Betterdeadthanred

YES! A year or so before BF2 was to come out and they were still discussing content (pre alpha or something? I dont know the terms that well), one of the 1up magazines did an interview with dice and they were planning to have 100 player server, 64 and 32 that would scale ingame between the 3 of them depending upon player count. There would be a period of warning and then the borders and flags rearange to the next size depending upon how many players there were. I'll see if I can find the article later.

Oh when I look back at what BF2 could have been and what it actually was.....

RazersEdge

The BF2 engine is essentially the same physics and networking engine as BF1942 but the graphics engine has been upgraded. I've played 128 player games for other games and oh MAN was it fun. Tribes2 with 128 active players was awe inspiring, it was very fast paced and there was a large amount of teamplay involved especially with vehicles, people would fly the aircraft in squadrons ect. Honestly I think that it would be amazing to see a 128 player PR game going, especially one with plenty of aircraft, tanks and things like that. I mean all things considered you wouldn't have to change THAT much outside of adding a few more attack aircraft and transports. Immagine it, with infantry concentrations on that, the AH-6 if working in pairs would be a Godsend on the battlefield. You could set up Mogadishu style fighting of insurgents vs USMC or US Army. Man... Seriously that would be awesome. If it were possible to setup body armor so that it actually works that would be cool too.

But imagine Al Basrah 64 on 64. You would see a lot more teamplay because the lovely people flying your blackhawks would be the people you would love to see the most. I think it would be interesting because you would see blackhawks being used like how Hueys were in Vietnam. You'd see door gunners swapping seats and popping off a 203 or tossing a frag grenade out the side, then getting back on his gun to light something up.

The day I see a realistic battlefield sim with high volumes of players and things such as realistic aircraft, airstrikes, laser weapons guidance... Oh man... Forward Air Controllers would be a viable job if server sizes were that large, (I am speaking more of them making it so that the laser designator the spec ops and squad leaders have would actually laser designate)

But now I get pessimistic because I have seen the BF2 code and I know how much of a pain in the butt it is to do a lot of things, specifically this. It won't be easy for them to code in I'll tell ya that much

Tempus

You guys are complaining about gameplay on the server now, imagine the chaos with double the number of players!

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FROM THE TACTICAL GAMER PRIMER.
3) Support game play in a near-simulation environment. Where the focus of play would not be solely on doing what it takes to win, but doing so utilizing real-world combat strategy and tactics rather than leveraging exploits provided to players by the design of the game engine.

Paperchase

I remember reading about the map scaling depending on player size mechanic in one of the June, July or August 2004 Computer Gaming World magazines.

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RazersEdge

But Tempus, bigger is always better! Besides at that point I wouldn't complain about the gameplay any longer, I'd have too many targets to shoot at.

PanzerHans

You need to recheck Tempus' location. He is not living in Texas.

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Betterdeadthanred

The following is from the June 2004 article from CGW written by Robert Coffey. I will bold the areas worth noting.

Drive-by Shooting xAbout those vehicles—you can expect more than 30 land, sea, and air vehicles in the finished game. The developers expect the class-based enhancements to nudge players into using them, but frankly, the stable of tanks, jeeps, fighter jets, helicopters, and attack boats should be plenty of incentive on its own. In a nod to the modern-age setting of the game and in an effort to focus on more intense combat, big naval vessels (like destroyers) have been eliminated from the game. However, the inclusion of fast, vicious patrol boats and the like should more than make up for it.

All the action takes place in three theaters of war: China, Russia (FAIL), and the Middle East. While none of the war zones are based on any specific city or battle, all are being designed with current world hot spots in mind, so while you won't be fighting in Baghdad per se, you'll be fighting in a place much like Baghdad. And the action should be very familiar to any Battlefield 1942 or Vietnam vet—DICE is very happy with its ticket-based control-point CTF variation and isn't planning on changing it at all. It is adding optional secondary objectives to certain maps that confer in-game advantages—things like taking out power stations to hobble the enemy.(FAIL)

Arguably, the only big change in gameplay is the scoring. In yet another nod to encouraging teamplay, scoring in the game is being tweaked so that medics get points for healing comrades and pilots get points for kills made by their passengers. The infantryman who paints a target with a laser for a guided missile, as well as the pilot launching the missile, will get credit for the eventual kill.(FAIL)

Is there more? You bet. But we'd have to deforest half the continent to get enough wood pulp for the pages we'd need to cover every single detail in this game. You'll just have to try to hold on until spring 2005, when you can experience the game for yourself.

Until then, remember one thing: It's going to be massive.

Third Party Parties Hard While DICE is doing all the hardcore designing, it has enlisted the help of Trauma Studios for one thing: coolness. This New York City studio is tasked with prototyping smaller features simply to enhance the game experience. Its input so far has led to the medic's lethal and lifesaving defibrillator, as well as rappelling lines that drop from helicopters(FAIL) to both deploy and rescue soldiers. Currently, up to 10 combatants can hang from a line—and they can shoot while they're there.(FAIL, not even Special forces had anything like that) Trauma has more tricks up its sleeve, but this is the one we really hope makes the cut. Don't you want to see 10 rope-hanging monkey killers raining death from above as they sweep through city streets?

Fighting on Two or More Fronts One of the biggest problems in any multiplayer shooter is balancing maps for player load. (here is the important part) No one likes deathmatching with two people on a sprawling 32-player map any more than they like deathmatching with 32 people in a two-player arena. Obviously, DICE has to create maps big enough to accommodate its targeted player load of more than 100—but what happens when only 22 people show up on a server? DICE has an ingenious solution: dynamically sizing maps. Think of a map as three concentric circles. With, say, 32 or fewer players, only the inner circle is active, and the exterior circles are inaccessible and out of play. When a threshold of players is crossed, the map opens up the next circle, and eventually, right around the 100-player mark, the last one opens. As players drop, the map contracts accordingly, with distant players warned to get back to the active zone. Don't worry—if you're too far to get back, you'll be killed and spawned within the smaller map, but your score won't be affected by the death.(FAILLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

ednos

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Perro

nice way to put a fail. im still rolling in the ground while im writing. n1

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Switch

poor kitty

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Better known as:
That noob who crashed the chopper.
That noob who ran over the mine.
That noob who TK'd me with a sniper rifle.
That noob who hit that APC at 300m with light AT! Our APC...

Braidedheadman

lol kitty

As I understand it, vets put those on kitties when they become preoccupied with licking their particulars too much.

Back on topic. BetterDead, could you provide a link to that article please? I wonder why the map scaling, if not the number of max players, didn't pan out in the end. I suppose that I really need not look any further than EA's habit of rushing release dates.

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Santa

Even if they somehow manage to allow 128 players in a server, the PR maps are entirely too small (Ejod, anyone?) and it would probably be incredibly laggy.

Morganan

A partial fail, the CO assets are secondary objectives (which some people look at as primary objectives)

Incorrect, at least partially. Drivers get teamwork points for gunner's kills. I never actually tested to see if the "spotter" gets teamwork points as well.

Incorrect, their wording could be better, but do the map's not change based on the settings on the server? Each map has a 16 player size, a 32 player size and a 64 player size, all with their own vehicle load-outs and objectives.

Betterdeadthanred

Meh, I'll give you that one but I really think the article was driving at BF2 being an objective driven game, not strictly from control points as previous battlefields.

No, spotters don't get points (PR and PoE do however) but I was driving at the laser guided bomb bit. Probably should have bolded that.

The most important thing was that the maps were going to scale ingame. Almost all servers run 64 player maps only so whats the point in that? Tactical Gamer is the only server I've EVER seen to have maps change durring the loading times. Something like this would have been a huge innovation for the FPS genre but they omitted it for reasons unknown, probably hoping people would tactically forget their original plans.

As for the article...
http://calbears.findarticles.com/p/a...iff129453/pg_2
...it can be viewed unedited here. Not that I changed anything besides bolding certain sections.

rkgreen04

that would need some nasty hardware to run