The History of Technology - iFrostbite Engine

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

 

Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment is a studio founded by four Swedes in 1992. The studio's most famous development is the Frostbite Engine. The engine runs on all major consoles, PC and mobile platforms. After the successful launch of the Battlefield series in 2002 and close cooperation with Electronic Arts, it gradually came under its wing. DICE uses the Frostbite Engine both in their own developments and in projects of other Electronic Arts affiliates.

  

The first game created using this  engine was Battlefield: Bad Company in 2008. The engine was developed to replace the technically obsolete Refractor Engine technology used in  the studio's previous games.

At the moment, there are five versions of the engine - 1.0, 1.5, 2, 3, as well as a special version of the engine for mobile systems - Frostbite GO. 

FROSTBITE ENGINE 1.0

 

As mentioned earlier, there are two versions for the first modification of the Frostbite Engine - 1.0 and 1.5. Only one game was released on version 1.0 and it only supported the xBox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles. As for the API, its first version supported DirectX 9.c and DirectX 10 / 10.1.

Now about the most interesting - the main feature of the engine was the processing of the destructibility of the landscape and the environment: buildings, trees, cars. Speaking of buildings - in Battlefield: Bad Company, the buildings were not completely destroyed, but only their walls were broken. the foundation of the building actually remained in place.

One of the declared features of the engine was optimization for multi-core processors. Supported dynamic lighting and shading with HBAO, procedural shading, various post-effects such as HDR and depth of field.

The maximum location size is limited to 32 × 32 kilometers of display area and 4 × 4 kilometers of play space. In addition, it is claimed that the maximum draw distance allows you to see the level up to the horizon.

The engine was built with its own HDR Audio sound engine, which does not require the use of specialized tools like EAX. The sound engine determines which of the sounds, be it a shot or footsteps, should sound louder and in which direction, which is important for shooters.

The engine is equipped with the FrostED game editor written in the C# programming language. The program is designed to create levels, and for the level design itself, the relief texturing method is used. FrostED is also used to work with things, shaders and objects.

 

The first game on version 1.5 was Battlefield: Bad Company 2, released in 2010. In the same year, Medal of Honor is released, which uses both versions of the engine at once, but the multiplayer is based on version 1.5.

In the Frostbite Engine 1.5 version, in addition to the complete destruction of buildings, there is a Destruction 2.0 destruction system, DirectX 11 support was also added to the game. But this API was not fully used by the engine.

Frostbite 1.5 supports stereoscopic image output using NVIDIA 3D Vision technology, i.e. The 3D image in the game works like James Cameron's Avatar: The Game. Stereo mode is only available for the PC version of the game.

The engine did not deprive AMD of its attention - in the game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, support for ATI Eyefinity technology was added, by virtue of which an image can be displayed on several monitors at once.

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR FROSTBITE ENGINE

 

First of all, it's worth noting that Frostbite 2 was one of the first ones written in DirectX 11 without being backwards compatible with DirectX 9.0 and thus without support for Windows XP. DirectX 10 is supported, but the engine was created for video cards with DirectX 11. The engine was not created based on versions 1.0 or 1.5, but almost from scratch. This time he squeezed all the juice out of DirectX 11 and took full advantage of the multithreading of processors. The engine is intended for use on 64-bit systems of the Microsoft Windows family.

Now let's note some interesting innovations in Frostbite 2: the engine received an improved Destruction 3.0 destruction system, with which you can create more sophisticated physics in the game. The improved Destruction 3.0 system allows you to destroy even more surrounding objects to even smaller sizes and will provide even more large-scale and accurate destruction. According to DICE, in theory they could use Destruction 3.0 to simulate the destruction of a model of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in downtown Dubai.

As for the size, the maps have become even larger, and the detail on them has not decreased at all. 

The animation engine ANT or ANimation Toolkit was also added to the game - developed by EA Tiburon and used in the vast majority of sports simulators produced by EA. This engine has no analogues and is the best in the implementation of animation and provides the smoothest and most realistic movements. Developers EA DICE stated that when developing the Frostbite 2.0 engine, they were unhappy with their own character animation results and decided to use a third-party tool. After considering Havok and euphoria, it was decided to stick with ANT.

Rendering the quality of the shadows of the light and the picture is equated to cinematic. Using the DirectCompute tool in rendering greatly improved performance and graphics. The lighting system was created using the third party library Enlighten, which provides a special real-time way of radiosity lighting. This is easy to verify just by playing BF3, especially since not so long ago there was a distribution of free copies in Origin.

The sound system is no different from what was in earlier versions of Frostbite. The only difference is that DICE's HDR audio system recorded sound effects from different distances to make the sound as realistic as possible.

The developers in Battlefield 3 paid special attention to weapons and their behavior in battle. The creators tried to reproduce the behavior of various types of weapons as close as possible to reality: reloading, portability, bullet flight path and even the dependence of the speed of bullets from the barrel and their energy on their caliber and barrel length.

In addition to Battlefield 3, Frostbite 2 powered games such as Need for Speed: The Run, Dead Space 3, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter. On April 15, 2011, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach stated in an interview that Frostbite 2's engine was already making the most of the resources of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, and the studio wanted to work with the next generation of consoles.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR FROSTBITE ENGINE 2

FROSTBITE ENGINE 3

In March 2013, DICE introduced Battlefield 4, announcing that it would be released on a new version of the Frostbite 3 engine, and in May 2014, DICE, Visceral Games and EA announced another Frostbite 3 game, Battlefield: Hardline. DICE, not resting on their laurels, continue to develop the Frostbite Engine, making it more and more realistic in all aspects: picture, physics, sound.

Frostbite 3 can simulate huge and highly detailed battlefields with functional destruction that occurs both spontaneously and at the behest of the player. Seamless locations and dynamic environment built on a new principle. Previously, the visibility of the surrounding world was created, for example, a tree sways in the wind according to the principle of scripting. In the case of Frostbite 3, the developer is provided with a tool for creating a tree, and the physics engine itself determines how the environment affects this very tree.

 

In the Frostbite universe, everything interacts with each other - wind, waves and clouds all move in accordance with the forces of nature. For example, by blowing up a car, you can see how the nearby trees will sway. Huge locations, combined with a lot of people running and interacting with you, create a sense of holistic reality.

 

Destructibility has always been a core feature of Frostbite technology, where everything is geared towards the direct impact of the gameplay on the environment - from small sparks that appear when colliding, to huge debris that shatters when falling from a height.

The new version of the engine implemented a system called Levolution, which allows players to interact with the environment on a new level. Without going into details, Levolution is an ever-changing world. You can change the map in the course of a multiplayer game, where an explosion of a column will bring down the top floor, and the fall of an underscraper or a dam break will completely change the environment of the game level. Levolution is activated automatically only when certain events occur on the map. For example, on the Paracel Storm multiplayer map in Battlefield 4, you can beach an aircraft carrier.

A new feature that's new in Frostbite 3 is consistent water simulation, which means that all players will see the same wave at the same position in the same amount of time. In Battlefield 4, you don't float on a flat surface because you are affected by various waves, and this applies not only to the character, but to vehicles and Ragg-doll objects. 

 

Frostbite 3 has many features designed to immerse you in the story and gameplay. One of the most important things is the facial animation and how the characters' eyes look. The depiction of characters in Battlefield has never looked so realistic. The use of subsurface scattering, the essence of which is to describe the mechanism of light propagation, in which light, penetrating into a translucent body through its surface, is scattered inside the body itself, and is repeatedly reflected from body particles in a random direction and at irregular angles. For the image of the iris, Paralax animation is used, which makes the eyes look like real ones.

 

Frostbite 3 is the most powerful tool in the hands of a developer, and the multi-platform engine includes support for everything from the iPhone to the next generation of consoles. The engine provides the developer with everything they need to create games, allowing more attention to the creative side, for more enjoyment of the gameplay.

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR FROSTBITE ENGINE 3

 

 

 

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that one can talk and argue endlessly about Frostbite and the Battlefield series of games. Frostbite shook up the Action FPS shooter genre with its arrival and set a pretty high bar that many developers are trying to achieve. Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment also does not stand still and with each new version they increase the realism of virtual battles and their famous destruction system. In the near future, we are waiting for such games as: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, Command & Conquer, Star Wars: Battlefront, Mass Effect 4 and of course Battlefield: Hardline, powered by Frostbite Engine 3. Therefore, we will wait from EA DICE exciting new technologies, realism and even more impressive graphics.