   Battlefield Bad Company 2 Questions
  1) How did they store the terrain in Bad Company 2? Do they have their own model format? Do they have any map editor for it? Do you know any the same model so I can use it on my game engine?2) Destructible building was great. How did they did it without suffering much performance? 3) Are there any new technology shown on this game that I missed?I'm asking because I'm currently have a simple game engine project currently working and I'm focus on FPS games. I just want to gain some knowledge on today's technology. I might study those concept and implement it on my engineThank you very muchJohn Stuart   
  Well if you want to use their technology, the easiest way would probably be to try to licence their engine. That might be expensive, but on the other hand, dozens of skilled programmers worked on BBC2 so you're not likely to be able to duplicate it all on your own.   ;Quote:Original post by StoryyellerWell if you want to use their technology, the easiest way would probably be to try to licence their engine. That might be expensive, but on the other hand, dozens of skilled programmers worked on BBC2 so you're not likely to be able to duplicate it all on your own.It took me a while to figure out why you were on about BBC2 (as in British Broadcasting Channel two...maybe I've been watching too much TV recently)..I know this is going to de-rail this thread a little, but have you looked into the Halflife 2 Maps? They have destructible buildings (In HL2:Ep2 for instance, with the strider blowing up buildings), as well as editors already avaliable as part of the sdk download - with alot of help online for creating maps / effects.Afaik, BBC 2 doesn't have a map editor though..;  1) Cant really know how they "store" the terrain in BC2 without seeing the source code. Terrain has been a major part of the battlefield series since BF1942 first came out almost 9 years ago, its probably been improved many times in its life to get to the point its at now. BF1942 had a level editor when it came out, what I remember of it was a large plane of terrain and you pushed and pulled vertices to shape it, i think it had height map support too, today it might be completely different and done on the gpu, other then that who knows.2) Destructible buildings no doubt comes from have the Havok physics engine integrated into the engine, which explains the performance, and costs an arm and a leg so it should perform. The destruction is not completely random, things blow up, but they sections that blow and they way they fall down are predetermined.3) I think there is some weird real time ambient occlusion going on too. Not sure how they do it.   ;  If you look closely you will find that the buildings in BFBC 2 are "segemented", that is they don't blow up dynamically (though they do a good job faking it). My theory is when enough damage is dealt it calls a functions to play an animation for that part of the building blowing up. I could be wrong but when you die in a building from it collapsing it is not like you are struck by different debris, you just die as it falls around you. So it plays the animation that shows chunks of it exploding, then deletes those objects from the initial structure. Think of a puzzle that makes an image and removing a piece of that puzzle. In the Afro Samurai game they did it so when you cut of an arm it was removed from the body object. That's my thoughts on it anyways.   ;Frostbite engine. Links to several technical articles.   