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Terrain in Battlefield 3: A Modern, Complete and Scalable System
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Description

Terrain in Battlefield 3: A Modern, Complete and Scalable System

Speaker/s: Mattias Widmark (EA DICE)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 5:00- 6:00 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl
Track / Duration / Format / Audience Level: Programming / 60-Minute / Lecture / Intermediate
GDC Vault Recording: Video Recorded
Description: In the session, we'll take a complete look at the terrain system in Frostbite 2 as it was applied in Battlefield 3. The session is partitioned into three parts. We begin with the scalability aspects and discuss how consistent use of hierarchies allowed us to combine high resolutions with high view distances. We then turn towards workflow aspects and describe how we achieved full in-game realtime editing. A fair amount of time is spent describing how issues were addressed.

Finally, we look at the runtime side. We describe usage of CPU, GPU and memory resources and how it was kept to a minimum. We discuss how the GPU is offloaded by caching intermediate results in a procedural virtual texture and how prioritization was done to allow for work throttling without sacrificing quality. We also go into depth about the flexible streaming system that work with both FPS and driving games.
Takeaway: Main takeaway is to see the full picture of a modern, scalable and flexible terrain engine that would work equally well for simulators as for games. A few novelties stand out, such as the procedural virtual textures and the flexible streaming system, both described in detail.
Intended Audience: Target audience is software engineers working with rendering in general, tools (level editors), data pipelines, streaming or that are just curious. Some technical artists may be interested too. No field-specific knowledge is required, but some knowledge of basic datastructures (quadtrees) and basic rendering (shader graphs, virtual textures) helps.

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