Inside Battlefield: Bad Company

Battlefield: Bad Company should be available by the time you read this, and a demo shortly before, so we’ll have ample opportunity to judge EA DICE’s transition from PC for ourselves. For those in doubt, Troedsson says if you like Battlefield, then Bad Company won’t disappoint. Throw almost totally destructible environments and the series’ reputation for stunning visuals, and the game is a tempting proposition.

“Players who go deep will also notice that it definitely changes how you play shooters and introduces another tactical layer to the sandbox experience.”


All about optimisation
Part of the development process involves optimising the content – it’s just as important as creating code and assets. Troedsson was able to provide us with some insights into how EA DICE deals with space and performance issues by tweaking its games.

Thanks to the known hardware of the consoles, the developer has been able to take its foot off the pedal on the optimisation front for Bad Company. Troedsson notes that usually it’s a crucial aspect when dealing with a new engine.

“In order to get to the final result we need to work with all areas, squeezing out every little piece of power of the hardware. Usually we start with overall optimisation of the code, like looking and rendering, physics, sound and AI. When they start to hit the limit of how much more performance we can dig out, we move over and optimise the content, scaling down on the amount of trees on a level or the amount of polygons on the environment.”

This deals with performance, but how about getting all that data onto a DVD or Blu-ray disc?

“If optimising for pure size on the medium we ship on we most likely would optimise by removing content e.g. scaling down quality of movies or removing entire maps/missions. But there are other things as well. Usually we try to squeeze as many localised version of the game onto the same disc, especially here in Europe. If the increase in manufacturing cost could be handled, these could be broken out to several discs and this would free up a lot of space.”