The Frostbite Engine History
Frostbite is a disease associated to exposure to coldness. When the tissues in the body get frozen, Frostbite occurs. Using this idea, EA Digital Illusions CE developed a game engine that features are destructible environments, real-time lighting, discerning sound prioritizing, long distance viewing and high graphical standards and resolution. The engine is compatible and well suited with Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems.
Video Game Developer EA DICE has used the Frostbite engine on their in-house games Battlefield series: Bad Company, Battlefield 1943” and “Bad Company 2”. Frostbites first version, Frostbite 1.0, debuted in 2008 with its second version, Frostbite 1.5, was used for the multiplayer component of Medal of Honor. The upcoming version Frostbite 2.0 is the next generation of the engine, which will be used in Battlefield 3, “Need for Speed: The Run, and Mirror’s Edge 2."
Information on the different versions of the Frostbite Engine:
Frostbite 1.0
The original and the first version of Frostbite technology was developed and debuted into the Battlefield: Bad Company series. Frostbite 1.0 introduced high amount of destructibility, allowing for almost every environmental piece to be destroyed, from walls to the ground itself.
It also allows for real-time lighting, allowing the lighting angles and effects to change animatedly without any modifications needed to be made to the environment.
Frostbite 1.0 also allowed very selective sound prioritizing, called HDR (High Dynamic Range) Audio. Meaning that it will select to emit more important and louder sounds, rather than every sound at once. Imagine a gamer playing a radio in-game, and a tank shell explodes beside him. Frostbite would allow the explosion sound to be significantly higher than the radio, rather than both at the same sound level.
Frostbite 1.5
The first version the engine was very successful, so DICE further developed Frostbite 1.0 into Frostbite 1.5 with Battlefield 1943, which was enhanced with Destruction 2, allowing buildings to be completely destroyed. Later, EA DICE released Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which featured even more improvements to Destruction 2, allowing for large structures to be collapsed and crush everything within it, with the ability to chip away at lighter pieces of environments instead of them being destroyed as a single entity. Frostbite 1.5 was also used in the multiplayer for the 2010 “Medal of Honor”, though with more limited destruction capabilities and vastly different weather effects.
Frostbite 2.0
Currently the latest version of the engine ,Frostbite 2.0, is in development and will be used for Battlefield 3! According to some reports from different gamin blogs, the new and updated version of Frostbite will take full advantage of DirectX 11 API and the 64-bit processors, with no support for DirectX 9 (thus will not run on Windows XP). Frostbite 2.0 will also feature increased in-game destruction with Destruction 3, creating more advanced physics than ever.
At 2010 SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), EA DICE gave many presentations on progresses and advances in their rendering technology:
Tile-based deferred shading acceleration via DirectCompute (application programming interface), and is being ported to the PlayStation 3’s SPUs; MLAA (Morphological Anti-Aliasing), which again executed with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation; Quasi-realtime radiosity; much better environment destruction and real-time approximated subsurface scattering.
For more information about Frostbite 2 in Battlefield 3, check out our "What You Need To Know - Frostbite 2" post.
