Cinematics Tools in Frostbite 3 by Frank Vitz (Electronic Arts)
Our next talk was by Frank Fritz from Dice all about Frostbite 3 which a game engine created within EA to run their software and create there games. I thought that this would be nice to look at for my Game Art and Machinima project as its a different type of game engine that is used and can offer interesting ways of looking at an industrial level engine. Frostbite is an open source and was created by some of the most talented software developer in the world. It was originally creates in 2008 and was a powerful first edition that has since, been revamped, and they are how using Frostbite 3.
It is a run time game engine that has a high multi-platform capability. FrostEd is for work flow and the animators, artists and scriptors and is the software behind Frostbite which can be taken to all departments and edited by them separately without it effecting the master version. At the current time Frostbite is one of the leading game engines managing to produce incredible pieces of gaming details, but it does have one floor, and thats the fact that it is not a commercial game engine, you can't buy it and its only inclusive to EA. But what they aim to do in the future is push to provide a better interface, increase the stability and make work flow more consistent. The only problem with it being a non commercial game is that with new people wanting to join they are not able to learn the software until they get to the company and that may not be possible without product knowledge.
The key part to Frostbite is the ability to make game cinematics and use components such as entities, schematics and sequences and time lines. Frostbite is also a very powerful way of producing Machinima as you can capture live game play and then edit it together later, record a network stream and modify before editing it or record with a number of people and then again edit it later. Its a great way of producing cut scenes that are able to use actual game play from either a solo campaign or group multi-player and then be edited to fit into a feature length cut scene. Battlefield 4: Naval Strike uses these techniques above to record there game trailer to be able to accurately show off what you can do in the game, meaning that you don't falsify the movement that you can actually do. This means that you can record the footage that you need and then edit it after to create it using this software.
He then went onto talking about how you can actually go about creating the world and where you should put action and where cut scenes would fit in nicely in the world to be seen. This can be achieved through location scouting of a scene, once the world has been created, the best way to find out where you should place a cut scene as you can see the whole world and everything happening and where the animation is going to be happening in the background. You can use this once you find a nice spot and just grab the entities that you want to put in the scene so that when the camera pans around to it and the character triggers that animation you will be able to see that take place and in the perfect location.
This can then be rendered normally or in real time using the software that means the camera will follow a certain path that has been recorded but you can still freely look around, creating another way of creating cinematics in games.
Plants vs Zombies was one game that was created using this software, Frostbite, but then also is the new Dragon Age: Inquisition in which Bioware, the company who produce it, have recently switched over to begin using Frostbite 3. They can use it to break down emotions of the characters and allow them to cycle through the animations easily with just a click of the mouse and choosing which animation you want to test. EA and Disney are also going to be working together in the future to produce the new Star Wars games to go with the upcoming movies and this is going to work well with Frostbite 3 as it can be developed and adapted by other departments that will have access to it in the future.
Altogether this talk was very insightful and I learnt a lot about the new software that I hadn't ever heard of before and it was amazing to see how it has been used in projects already like Battlefield 4: Naval Strike and how it is continuously going to be developed in the future for the Star Wars games. Its an exciting piece of software that I will be definitely looking at in the future to see the further development of it and look into its full potential as a game engine.
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