In my previous post, I told you that we worked on the cinematic sequences for Battlefield 3. Now, after an announcement on our facebook page, I can tell you what our technology is called.
Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
FaceForward
by Steven posted on October 27th, 2011 in Development, NewsWhy Battlefield 3 is my most anticipated game
by Steven posted on October 22nd, 2011 in Art, Development, Games, NewsAs a software engineer in Electronic Arts’ worldwide motion capture studio, the systems I write and maintain touch many of our games in small ways. It’s not often that I can point to a feature in a game and say “I did that.”
Battlefield 3 is different. We built the facial animation pipeline used for the interrogation scenes and I’m rather proud of what we accomplished. EA Capture was small studio with an aggressive timeline to create a new technology for one of our company’s biggest titles. And we had to do this while maintaining the same workload and quality for our other game teams. It was an incredible experience and if I had to do it again… I would do many things differently. Though, that shows how hard we were pushing our limits and how much better this technology will become. It’s next generation technology used for the current generation of games.
I’m finally at the point where I can watch the cutscenes and see how good they look, instead of seeing the things I want to change. More than anything, I’m excited about what our creative talent will do with this in the future.
As much as I want to celebrate the achievement of my team, I am in awe of the wizards at DICE who actually got this stuff working in Frostbite. You can see the fruits of their labour below.
If you can’t view it on YouTube, check it out on GameTrailers.
Porting my Win32 C++ apps to Cocoa Objective-C
by Steven posted on May 22nd, 2010 in Development
This article is for C++ programmers who want to port their Microsoft Win32 games to Apple’s Cocoa. This is not a comprehensive tutorial. It is more like a guided tour. However, it should give you a good idea where to start and help you avoid costly delays. (more…)
Version Control with Mercurial, Apache and TortoiseHG
by Steven posted on May 13th, 2010 in Development
I recently started a new software project – a game engine. Even though the current development team is a single programmer, I need a version control system (VCS) that will:
- allow me to manage multiple repositories (with independent branching, tags, etc.)
- allow me to synchronize code across hardware and software platforms
- backup the entire repository on multiple machines (for safety reasons)
- easily allow me to add/manage contributors in the future
After some research, I chose Mercurial. If you are reading this article, you have also chosen Mercurial. If you do not know what Mercurial is, or are unfamiliar with distributed version control systems, go here. The rest of you can continue reading.
