It looks like DICE has been working behind the scenes porting its Frostbite engine over to iOS. This is of course the engine that powers the Battlefield games. On the Frostbite blog, Kristoffer Benjaminsson product owner for mobile at Frostbite has talking about getting Frostbite on iOS.
Parts of Frostbite are already working on iOS with the Battlefield 4 Commander app and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare which is also powered by the Forstbite Engine. Now the company wants to see Battlefield 4 on iOS, but getting it to the platform has been quite the task.
The Frostbite engine will handle dynamic features like destruction or moving light sources in real-time, but being able to do that on a mobile device is very hard. DICE has said that this, “puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed world’s with superb visual quality. We were making great progress feature-wise, but hardware and software limitations forced us to either scale down the number of objects and their complexity to retain visual fidelity, or accept lower visual fidelity to cope with a larger number of objects”
The DICE team persisted on with Benjaminsson adding, “So to see exactly how far we could take the engine on mobile we set ourselves up for a real challenge: getting selected parts of the Battlefield 4 – truly a visually demanding game – running on iOS! I want to stress that this has been a tech demo to test the engine capabilities, and nothing else”. He continued: “There is still much to do, but we’re very happy with the results so far. It’s a great feeling porting a system, get it running, and discover that there’s actually performance left. Even though we have much room for performance improvements on our end, we’re pleasantly surprised of the performance we’re getting from the hardware”.
So will we see a real Battlefield game come out for iOS? Time will only tell!
Source: Frostbite Blog via Tweaktown | News Archive
