For those who know me or any fans of mine out there (hello?!) I'm on quite an interesting modding journey here. It's a long one but good fortune comes to those who persevere. As part of my mission to improve the single player and Coop experience in Forgotten Hope I started looking at 2142. The first thing that occurs to me is that Forgotten Hope might do well to eventually switch to the 2142 engine. It is quite different to the Battlefield 2 one, by the look of it very different. Maps load VERY fast and there have been a lot of fixes applied to the engine by DICE. It's really an entirely new version of the Frostbite engine. Forgotten Hope, knowing them, have probably already looked into this. There may be technical reasons that prevent switching, not to mention the time consuming nature of porting everything over. Anyway, I digress.
2142 has auto controllers .... the most obvious example being the minigun turret that you can drop. It's really just another AI soldier, it just can't move around. Does Battlefield 2 have these ? These could be used in Forgotten Hope AI for artillery and other assets. Another possibility is porting Forgotten Hope to 2142 just for those who want a full single player or Coop experience. 2142 can use 128 bots (at the last count). I think Battlefield 2 can use high bot numbers as well but it seems slower. I need to do some benchmarking. The AI code may be very different in 2142 as well.
So while I ponder about fixes to the AI I'm developing a utility that will allow quick starting of multi-core games for Battlefield 2 and 2142. Neither are multi-core enabled but can be effectively made to be multi-core supported by running the game engine - the server - on one core and the graphics client - what the player sees - on another. This multi-threads the entire thing. It's quite fiddly to set up. I'm still testing the performance, both frame rate and the performance of the AI. But my research has revealed that single player and presumably Coop (not tested yet) becomes a totally different experience. Action is no longer isolated to where your 24 bots on your side happen to be as the player can now up the bots numbers much more ... the number previously being limited by running on a single core. Battles now positively EXPLODE across the screen. I guess replicating the kind of thing you get in a good fully packed online multiplayer game. So now we should get to see this in offline/SP/Coop.
