3D Vision Blog

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a first-person shooter set to be released on March 2nd, as a sequel to released in 2008 game Battlefield: Bad Company. The new game is still following the continuing combat adventures of misfits of the US Army’s Company “B,” and Bad Company 2 features the characteristic humor and grit of the Bad Company series, as well as a variety of gameplay improvements and additions, including 2-24 player online support; all-new four man squad gameplay; and more. Couple this with the variety of vehicle related items and classic Battlefield weapons included with the Limited Edition, and you should have the Ultimate Battlefield Bad Company experience to date. That is of course if you intend to play the game normally and not in stereoscopic 3D mode as there are some issues that you should be aware of if you are going to play it in S3D, thankfully there is a workaround for most of them so that you can enjoy the game with the added perception of depth. Oh, and I almost forgot that Bad Company 2 is actually one of the still few games that supports some features of DirectX 11 if you have the compatible hardware, but for Stereo 3D that does not concern us at all yet.

I had a chance to try the game a bit early in stereo 3D mode and play a bit with the settings to find what can be done to improve the experience for S3D players using Nvidia’s 3D Vision. The bad news is that there is still no profile in 3D Vision available and the good news is that I have prepared a custom convergence file to be used for better results. When running the game for the first time you should set the resolution and detail level accordingly to reflect your available hardware, but be aware of the fact that the game is quite heavy and requires a powerful video card to be played in high detail in stereo 3D mode. You must disable HBAO (Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion) to get better results in stereo 3D mode and the other thing is to set the AA option to 1x (disable), otherwise you might not see depth in the game! You have to also disable bloom (set bloom=false), but that is done in the settings.ini file, DirectX version in use is also being controlled from the ini file with auto set by default to choose the highest supported (DX10 for 3D Vision). The settings.ini file can be found in the documents folder in a subfolder named BFBC2 and you can edit it with a plain text editor such as Notepad.

While playing the game you can notice some problems with shadows and lights rendering – weird shadows around characters or glowing halos, lowering the depth level can help get rid of these. Generally you can play with a higher depth level without very serious issues, but for most problem free experience with the custom convergence settings you need to get the depth level to a lower setting (5%-15% should be generally Ok). The crosshair and objective indicators on the screen are rendered in 3D which is good, but the HUD is in 2D, although with custom convergence settings this is not an issue. The good news is that we are expecting an official patch to improve stereo 3D support soon after the release of the game and an official 3D Vision profile. Meanwhile if you try these recommendations and my custom convergence settings please leave your comments below on how they worked for you.

- To download the custom convergence settings for the game Battlefield: Bad Company 2…