What is frostbite 3

It's software-development infrastructure that allows people to build video games. An engine is what developers craft their games on top of, providing them with several development necessities like a renderer, audio, scripting tools, artificial intelligence, animation, and physics simulation. It's a toolbox, allowing a developer to quickly to get to core of game development, rather than reinventing the wheel and rebuilding these tools from scratch.

A good example is the old Infinity Engine games: BioWare made the engine for Baldur's Gate, but Black Isle Studios was able to use the Infinity Engine, skip that stage of development, and roll right into crafting the world and narrative of Planescape: Torment.

These engines require development effort in order to make them do exactly what a studio wants, but they also have huge communities of other developers who are doing the same thing; there's a shared expertise that developers can draw on. Many of these engines also make it easy to port your finished game over to different platforms like PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, and even mobile.

Developing your own engine from scratch can be a much costlier affair, since you're building a framework from the ground up. The difference here is a bespoke engine can be directly tailored to your game, while a general-purpose engine is a jack-of-all-trades. There's also the issue of licensing fees. If you're using Unreal Engine, you pay 5 percent of your revenue to engine developer Epic Games when you ship your game.

The additional cut taken by digital storefronts and other middleware can add up, lessening the actual profit a developer sees. With an in-house engine, you're not paying anyone; and if you stick to a certain genre, you're likely to have an engine that can roll forward from game-to-game. Major publishers are keen to not pay licensing fees, but their handling of their own engines vary. Ubisoft has been rather successful with its handful of in-house engines: AnvilNext 2.

EA has tried to follow in their footsteps, but Frostbite hasn't been the one size fits all solution that it might have hoped. Electronic Arts used to have several studios that each utilized their own engines. The engines didn't always have keen names because they were just what the games were built on. DICE had developed the successful Battlefield series Battlefield , Battlefield 2, and Battlefield for EA, and the publisher wanted to bring them further into the family.

It was also the first game that would use Frostbite. Instead of building a new engine for each game, Frostbite would carry from game to game for DICE, improving with each iteration. At the time of Battlefield 3's release, EA had a host of major franchises all using their own engines.

EA Labels president Frank Gibeau wanted all the studios to get on the same page. The idea was to show the other EA studios how awesome Battlefield 4 looked, and point to Frostbite 3 as the reason. Not everyone was up for switching to Frostbite though: EA Sports was about to switch to the Ignite engine for its releases, and third-party studios like Respawn Entertainment stuck to engines they were used to, like Valve's Source engine.

Still, EA believed heavily in Frostbite. Seemingly, the major issue with Frostbite is that it was an engine built for a specific purpose: first-person shooting and multiplayer. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, BioWare had to create a dialogue system within Frostbite and make an animation system for dogs and horses, but Frostbite could only animate bipedal creatures. For Need for Speed Rivals, Ghost Games had to rework Frostbite's streaming system to accommodate the speed at which its cars could move.

The tactical camera, just being able to pause a game and still work within it, Frostbite didn't have that, it had no concept of that. We've had to add all of these things to it over the course of our development over the last four years.

We built all of these different tools for the engine. The idea was that all this knowledge could feed back into Frostbite, creating a general purpose engine for all of Electronic Arts. It's an excellent idea, but not one that has gone off without a hitch. BioWare worked on another project prior to starting on Dragon Age: Inquisition, code-named Blackfoot.

It was a multiplayer-focused Dragon Age, but it really was a way for BioWare to get used to Frostbite. The studio knew that The engine would provide challenges, but it needed a way to see how deep the well went. Like a bunch of things that we take for granted it doesn't even really conceptualize. We actually had a project code-named Blackfoot which was the first game we had that was looking at Frostbite.

That became the core of what became Dragon Age Inquisition, the techlines, more than any of the development, so we've actually been looking at this a long time," said Inquisition executive producer Mark Darrah told GamesIndustry.

Implementing basic RPG features took a very long time in Frostbite. BioWare was working hard to build one of the biggest games it had ever crafted, partially inspired by Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, while working with an engine not built for RPGs. It was like pulling teeth. Then I had to add animations, and then I could scrub it two or three times before it would crash and then I'd have to start the process all over again.

It was absolutely the worst tools experience I've ever had. Worse, DICE was updating Frostbite with new features because the engine was being used for a host of games. So BioWare's developers were grafting new things onto an engine that was changing underneath them. Because the new version of the engine would come in, the tools team would start doing the integration.

All the while, the team is still working and moving ahead, so it gets worse and worse and worse," Lee told Schreier.

It finally launched on November 18, , becoming one of BioWare's best-selling games. And those features who help in future BioWare games. They're both RPGs, right? They wanted a title that would allow players to explore a galaxy of vast, procedurally-generated planets. It was supposed to fulfill the promise of the first Mass Effect, utilizing new technology.

Frostbite was missing features, but Inquisition was wrapping up when Andromeda went into pre-production, so the latter title was getting some of the features it needed. The problem was the outline for Mass Effect: Andromeda was actually a much bigger project than even Inquisition.

Andromeda's maps were supposed to represent entire planets, so they needed to be bigger than even Inquisition's vast spaces, and Frostbite wasn't equipped to handle that. But when you're building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult," one developer told Kotaku.

Mass Effect: Andromeda began pre-production in , but by BioWare Montreal was cutting out the concept of procedurally-generated planets. Ultimately, due to this lack of direction, BioWare Montreal had to scramble to create the final version of Andromeda, most of the work coming in the last 18 months.

And Mass Effect: Andromeda didn't fully right the ship prior to launch. Instead, it had a host of bugs and poor animations, leading to poor reviews and a bad reception in the community. The pain of what Mass Effect: Andromeda could've been, and what it was, lingers for some developers. One developer, Andromeda designer Manveer Heir, pointed to Frostbite as one of the big issues during the game's development.

Frostbite will take dozens more engineers, money, and time on FB because of the way its architected and how far behind it is from Unreal unless you are making BF. There is a reason I chose Unreal Engine 4 as my engine for my next project. Star Wars: Battlefront looked great thanks to the ongoing work on Frostbite, but fans hit it for a lack of depth and longevity. The studio had hired Uncharted creative director Amy Hennig to make a grand Star Wars adventure, centered on the dirtier side of the universe.

This was Project Ragtag. The problem was again, that Project Ragtag was meant to be a third-person action-adventure game, not a first-person shooter. Frostbite didn't have all the tech needed to make it easy to craft the kind of game Visceral wanted. For example, if a player is playing a radio, and a tank shell explodes beside them, the game will only emit the much louder explosion, and not the radio. This also allows for sounds of certain elements to change at different distances, different angles and in open and closed environments.

Frostbite 1. This version was also used for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 , as well as Medal of Honor 's multiplayer, though with more limited destruction capabilities and vastly different weather effects.

Frostbite 2 [2] is used for Battlefield 3. The game engine has several upgrades including improved tessellation technology. It also features Destruction 4. Levolution allows players to destroy certain key objects which will then impact the map ranging from the immediate area to the entire map and gameplay afterwards. Dynamic water behavior has been introduced. Water acts more aggressively, waves have been implemented and players now face a real water surface that will react to all entities such as players and vehicles.

Other EA titles will also make use of the engine as well. Battlefield Wiki Explore. Battlefield Battlefield V. Battlefield 4. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account?