware'08 slides online

2008-07-03T00:54:00.005+02:00

The slides for my presentation The Intersection of Game Engines and GPUs - Current & Future from Graphics Hardware 08 is now online at the conference site together with about half of the other talks. The rest of them should hopefully be up shortly.

This was the first time I attended the Graphics Hardware conference and I must say I enjoyed the conference very much. It was quite small with only ~80 people attending in total so you could almost get to know everyone at the conference which was great. Most people were either researchers/students from universities or from the hardware vendors (primarily Nvidia and Intel), but there also were a few ISVs although no other game developers as far as I know ( = more attention to yours truly).

Was initially a bit skeptical about Sarajevo before the conference and didn't really know what to expect. But the lovely warm weather, perfect blue sky, cozy city center and the outgoing and friendly locals quickly won me over. They've done an amazing job of rebuilding the city and their lives after enduring the long siege during the Bosnian War. Would love to return to Sarajevo some day again.

My actual keynote talk went really well and was well received by an interested audience (always a plus). Didn't start preparing and writing for it early enough but spent some very late hours in the hotel the day before to structure the talk better and to reduce the length of it to fit the 1 hour schedule. Managed to squeeze in a whole lot of topics and future rendering use cases but also had to cut away some very interesting topics such as real-time REYES rendering, displacement mapping usages and non-rendering raytracing usages. Could have easily talked for 2-3 hours instead of 1 :)

Some of the my slides might not make much sense separate from the actual presentation, so post a comment or send me a mail if you have any questions. Video & audio was recorded at the conference as well but I'm not sure if that will be made available online.

Of the other papers and presentations at the conference I found all to be of interest although of varying applicability for us (not unexpectedly). For example mapping to and parallelizing graph data structures on GPUs is an area we (games) will surely run into in a near future as we create more complex and interesting AI & general irregular data relationships.

Overall an excellent conference and I hope to attend it again next year, believe it will be hosted together with Siggraph in New Orleans (yey).

Next up conference-wise this summer for me is Gamefest and the Microsoft GAB (Graphics Architecture Board) meeting in Seattle in a few weeks and after that Siggraph in LA.

GraphicsHardware'08 talk

2008-06-17T13:28:00.003+02:00

I'm holding one of the keynotes at the GraphicsHardware conference later this week (20-21 June) in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The talk is titled "The Intersection of Game Engines and GPUs--Current & Future" and here is the (rather dry) description of my talk:

Game engines have long been in the forefront of real-time graphics working in symbiosis with GPU hardware. Both are evolving in a fast pace in all areas with increased performance, flexibility and complexity. This talk is about the intersection of the two and what the continued development gives us as new concrete opportunities, challenges and requirements of graphics hardware and software for game engines, such as DICE's Frostbite Engine, in both the future as well as the current.

Haven't been to that conference before, it is quite small but exactly the right kind of people to discuss GPUs and future rendering techniques with. So will be very interesting!

I'll try to post the slides here aftwards, and potentially video/audio if they record it.

Back to PowerPoint..

The End Is Near...

2008-04-16T22:34:00.001+02:00

I Get Your Fail

2008-02-21T22:50:00.002+01:00

I have, together with a few friends from work, set up another blog titled 'I Get Your Fail' (derived from an internal joke) where we'll post weird and broken stuff from day to day game development. Everything from screenshots, error messages or even short clips

Coming up with material shouldn't be difficult at all due to the wonderful chaotic and ad hoc nature of game development. And have a huge backlog of screenshots from previous games I've worked on (esp. RalliSport Challenge 2) that would be fun to share.

Back to debugging RSX crashes..

Battlefield: Bad Company Developer Walkthrough videos

2007-09-07T09:04:00.001+02:00

Our producer on BFBC, Karl-Magnus Troedsson, did this 'developer walktrough' at the Leipzig Game Convention last week that is now up on GameTrailers.com.

It's a good run through of the gameplay and how everything interacts with the tactical destruction. And I must say the build played really well and the visuals looks extra good when being recorded from an HDTV like this, love the 'tv on camera' effect.

Click on the video links to see HD versions of the videos.

New Battlefield: Bad Company teaser trailer

2007-09-05T09:04:00.000+02:00

We've just released a new teaser trailer for Battlefield: Bad Company which shows actual game footage & tactical destruction for the first time.

IGN has it here.

Frostbite engine screenshots "leaked"

2007-04-18T01:04:00.000+02:00

Looks like someone has run a PDF image extractor on my Frostbite GDC talk and spread them around the tubes. Not really what we intended, but they are good screenshots and they were semi-public already (inside PDF on amd.com) so what the heck :)

Here they are:

Found a couple of sites/forums commenting them, always amusing to read:
TeamXbox forum, Xboxyde, TalkXbox.com, FZ.se

My Frostbite Rendering GDC presentation is online

2007-03-31T13:28:00.000+02:00

Mine and Natasha Tartarchuk's GDC session "Frostbite Rendering Architecture and Real-Time Procedural Shading & Texturing Techniques" together with the other AMD and AMD sponsored sessions are now up on the AMD/ATI Technical Publications page.

Here is a direct link to the presentation PDF

We merged together our 2 seperate slides 20 minutes before the session in the actual lecture room, so excuse us if the picture layout is a bit chaotic in some slides :)

Talking at GDC was a very good learning experience, a bit scary to stand and talk in front of 200+ other game developers but it went quite well and got some good feedback.

Next up will be the Advanced Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games course at Siggraph 2007 in August were I will talk about more of the technical details of our terrain & undergrowth rendering methods (Procedural Shader Splatting).

We've finally released the Battlefield: Bad Company teaser

2007-02-28T20:33:00.000+01:00

Marketing finally released the movie of the in-engine teaser we created for Battlefield: Bad Company a while ago. This is the same movie I showed at SIGRAD a few months ago as part of my Frostbite presentation.

It is exclusive for Xbox Live Marketplace for now but it has already spread to websites such as Xboxyde (SD version), Xboxyde (720p version), Youtube and Google Video.

The HD version seems to have been quite heavily compressed, I'm sure some other site will release a better version pretty soon.

For the technically interested, yes this is real-time footage from within our new Frostbite engine. It is a 720p direct feed captured from a Xbox 360 devkit running at about 25 fps with no additional offline post-processing or such.

Here a few interesting / funny initial comments about it that I found on various sites and forums:

"omg that was awesome.. even my gf liked it lol"

"This is D.I.C.E we are talking about here. Rallysport Challenge D.I.C.E."

"thats a bad ass trailer, best Ive seen in a while. Getting bit sick of pre-rendered "wanna be" movie feature type of trailers telling me nothing about gameplay itself. At leats in this one I know I can blow up...everything :)"

"shit yeah!!!! i love all the battlefield games and my god i will LOVE this one too."

"Hahaha, that friggin' owns! Can't wait for this one."

"Very nice teaser! I wonder if this kind of humour will make presence in-game though. I hope so! Anyways, it looks like a nice game, plus we'll be able to blow up "anythang!" LOL"

"THAT was pretty damn impressive - it's all the pics we've seen, but really in motion, really smooth, with destructable environments - AND it's Battlefield, so it's gonna be with lots of guys and vehicles... love it, love it!

Battlefield is the second of only two francises I still love on PC, and I'm glad to really see the visuals (and hopefully also the gameplay) jump with this one - good old DICE!"

"Well considering these are in part some of the guys behind Rallisport 2, or so I heard, I'm not really surprised it looks great. RSC2 still is one of the best looking racer ever, even compared to some next-gen ones."

"Yup, lead programmer for RSC series and BF Bad Company is the same guy :)"

"Real-time greatness, finally the first next-gen Battlefield game."

Actually the lead programmer for Rallisport and BFBC isn't the same, but there are quite a few key people from both RSC and BF2, myself included, working on both BFBC and Frostbite. We have a very good team, which I hope shows.

SIGRAD Frostbite presentation over

2006-11-24T20:19:00.000+01:00

The keynote presentation I held at SIGRAD 2006 (mentioned earlier) last wednesday went really well and was very much appreciated by the (mostly) students, teachers and professors at the conference which is fun.

Before the presentation we showed an in-game captured movie from a Battlefield: Bad Company build (Xbox 360) that also was very well received. Happend to be the world-wide premiere of any moving pictures from both BFBC and Frostbite which is kinda cool :) The movie should be released to the public very soon now.

I'm going to look into if it is possible to release the presentation as well, it's very technical and quite text-heavy so could be a good read for people interested in rendering and/or engine architecture.

Since the presentation went so well, and wasn't as difficult as I first thought it would be, I will most likley try to get a presentation together for GDC or SIGGRAPH next year of a Frostbite system or technique. That would be even more fun.

SIGRAD speech: Frostbite Rendering Architecture

2006-11-19T18:27:00.000+01:00

I'm holding the keynote speech at SIGRAD'06 next week on the November the 22 about the rendering architecture of our new Frostbite engine and Battlefield: Bad Company!

From the conference poster:

The keynote speech for SIGRAD’06 is about rendering technology used in the current generation of game engines. Torbjörn Söderman (Lead Rendering Programmer) will talk about the history of rendering technology in the game industry and Johan Andersson (Rendering Architect) will give an overview of the architecture and rendering systems of DICE’s new Frostbite engine that powers the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

It's a pretty small local graphics conference but I've never really held any kind of presentation of this scale outside DICE before so I'm sure it will be interesting and a good experience. If it goes well and is appreciated I'll probably try to do a talk for GDC or SIGGRAPH next year.

Back to the preparations..

DICE & EA Battlefield: Bad Company press releases

2006-08-22T08:25:00.000+02:00

Both DICE and EA made press releases yesterday about BFBC, making it fully official and giving some more information to the public.

The short DICE press release can be found here (Swedish), and the much more detailed (and in English) EA press release here.

EA writes:

EA AND DIGITAL ILLUSIONS UNVEIL BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY FOR NEXT-GENERATION CONSOLES

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - August 21, 2006 - Throw out the rules of engagement, this is all-out war! Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced that Battlefield: Bad Company™ is currently in development for the Xbox 360&E153; video game system from Microsoft® and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system.

Built from the ground-up for next-generation consoles using Digital Illusions' bleeding-edge Frostbite™ game engine, Battlefield: Bad Company drops gamers behind enemy lines with a squad of renegade soldiers who risk it all on a personal quest for gold and revenge. Featuring a deep, cinematic single-player experience loaded with adventure and dark humor, the game delivers the series' trademark sandbox gameplay in a universe where nearly everything is destructible.

"The heart of DICE's multiplayer games is the frenetic, unpredictable nature of the sandbox experience, where anything could happen at any moment, and that's what we're bringing to the core of Battlefield: Bad Company's single-player campaign, said Karl Magnus Troedsson, senior producer at DICE. "In a world that's 90 percent destructible, the gameplay possibilities are infinite - the battlefield is always changing, forcing players, teammates, and enemies to react accordingly. Gamers will have total freedom to adapt to and tackle challenges in creative Battlefield-style ways."

Battlefield: Bad Company also will feature a full suite of the franchise's trademark multiplayer options with deep gameplay modes designed to take full advantage of the game's massively destructible environments.

Developed by Sweden-based developer Digital Illusions, Battlefield: Bad Company is slated to ship for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2007. For more information about the Battlefield franchise, please visit http://battlefield.ea.com.

Battlefield: Bad Company screenshots

2006-08-19T12:00:00.000+02:00

A couple of gaming forums has gotten a hold of a few screenshots from BFBC, not sure how since I haven't seen them on any of the larger games site yet. But they might just be first to release the press material.

Here are some comments from various forums after hearing about the game and seeing the screenshots. Quite amusing for me since I work on the rendering & tech:

"I am telling you, I am 100% positive that those shots are not ingame. There is no way that even the Xbox 360 could produce those graphics in such a large-scale game as Battlefield, especially on that hobbled together engine that the games run on."

"For sure. Those graphics are beyond this generation as far as I can see. I'd put money it looks nothing like that. Not because it's EA. FN3 is still the most impressive thing I've seen. A new engine could help tons though."

"wow those r amazin graphics... is that 2142?"

"That IS amazing graphics!"

"mmm... prerendered CG always looks nice :/"

"OMG I just wet my self"

"In-FREAKING-deed. EA makes me happy AGAIN, this just about makes up for BF2 :)"

"When has DICe cer released prerendered screens of any of its games? ANd this is compeltey possible, there is NO REASON TO BELIEVE IT'S FAKE. It even has jaggies on some areas so obviously it's real."

"wtf is this game gonna be about or is dice trying to be funny to get our attentions away from1.4 being delayed"

Links to forum postings about BFBC:

Our game Battlefield: Bad Company (360, PS3) is now official!

2006-08-19T00:26:00.000+02:00

The upcoming September issue of Game Informer magazine has an exclusive first look at the game that I've been working on for quite some time here at DICE; Battlefield: Bad Company for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

We also have the exclusive first look and Battlefield: Bad Company for PS3 and Xbox 360. Find out how DICE plans to create the best single player experience ever in a Battlefield game to date (not to mention multiplayer plans).

I haven't seen the article myself yet but it's very exciting that the game is now finally official and to start to see peoples reactions and comments about it. Even these mixed ones from the TeamXbox forums.

Public information about the game is scarce now until people can get their hands on the magazine, but I've seen a few sites and blogs that have picked up the story so far:

I'm sure there will be more information shortly, but until then, the tiny tiny character screenshot at the top left corner of the Game Informer cover will have to do :)

Off to SIGGRAPH

2005-07-30T22:40:00.000+02:00

I'm off to SIGGRAPH 05 in Los Angeles first thing tomorrow morning. 18h flight, phew. But it will definitely be worth it; lots and lots of interesting people, presentations, papers and courses this year, especially with focus or utilizing GPUs which is what I'm most interested in.

Hopefully I'll also meet up with some of our contacts at ATI, Nvidia and Microsoft that we have worked with for Battlefield 2 and upcoming products for a beer or three :)

Will try to write up a good summary of the presentations for the blog when I get back, need to do it anyway to spread the information inside the company (that are paying for the trip) so shouldn't be a problem.

Creating the High-Tech Audio of Battlefield 2

2005-06-15T00:11:00.000+02:00

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

2005-06-14T22:59:00.000+02:00

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

2005-06-10T22:11:00.000+02:00

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

2005-06-02T21:31:00.000+02:00

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

2005-06-02T07:59:00.000+02:00

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

Is this the way to Amarillo

2005-05-29T12:19:00.000+02:00

I loved the music video spoof in fridays Rocketboom vlog. It's a spoof of the song (Is this the way to) Amarillo by members of the British Army in al-Faw, Iraq. Here is more information about it.

The music video spoof of Beach Boys Kokomo (as Kosovo) here by norweigan and american soldiers isn't bad either.

A Gamers' Manifesto

2005-05-25T08:11:00.000+02:00

The crate has long been held up as a symbol of lazy game art design, a crutch that game level decorators have been falling back on for fifteen damned years. Come to think of it, have you ever actually seen one of those wooden crates in real life? And did you smash it to see if there were bullets and medicine inside?

A Gamers' Manifesto: 20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles. Very good and fun article with lots of should be obvious stuff about games. Must read for developers.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Announced

2005-05-16T21:40:00.000+02:00

id Software announced today Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (press release) developed by Splash Damage together with a screenshot

As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in either the EDF (Earth Defense Force – humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies, each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. Troops utilize over 40 conventional and futuristic vehicles, deployable structures, and defense systems like quad-bikes, tanks, and alien walkers for epic ground assaults; or helicopters and anti-gravity ships to lend firepower from the air. Throughout each battle, teams establish bases, deploy defense structures, artillery, radar, and advanced forward-command systems into enemy territory while constructing and demolishing obstacles to speed progress and gain a tactical advantage over the enemy.

With realistic dynamic lighting and shadowing from headlights, searchlights and even the moon, battles can be fought during the day or night; while accurate simulation of the atmosphere, weather, and vegetation combine to create an unparalleled degree of realism. Battlefields are perfectly rendered using MegaTexture, a totally new rendering technology developed by id Software that crunches millions of polygons and a gigabyte-scale texture into a single, seamless and un-tiled landscape with unique detail down to the square inch or the un-obscured distant horizon.

Sounds interesting, perhaps a worthy Battlefield 2 competitor? Wonder what's so special about their MegaTexture(tm) landscape rendering system tough, the landscape looked pretty standard in the screenshot at least, nothing special at all. But perhaps they've focused on long view distances and huge levels instead. Probably by using generated normalmaps which would be a huge win in both quality, memory and performance if you want really high geometric detail. That combined with geometry clipmaps (or similar GPU-centric solution) and some innovative texture compression scheme and/or procedural layer system might almost qualify it at as a "totally new rendering technique". But the sceptic in me says it's just PR as usual, but I hope I'll be positively suprised.

MTV Xbox 360, superficiality & buzzwords

2005-05-15T14:15:00.000+02:00

Danny Ngan has a really good post in here in his blog Poo-Poo Platter about the MTV Xbox 360 special that aired earlier this week and the state of the games industry with the all the superficial focus on graphics, buzzwords and celebrities instead of the actual games and game design.

Also, with mass acceptance comes the pressure to make everything attractive and pretty just to get people’s attention. Kids, fanboys, and newbie/wannabe developers are completely blinded by all the buzzwords and acronyms shoved out there by video card manufacturers and high-priced game engine developers for the sole reason of selling their wares. Those kids seem to think that Shader 3.0, ragdoll physics, full-destructable environments, realtime hair and fur, and what-have-you are essential requirements for good games. Sure it’s nice to see all these pretty things happening on screen, but do they really make the game any better? Does seeing every single hair follicle on the bouncy-boobed leading lady’s head sway in the wind while she guns down fuzzy fire-breathing demons in the middle of a rainforest with sunlight shining through the leaves and casting semi-translucent shadows on the ground while shiny bullet shells fall to the ground creating small puffs of dust actually make the game more fun?

As a game developer, this frustrates me to no end. Too many players are concerned with how it looks and not enough with how it plays. Ideally, it’s an equal balance of both. Great graphics, great gameplay. However, it’s the looks and the fluff that get the game noticed, so we have to deal with it. MTV used to be about music and videos. Now it’s about Jessica Simpson living the blonde stereotype, horny co-eds on The Real World, and Jackass. Is the game industry turning into MTV?

I must say I really agree with him, even as one of those people that implements the "sunlight shining through the leaves and casting semi-translucent shadows on the ground" and finds that utterly fascinating and interesting. Those people will always exists, but in order for the games industry to be taken more seriously and expand beyond the current experienced and hardcore gamers, buzzwords and superficial advertisment can't be the sole focus. But that's obvious, isn't it?

IGN Battlefield 2 Hands On

2005-05-15T13:45:00.000+02:00

"Right now, I'm in love with DICE" - Dan Adams, IGN

IGN recently got to play BF2 and has written a short but good preview here and created 25 new videos of it.

Still, the base feel is certainly different than it was in 1942. Weapons seem much more true to life in their dispersal patterns (in fact the guys say they spent a lot of time making sure automatic fire really made it harder to hit distant targets) and simply feel good when they're fired. Each of the weapons I had the chance to use was a unique fighting experience and I'm sure players will have favorites in no time at all

I also had the immense pleasure of playing BF2 on a playtest at work last friday. Hadn't really played it before, especially not in a real playtest with full servers, and I must say that it was the most fun I've had in a game for a long while. The game was very polished, ran fast and well balanced. I'm definitely looking forward to more playtests and the actual release. Good work by our team :)

These are the Voyages...

2005-05-15T13:25:00.000+02:00

Just saw the final Star Trek: Enterprise episode These are the Voyages, what a weak episode. Especially since it ends the 18-year continous run of modern Trek on television and it will be a while (at least a couple of years at a minimum) before we will get a new series.

WARNING: Spoilers below

One of my main objections with the episode was that they didn't let the Enterprise characters stand on their own feet, they just jumped 6 years into the future (with the only thing changed was T'Pol's hair) and focused on Will Riker from TNG, esentially making the Enterprise characters supporting characters in their own show.

The actual plot was very weak, the whole Shran apperance and the rescue mission for his daughter felt like it was created only so Trip could go totally out of character and commit a pointless suicide to save the captain and the ship from a villain that should have been no match at all for them. By the way, how did those simple thugs find and catch up with Enterprise and then board it at warp 7?

On the positive side, the whole forming of the interstellar alliance that will become the Federation was very interesting. That was something I was looking forward to ever since Enterprise was announced 4 years ago. Unfortunately they didn't deliver tough, basically just showing glimpses of the event and not even showing Archers supposedly legendary speech, damn you TPTB.

Overall I would grade the episode 2/5.

RalliSport Challenge 3

2005-05-14T13:28:00.000+02:00

Now with the recent Xbox 360 unvieling at the ridiculously worthless MTV event a couple of days ago (look at the OurColony video here for a much better presentation) there have been quite a lot of speculation on what games are coming to the new console. One of the games that was announced was Project Gotham Racing 3 which caused enthusiastic speculation that RalliSport Challenge 3 also was in development.

As far as I know, as one of the developers on both RalliSport Challenge 1 and 2 here at DICE, that isn't the case. At least not at DICE since we are more or less a part of EA now and they aren't that big on platform exclusive titles (or titles that sell less than one million copies). But since Microsoft owns the RalliSport IP they can develop the game themselves or let another studio do it for them. That would be kinda cool and interesting to look at but I doubt it will happen since RSC2 unfortunately wasn't really a commercial hit for them.

For all RalliSport and Xbox 360 fans I've dug up a couple of high-resolution development screenshots (720p with really good antialiasing) of RSC2 so you could get a glimpse of what RalliSport Challenge 3 on Xbox 360 might have looked like at a minimum. If we would do a sequel on Xbox 360 it would look a lot better than this tough, trust me..

First post!

2003-09-11T21:01:00.000+02:00

Just created a blog here at Blogger.com. Blogging is kinda new to me so don't know of often I will update or what in particular I will write about..