A short demo of my Battlefield 4 network capture replay and custom renderer, playing back a Gunmaster match on Dawnbreaker. This was a real game, with real players. Note: It's being played back at 2x speed, but is otherwise perfectly real-time, exactly as I could have experienced it.

The whole thing runs offline from a binary recording (a few megabytes). Game traffic is captured off the network along with the TLS keys, which unlock the session setup and the keys for the encrypted game stream. From there the replayer decodes the Frostbite packets, works out which level the server loaded, and rebuilds the match: players, movement, kills and scores. The level geometry is rendered from the game's own data & real shaders, with no Battlefield 4 running.

From the renderer to the network decoder, everything is custom when it comes to BF4; very little has pre-existing work published, almost nothing is open source of relevance. Perhaps it's a good thing, given how vulnerable BF4 seems to be.

On fidelity, there are a lot of gaps of course, I picked this replay specifically because it has no vehicles and is on a map with no glaringly obvious flaws in the rendering. Soldier animations are broken in this video, they only have basic poses here, and they're all given the same exact rifle rather than the appropriate weapon. Soldiers don't have textures, projectiles are just tracing lines, destructible level state is completely ignored/unconsidered, glass reflections don't quite look right, fire doesn't exist, some level textures aren't properly decoded/applied, and decals like paper/trash are not placed/varied based on how the level wants them.

This is the result of several months of reverse engineering the game at large, from networking, to rendering, to assets and textures, to the level organization and BF4 client overall. It's only one of the project's features right now, alongside my work in patching BF4, a BattleLog/Blaze emulator, and a ground-up client/bot framework (not the same as a 'server side' bot).

My hope is to get an accurate renderer that closely matches the game and works with live state such as Levolution. The other part is to make this browser-based; I've already taken the right steps towards doing this and have most of the problems worked out; it's just taking time to resolve each problem one by one.

In terms of capturing data, it would not be hard for me to provide the average user a tool for adding this to their client as a way of recording their gameplay sessions safely. I'm deliberating over the idea of community captures shown off in the browser, collected manually or automatically, similar to CS:GO replays.

I need a bit of help from the swarm intelligence.

I collect everything related to Battlefield and today I received the German retail add-on version of Battlefield 4: Second Assault. All the other add-ons come in a milky white case, but this one is black. Is that right? Does anyone happen to have this version and can confirm that it was black? I can only find pictures of the milky white case. Maybe I’ll be lucky and someone can help 😅

I'm not sure what to say about this one.

we back, after exploring outside the campaign maps with no clip i wanted to try something different: how much work would it take to bring stuff from bf3 into bf4?

my long term goal is to have bf3 maps playable in bf4, eventually on my own server, but starting with a whole map seemed like a good way to lose my mind so i started with the m16a3 lol

after digging through both games' files i got the bf3 weapon model and its diffuse/specular textures converted and loading in bf4's campaign. the bones needed to be matched between the games so the magazine, trigger and other moving parts would follow bf4's animations properly.

it's now usable in Shanghai, with full auto working, and i've tested reloading and switching to another weapon and back without problems. funny little detail: bf3 keeps the automatic m16a3 under an internal m16a4 name, which made digging through the files a bit confusing at first.

there was also a separate headache with actually getting to use it. the weapon was still locked in the campaign crate even after changing its availability setting. turns out the campaign crate has its own unlock setting, and changing that finally let me equip it.

there's still work to do. it currently replaces bf4's m16a4 slot and keeps that name in the menu, and the animations and sounds are still from bf4. some material layers are also still bf4's, so the visuals need more work before i'd call it finished.

but having actual bf3 geometry and textures in there, equipping it and shooting it in bf4's campaign is a pretty cool first step. next i'd like to give it its own weapon identity and keep bringing over more of the original details, then work towards importing map objects and eventually maps.

going from flying around Shanghai looking at background buildings to messing around in Baku to this has been really fun tbh, cheerio

Post #1: https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield_4/s/dnN2FRFNvR

Post #2: https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield_4/s/4yxqWgzIPe

Post #3 https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield_4/s/VMOX9VOpCy

Sometimes game lag works out

The old swirly whirly!

A few Xbox clips over the past few months that give me that 'Only in Battlefield' feeling. From LOBK Rush to UMSF Conquest, C4 to defibs and bow to repair tool. We always mess around and have fun while we get the numbers up in our Rush server, see you on the Battlefield!

My gunner has been marking vehicles with his gunner soflam, but the diamond to shoot them with my laser guided missiles doesn't appear on my end, why?

Bird hunting never stops!

Ive been playing battlefield 4 for some years now, but didnt start playing til xbox one. I play on the series x now and have been since 2022. I was always on the top of the leaderboard and would sometimes do better than most teammates. Not saying that I would have some crazy K/D ratio on matches but would do fairly good. However, a few weeks ago I just completely dropped in my skill and it baffles me because I suck now. Like idk what I did for me to just completely do dog crap on the game. I get almost no kills and when I do its never past 10 kills 80% of the time. My K/D ratio is always almost more deaths than I do kills. I do my best to slow down and be more strategic but even then I suck. I have messed with my settings to try and help me but even with that I don’t do any better. I rage out so much and it upsets me because I was always so good, but its like a switch turned off and I can’t seem to be as good as I used to. I have the series 2 controller and hoped that would help but nope. My aim has gone really bad and miss most my shots, even in close range. Then out of nowhere I get blasted and killed so quick. Is thwre any advice anyone can offer, maybe some controller settings? Thank you.

sup y'all, i've just started testing no clipping in bf4's campaign bc i wanted to see the views and already got some for the aircraft carrier that you go to investigate and Shanghai. i really wanted to see how much work they put in and especially for Shanghai i'm honestly very impressed, most of these is just background stuff that people barely pay attention too but even after going away for a long time you still see things they put some effort in. And funny to see the aircraft carrier is just in the sky

i was really curious about the ai too, since bf4 and these kinds of games are heavily scripted based on where you are, what happens when you can go anywhere?

some observations:

- on the aircraft carrier i could go up to the enemies or way after and they kept tracking me but didn't shoot even when i was right next to them, after i attacked them they didn't shoot back but the friendlies walk through the door even tho it was closed and just sat there next to the enemies without them attacking each other. only after i went to the door and press e to open it did the fight begin. which makes sense and is expected to be scripted this way, but very interesting to play around with it

- in Shanghai as soon as we got on the floor with the weapon crate and where the fight begins i just no clipped outta there and started moving around to explore the city, it was very cool and interesting, very beautiful visuals and very nostalgic, when the angle hit just right i could feel like i was just standing there and the city looked very real. After my trip i came back to see the enemy npcs just constantly falling but not dying and shooting back at me when i got close, interesting, and the building wasn't there anymore and Irish and Pac had fallen to the bottom and were shooting at the npcs that were high up there falling, hilarious tbh. when i got to a certain low altitude the building did show up again (not completely) but i wanted to see if i could just walk outside (in the areas that i know we could walk before or will later but after disabling no clipping the game just crashed

more work needs to be done for further testing but its been already really fun, gonna try other missions now

more pics here, already hit the reddit limit: https://imgur.com/a/QmjPZHE

i'll keep adding there as i go through the missions

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