Frostbite engine

Dice developed the new Frostbite DX Win32 engine from the ground up for DirectX 9 Battlefield: Bad Company according to Johan Andersson from Dice. Johan is a self-taught senior software engineer/architect in the central technology group at Dice. For the past years he has been working on the rendering and core engine systems for Battlefield.

DICE next-gen engine & framework

Built from the ground up for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, Multi-core PCs with DirectX 9 Shader Model 3 & Direct3D 10 along with SM 4.0 and designed to be used in future DICE games. As time progresses advancements to the engine will continue.

Shading system backends

• Multiple backends
  • DirectX 9 SM3 for PC & Xbox 360
  • High-level GPU communication on 360
  • Direct3D 10 for Windows Vista
  • libGCM for PlayStation 3

Key feature of shading system

• Rich high-level states instead of low-level platform-dependent states
• More flexible for both user and system

Editor, FrostED

Asset creation Levels, meshes, shaders, objects Fully separate and C#-based

Terrain Rendering System

• Long view distance with true horizon
• 32x32 km visible, 2x2 – 4x4 playable
• Ground destruction
• High detail up close
• Very high detail in a distance
• Low memory usage
• Multiple high-res heightfield textures
• Easy destruction of buildings
• Fixed grid LOD with vertex texture fetch
• Normals are calculated in the shader
• Semi-procedural surface shaders
• Allows dynamic compositing