r/starwarsgames

What was that an amazing operation, but also, a lot of hectic scenario's happened during it.

At the moment I am mainly playing in a ARMA3 unit called the 212th Attack Battalion. Been playing there for around 1.5 year and what a lot of fun has is been.
Every week there are multiple operations that we play, but this one... Called Miner Violence...

As a soon to be teamlead in the unit, I had the "command" over 3 others, together we were the Team Shadow 2-1 under squadleader "Cordy". We were dropping off just outside a CIS FOB.

Together with other squads, we took the first FOB with relative ease, a few casualties but the clankers were fried!

The next objective was another FOB, which we took with even more ease.
My squadleader and I thought... this does not seem right, we took both FOB's in one hour, which is very, very quick.

And we were right... the third objective was to secure a mountainbase and boy... we dropped in via LAAT's and we were immediately pinned down. Even with our mechanised units, that included 2 AT-TE's, we could not push through the CIS fortification of the landing zone and almost everything was blowing up.

I personally died multiple times, and our ARC squad, the Banshees, were fully wiped out.

Eventually our platoonleadership ordered us to take the long way around, which seemed fine at first but we got ambushed by AAT's and B2's. But we pushed through those lines!

Eventually we had to fight up hill, in the middle of a minefield, but once on top, our platoon took the base and secured a HVT. The relief when we had secured that base and maintained a foothold on the planet was great. We extracted succesfully and the 212th Attack Battalion did their work again!

FOR THE REPUBLIC!

________________________________

I would like to post more short stories about the missions we are doing within the unit, since I think it is a great way of playing a STAR WARS game with a lot of people.
STAR WARS has been one of my favorite franchises of all time and RolePlaying in a unit is amazing.

Before I joined the unit I had my doubts about it, because it seemes so "strict". But I have never been so wrong.
Yes it is a unit and there are some "rules", but everyone there are STAR WARS fans that have the same goal, playing a massive STAR WARS game together.

If you do want to try it out, hit me up!

And if you would like to read more of these Short Stories about our missions, let me know in the comments! Personally I love to talk about them. 😄

From a galaxy far far away, I bit you farewell and thank you for reading!

P.S. Sorry if you see grammar or spelling mistakes, English is not my first language hahaha 😂

Previous BF 2015 specific post for better Context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/1vmwb25/the_frostbite_engine_in_star_wars_battlefront/

TL;DR Battlefront II offered 4x more lighting density, more realistic tonemapping, and damn good image quality for TAA standards. Battlefront 2015’s strengths are more subjective as the higher contrast “filmic look”, specific artistic choices, and better asset quality still make it many people’s personal favorite.

The first thing to compare is the lighting system.
In BF 2015, they used a semi-dynamic GI system to provide interactive lighting artist workflows. Later on, DICE would develop a custom system called Flux that utilized an offline path tracer in the editor to bake indirect lighting. It is important to note that direct lighting (other than the sky) is done dynamically in BF II. Frostbite engineers realized that Battlefront II could use this more elaborate method to get 4x more lighting density than Battlefront 2015:
https://www.ea.com/news/precomputed-global-illumination-in-frostbite

With the power of modern affordable hardware, I would prefer if the lighting systems would look more like this:
https://youtu.be/SnNm7rSSvlg?t=2985&si=fhWTICkmQeJWzWIQ

BF 2015 applied a “filmic” tonemapping curve that provided a high contrast look to the game. Expecting a shift in display technology, DICE decided to develop a new method called Display Mapping for BF II where the game would calculate HDR values to be referenced in a LUT and eventually sent to your type of display. Battlefront II’s tonemapping is more realistic compared to real world reference than the Battlefront 2015 version:
https://www.ea.com/news/high-dynamic-range-color-grading-and-display-in-frostbite

Battlefront II’s Display Mapping Compared to other Tonemappers:
https://youtu.be/SnNm7rSSvlg?t=4253&si=e_JJHKNrQWzOY0BY

Battlefront 2015 on PC offered a not so perfect TAA, a blurry FXAA, and an AA off option. Battlefront II has forced TAA but the here implementation is competent. This is due to high quality motion vectors and accurate reprojection logic as well as minimal use of past frames. This all leads to a good resolve with no smear and no ghosting trails. On the console versions, both games use TAA so BF II wins there by default.

Now for some rapid fire topics. Battlefront 2015 used more photogrammetry than Battlefront II. Lucasfilm provided DICE with a whole load of digital assets however there was still a lot of photogrammetry work done on places like the Naboo Throne Room:
https://youtu.be/5LHB-n9AMR4?t=578&is=SjxrLX2rIQzX_Ozj

I’ve seen claims about how BF 2015 stores lighting info in the textures. There is no evidence to back this up and the devs even disproved that in the GDC 2016 Battlefront Photogrammetry Presentation:
https://youtu.be/U_WaqCBp9zo?t=1077&si=C_8e8hVODVaNjNT3

Picked up for a few bucks with 2 others games.

The only Star Wars games i saw you could control capital ships were a mod for X4 and a game mode on Roblox.

I think it would be really cool if we got a Star Wars game, where we could control ships from corvettes like the Tantive IV to big capital ships like an ISD or Lucrehulk Battleship. Perhaps as a sort of galactic Ship vs Ship game similar to WOWS or like space battle from Battlefront 2 but more immersive.

The game could also be as an sort of open world game with the possibility of raiding space stations in a hit and run style attack for the rebels or escorting freighter as imperial for pirates in the Outer Rim, having multiple star system we can jump to for missions or explorations. Or playing as pirate, stealing ships similar to Assassins Creed Black Flag.

I personally would like a game similar to Rogue Squadron but with bigger ships.

-What is your opinion about such Star Wars game?-

This is my recreation of the larger Legends version of the Providence-class Dreadnought.

It is the massive version that measures more than two kilometers—not the smaller, more commonly seen Providence configuration. The model was built with roughly 440K Blocks and uses a hollow structure to keep such a large ship manageable.

The first version looked too dark. After switching to a newer reference image, the exterior was changed to weathered light gray with clear blue CIS markings, dark mechanical trenches, and a few yellow and white details.

When Battlefront 2015 launched it set new standards for visual fidelity. Photogrammetry was the technique that caught everyone’s eye at the time. The basic idea is that the development team can capture many types of objects, props, and other elements from the real world to then eventually turn those things into assets that are ready to be used in the game.

Many people over the last decade have pointed to this technology as the leading reason why the visuals of BF 2015 are so good. While it is true that this game was one of the first to fully embrace photogrammetry based rendering, it is far from the only one. Common engines such as UE5 utilize photogrammetry yet the visuals and performance can often fall short.

Frostbite graphics engineers have documented where a lot of the material richness of the game engine comes from. Ultimately, it is down to the type of Diffuse Model being utilized. Most games that are being made today use the Lambert BRDF which is an outdated diffuse model that shows obvious deviation from real world reference. Frostbite took the more accurate Burley Diffuse from Disney (specifically post-2012 PIXAR animations) and modified it for use in Star Wars Battlefront and future titles.

Other Frostbite related things to note are that these games avoid using the industry standard ACES tonemapper and there are no noisy textures as well.

UE5 makes the mistake of defaulting to ACES 1 (which displays inaccurate colors and a loss of detail) as well as offering Virtual Textures and documenting them in a way that necessitates use of smeary TAA to clean up the visual noise and can even harm performance.

TL;DR While Photogrammetry was a big breakthrough in early 8th gen, the main thing that helped BF 2015’s visuals stand the test of time was having a more accurate lighting model than other games to get more realism out of the materials. Also custom tonemapping and eliminating noisy texture/artifacts was crucial here.

Resources below will give context to these rendering topics:

https://youtu.be/qZtNU-4yqtI?si=q98pSSQ2dplfsB2B

https://youtu.be/SnNm7rSSvlg?t=3885&si=Nh_q4k4l05nTTZMe

https://youtu.be/Ls4QS3F8rJU?t=539&si=O6qNS8005IzWCXX2

https://youtu.be/U_WaqCBp9zo?si=eDPTw2pxB1QaGuU0

https://seblagarde.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/course_notes_moving_frostbite_to_pbr_v32.pdf

https://media.disneyanimation.com/uploads/production/publication_asset/48/asset/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_notes_v3.pdf

https://www.ea.com/news/high-dynamic-range-color-grading-and-display-in-frostbite