DICE has been porting Battlefield 4 to iOS

DICE has been porting Battlefield 4 to iOS
David Scammell Updated on by

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DICE has been able to successfully port parts of Battlefield 4 over to iOS, the developer has revealed.

While DICE stresses that the project is only a tech demo, the first screenshots of the shooter running on a tablet were revealed earlier this morning showing the game’s Rogue Transmission map rendered on iOS.

“It has been quite a challenge [to port Battlefield 4 to iOS],” said Frostbite Go’s program manager Kristoffer Benjaminsson. “To handle dynamic features such as destruction or moving light sources, most things in the Frostbite engine happen in realtime. This puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed worlds 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.

“This all changed when Apple introduced Metal, their new low-level graphics API, which allowed us to make full use of the hardware. Together with the latest range of hardware, Metal has created possibilities previously out of reach and for the first time we can include both high visual fidelity and a large number of objects.”

And there’s still room left over for further improvements, too, Benjaminsson adds.

“There is still much to do,” he continues, “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.”

Battlefield 4 ios

But while Battlefield 4 iOS may never make it to market, could DICE’s work open doors for future Battlefield titles on mobile?

Battlefield Hardline launches on PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC on March 17, 2015.

Source: frostbite.com