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Battlefield: Bad Company 2

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#103
NoxNoctum said:
So it's pre-orders only for the beta?

Kinda sucks, don't wanna pre-order cause I wanna see how the game runs on my comp first.
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Hey, u can order pre-order game, get beta key and 7 days before release cancel it.

Anyway, BC2 seems to be next PC failure like MW2 does.

Some "features" of PC BC2 game version

No developer console
No PBBans
No Server client
No Mod tools
No pron
No hardware sound
No battlerecorder
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Some quotes

We have not removed a console from BC2. The simple reason is that BC1 and BC2 never have had an in-game console. Which also means that the game won't be possible to hack in this regard.
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we will not have prone. Period. Not on PC, not on console. The end.
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Hi there forum people, I'm one of the audio programmers at DICE responsible for the audio tech in Frostbite. repii sent me here to hopefully clarify some things. So here we go.

1. All platforms we presently target use software mixing in favor of the older hardware mixing engines. For PC, with Windows Vista switching to software mixing to get around hardware limitations and provide more powerful APIs (DirectSound was designed around the old ISA bus) with added support for things like custom DSP effects in the mixing pipeline, we could finally have a unified path for all SKUs. While the hardware acceleration provided by current gaming cards does provide the ability to do limited mixing and some environmental (reverb) effects without much CPU cost, the APIs are restricting (AFAIK, no custom DSP chains in HW) and it would demand much work from our side to work around that, if it's even possible.

2. Looking at some usage metrics at Steam Hardware Survey we can see that only about 3.7% of Steam users have access to any type of hardware acceleration features, although it seems to be increasing slightly. Granted, this is not necessarily the most reliable source, but it's the best one we have access to and it's usually a great indicator of what our target audience uses. Had we relied on hardware accelerating sound cards for our audio engine we would have provided a degraded experience for almost 97% of consumers. We want all our consumers to have an awesome aural experience when playing our games, so obviously we will do what fits that goal best given the resources we have available. We simply can't afford to support more than one path.

3. Regarding availability of hardware to test on, given that we would've gone down that path, I'll simply say that we used to have a discount from that big sound card manufacturer, but several years ago that disappeared. It's not like with Intel and the graphics cards companies who send repii all their new toys We simply cannot afford to go our and buy lots of cards, which is another upside to software mixing, we don't have to since all our features work on all cards equally. This saves both money and time and allows us to deliver greater quality to all of you.

4. I know PC gamers are constantly looking for that edge over the console crowd, so I'll say this about performance, since this is that type of thread. If you have a faster CPU, our audio engine will be able to do more "stuff" in the same amount of time, and as such provide an even more awesome experience for you guys. This is however not something we would be able to do had we used hardware acceleration, since those resources are the same for everyone (kind of like on consoles, ironically enough). So just know that as you buy better computers, our engine will scale fairly well along with it. Even more so in future revisions of the engine.

5. If you truly want the best audio experience, in any game on PC, focus on finding a sound card with a good DAC and make sure you can turn as much post-processing as possible off and that you have some nice speakers. Any "enhancements" made to the signal after we send it to the sound hardware may introduce unwanted artifacts. Our sound designers take great care to mix the game and even master it thoughtfully depending on the settings available in our in-game options menu, so to get the true intended experience, stay away from additional EQs or other effects. This of course goes for home theatre receivers and TVs when playing on consoles as well. They even author specific content for the LFE, so make sure you turn that woofer up! But who am I to say what you can and can't do with your audio!


I hope this information sheds some light on how we're thinking, and the audio department here at DICE would like to thank everyone in forums and video comments for their kind words about the audio in our games!

Thanks for listening.
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Alright people, you asked more questions about the audio engine and I have more answers! I should start by saying I'm not one of the crazy guys in that video. That's our head of audio David and the lead sound designer for BC1/BC2, Stefan.

Answers time.

1. I talked about having a "faster CPU", which might be a bit vague, so let's elaborate a little on that. The way the revision of the audio engine that's in BC1/BC2 works is that it'll use a single HW thread to do all audio logic and mixing, ie. it'll help more with a CPU with a higher frequency. This actually also goes for the consoles as well, so on PS3 all the mixing will be done on a single SPU whereas the audio logic still runs on the PPUs. So this touches on the "future revisions" bit as well. As a game becomes "feature complete", any major changes will be done on some other branch of the engine so as to not endanger the game's stability etc. So I can't say much about it, but the current revision of the audio engine will utilize multiple HW threads in parallel for both audio logic and mixing. This obviously goes for consoles as well, since we basically don't have any platform-specific code (in the audio engine, apart from the lowest level).

2. Let's tackle some quality settings! It's fairly simple really, we do all audio processing in 32-bit floating point at 48kHz which is then always quantized down to 16-bit (due to issues with certain sound cards in 32-bit) on PC. On consoles it's always 48kHz/32-bit floating point. We do not support sample rates above 48kHz due to similar issues with the aforementioned sound cards. Also, the revision of the audio engine that BC1/BC2 uses does not fully utilize 7.1 surround sound, but we'll get to that in the future. So, short answer: 5.1/48kHz/16-bit will get you the best experience.

3. Alright, so the 3.7% thing. I'll be honest and say I didn't research this enough and only counted Creative's cards. After looking into it a little more, there are indeed more cards that have some degree of HW acceleration support. At least on paper. That Realtek card for example only supports EAX 1-2 and if memory serves that's what was around when BF2 came out, and it's roughly equivalent to the HW reverb solution that was in the first Xbox (I3DL2 reverb). While I wouldn't put it as harshly as "Hardware accelerated sound is a dead and dying path to invest into", I won't argue the point. With Windows Vista Microsoft ditched the HAL path for DirectSound, which means anyone wanting to use HW accelerated sound card features in Vista or after will have to use OpenAL (Creative's "DirectSound"). As I mentioned previously, the structure of DirectSound is mostly legacy due to how old HW worked, and as such is very limiting. This is why Microsoft chose to adopt their XAudio engine (originally created for Xbox360) for Windows as well, and also to remedy a ton of other fidelity issues. If locking a buffer of audio samples and play it back using some volume and panning settings is all you need (I include 3D positioning in panning), then these "old skool" APIs are probably sufficient. Hell, you even get some free reverberation! But once you want to do a bit more with your audio you'll just end up using your own mixing engine and stream the result of that into a dynamic buffer for output to the sound card. So while I understand that it might feel disheartening to have bought a sound card that touts all these nifty features and not have us use them, they're simply not in line with what we want/need to be able to do. It's not all in vain though, most of those cards have pretty good DACs and nice (high) Signal-Noise ratios. The way forward right now seems to be Larrabee and other GPGPUs. Wow, that's a wall-o-text right there..

4. Let's end on a lighter note and talk about the "impaired hearing" state in BC2. For this effect we're using a IIR2 low-pass filter at 400Hz with an unfiltered sound playing on top of it.


Cheers guys!
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I hope Tripwire make RO:HoS as normal PC game with console, server files, mod tools and advanced anticheat thini, not retarded console game like mw2 and bc2.
 
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#108
Dcode said:
So DICE/EA will be hosting their own dedicated servers and that's it?
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No, I think they won't allow you to host a server or make non-ranked server. You can still rent your own ranked servers.

I don't understand whats the crying about that. No one played on non-ranked servers in BF2 or BF2142. And theres no point to even allow you to host your own crappy servers from your computer because there won't be mods tools(testing maps is the only reason I can think for that server).
 
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#109
I don't think there's anything to upset yourselves. Bad Company has started as a console game, and it's just a console port for PC. With better(awesome, judging by PS3 beta) graphics. If you want all those stuff listed in the first post, you might as well pass on BC2 and start waiting for BF3.


Dcode said:
So DICE/EA will be hosting their own dedicated servers and that's it?
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Nope it will work how BF2 is working right now actually. DICE/EA will authorize lots of gaming hosts to rent "ranked dedicated" servers. DICE/EA says they won't profit from this, dunno how true that is.

Honestly how many of you played on unranked BF2 servers? I haven't, it's just pointless when you have stat tracking.
 
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#113
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