Red River Operation Flashpoint

 

Even more enviable, though, is the view from its office window: Codemasters’ corporate HQ looks out over a vista of unspoiled Warwickshire farmland. Three development teams occupy the campus and produce the majority of the firm’s big franchises. It’s a tranquil setting for such a cutting-edge company, but whenever it starts to feel too remote, there’s a pub in the basement and a free bus to the nearest town. No wonder so many of the staff say they enjoy working here.

Right now, there are two reasons to raise a glass at the bar. The first is that Codemasters’ latest racing game, F1 2010*, garnered critical acclaim and smashed sales expectations. The second is that the third installment of the Operation Flashpoint* series, Red River*, has just hit a major development milestone—an event marked by the release of the first public trailer, two days after Visual Adrenaline visited the team.

Red River moves the near-future storyline of the infantry shooter from the tundra-covered island of Skira to the sandy deserts of Tajikistan. It retains the key hallmark of an Operation Flashpoint game: vast, seamless playing areas many kilometers wide in which players can choose their own tactics. It also has the same realistic squad-based combat—with AI teammates or four players in co-op—and an unnerving attention to detail and authenticity. There is one big change of direction for the series, though, which Steve Bennett, Red River’s lead programmer, revealed.

“The goal was to make it more accessible to a wider audience,” he said. “We wanted a mainstream game rather than a hard-core military simulator. We’ve achieved a lot in that regard. From a technology point of view we wanted to make everything more efficient, with higher detail and better visual quality right out of the box.”

Increasing Complexity

The rendering team’s challenge at the start was to match in terms of scale previous Operation Flashpoint games but to live up to modern gamers’ expectations for detail. To make things more difficult, the designers decided that in addition to the wide-open spaces for which Flashpoint is acclaimed, they wanted to improve the density of built-up areas to create more intense battle scenes in tighter spaces.

“The environments in Operation Flashpoint: Red River are more detailed and complex than the last game,” Bennett explained. “Much of the game play is based in small villages with narrow paths around a very complex environment with a lot of objects. This expands the range of combat—from very long range over open terrain, to close up with people coming out of doors and shooting out of windows. It’s a lot more tactical when you approach those built-up areas. It’s been a real design and technical goal.”

Stuart Merry, a senior programmer on the Operation Flashpoint graphics team, reckoned that as a result of the effort, in some cases there are three times the number of objects on screen at any one time as there were in Flashpoint: Dragon Rising*. Although this game is set in a hot, arid environment, most people don’t realize how difficult it is to make a desert look convincing.

“In the last game we had large areas that were just swaths of grass with not much there,” Merry said. “Now we’ve got a very, very busy environment wherever you are. If you’re out in a desert, there are loads of trees, loads of bushes, loads of rocks. If you’re in a city-type area there are buildings and barriers, more bushes, and yet more rocks.”

One advantage that the Flashpoint team had is that all of its in-house games are based on the ever-evolving EGO* engine, which debuted in 2007’s Colin McRae: DiRT*. Improvements are shared between the different teams, so new particle and HDR effects created for F1 2010, for example, found their way into Red River. Meanwhile, familiarity with EGO from the start of the project has enabled the programmers to focus on new features that improve performance.

“The technical challenge we faced was changing the location and increasing the detail,” Merry said. “The artists wanted shaders and detailing on the objects themselves, so in addition to having many more objects we had a lot more detail on each object. So we’ve had to implement things like occlusion culling, which allows us to have very dense areas as long as one part of that area isn’t too busy in itself.”

Dave Smethurst, principal programmer on Operation Flashpoint: Red River, says that by rendering only what the player can see reduced the overall workload, saving about 30 to 40 percent of the objects in the scene.

“A building may be broken down into five or six draw calls because of the number of materials in them,” he said. “By doing one draw call for the occlusion culling we can remove, say, six draw calls later on in the pass. We’ve also had to look at each section of draw calls to examine the parameters that are being uploaded to the GPU and the impact they have on the CPU performance, and see how we can batch those together to reduce state changes.”

Tools such as Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer and Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers have played a vital role in developing and optimizing the new rendering systems. The payoff isn’t just the ability of gamers with high-end machines to see an increase in the detail levels. Not only is the game world more complex, the quality of rendering on mainstream graphics hardware is improved.

“Occlusion culling allows us to achieve better frame rates on our minimum hardware target and to render the high detail worlds the artists are authoring it in,” Smethurst said. “Anyone with a minimum spec piece of hardware will notice changes that will bring the game to life.”

Smethurst added that the experience of playing Red River on a laptop with Intel® processor graphics will be akin to seeing it run on a next-generation console, a huge step forward for the franchise. “The entry-level hardware for the PC has improved significantly in the last couple of years, bringing it into line with some of the other platforms that we develop for,” he said. “That means that the experience that somebody playing on one of these new entry-level machines has will be more in line with how the artists are visualizing the world.”

On the 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor hardware you can get a good quality game playing at a really good frame rate, so we can focus on what the game actually does rather than scramble to get it playing at all.”

—STEVE BENNETT, LEAD PROGRAMMER, RED RIVER

Spinning Off Physics

Being able to render a more complex world on entry-level graphics introduces new problems, though. Every extra rock, for example, presents a greater path finding challenge for the AI.

“As the graphical density has increased, so have other elements of the game, such as physics and AI.” Merry explained. “We’ve moved those off to other cores as necessary to achieve our target frame rates, because that’s obviously a huge hit when you double the amount of objects that you can collide with or that the AI has to avoid.”

At the same, designers were keen to add more non-playable character (NPC) soldiers into battles, making the whole game feel more theatrical. To achieve this, the programming team has reworked the way EGO handles multi-threaded routines, introducing dynamic thread distribution that can scale from two to twelve or more cores.

“Learning the lessons from the previous game, we’ve had a look at how we can load balance some of our jobs even better,” Smethurst said. “We’re increasing the number of threads that are running, for instance, and the AI has been threaded out of the main game play thread.

“We’ve also gone back and looked at our performance for streaming in new terrain. In the previous game we had dedicated processes for various parts of the streaming. What we have now is a system whereby the load of those processes is automatically balanced and a control thread farms work out according to which thread is idle.” According to Bennett, the more sophisticated and realistic animation models that have been included are areas in which this is particularly apparent.

In addition to the new technology and tools at its disposal, there’s a human factor that has allowed Codemasters to rise to the unique challenges of creating the next Operation Flashpoint game. The studio is pioneering the use of agile development in games design, breaking up the boundaries between artists and engineers by organizing them into temporary, goal-oriented scrums. It’s been a successful experiment for Red River that has proved so efficient that it’s been deployed across the company.

“Originally we were working on two-week short cycles,” said Merry. “But that didn’t suit the development for programmers, really. So we went back to the drawing board, reassessed it, and we went to four-week scrum sessions which helps speed up our development process.”

Another, more personal element, has helped too.

“It’s great having the relationship we do with Intel,” Merry added, “because it gives us great previews of what’s coming up, and the developer assistance is obviously very important for targeting that hardware and getting a game running on it at the frame rate that we want, so that people running the new systems get the game we want them to see.”

It’s great having the relationship we do with Intel because it gives us great previews of what’s coming up, and the developer assistance is obviously very important for targeting that hardware and getting a game running on it at the frame rate that we want.”

—STUART MERRY, SENIOR PROGRAMMER, OPERATION FLASHPOINT* GRAPHICS TEAM

Accelerated Development

Testing such an expansive game world brings its own problems for development schedules, but Bennett explained how a hardware upgrade has helped significantly improve build times.

“The new programmer spec PCs are four-core Intel® Xeon® processors with 64-bit operating systems,” he said, “and they’ve provided a big productivity improvement. Historically compiling and linking a game takes a lot of time and all the PC’s available resources. With the new machines you can compile and run the game two or three times quicker and still use the PC for e-mails or documents at the same time.”

In some circumstances, Bennett told Visual Adrenaline, the Intel® Xeon® processor-based machines are six times faster than their predecessors.

“In addition to compiling and linking the game, we’ve got processes for building the world and data for the terrain that used to take 18 to 24 hours. With the new systems they take three or four hours, so it’s a big improvement.”

The Future is 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors

A key target for Operation Flashpoint: Red River has been getting the game running acceptably on entry-level hardware. Obviously some visual compromises will be necessary, but the quality of integrated GPUs now is such that Codemasters believes it is possible to match the graphical performance of, say, a Microsoft Xbox* 360 on a mid-range laptop with Intel processor graphics and a decent CPU. “That’s a scenario that’s only going to get better”, said Bennett.

“The quality difference between the new 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor hardware and the old, 2007-level hardware is quite immense really,” he said. “You’d have to lower the quality levels, the LOD distances, and the texture resolutions to the extent where the game would look quite poor and play quite slowly, detracting from the game play experience. On the 2nd generation Intel Core processor hardware you can get a good quality game playing at a really good frame rate, so we can focus on what the game actually does rather than scramble to get it playing at all.”

Merry concurred: “The 2nd generation Intel Core processor’s architecture is very important for game developers as it provides a well-defined target of mainstream hardware to set your coding standards to. When you’re able to look to a specific goal in terms of hardware, then you can tune your game for it and know that everyone is going to get the experience the designers want on that platform.”

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