BF2 Internals

The BF2 engine has been written in C++ and also make heavy use of STL.

Reference Counting

A lot of the internal components of the game use intrusive reference counting through inheritance. The base class would look something like this:

class RefCounted {
public:
    RefCounted() : m_refCount(1) {}
    virtual ~RefCounted() {}

    virtual int addRef() {
        return ++m_refCount;
    }
    
    virtual int getRefCount() const {
        return m_refCount;
    }

    // Unsure if there actually is a base implementation of this method,
    // this is almost always points to a unique function in the vtable but follows this pattern.
    virtual int release() {
        if (--m_refCount == 0) {
            delete (RefCounted*)this;
        }
        return m_refCount;
    }
private:
    int m_refCount;
};

Do note that this class is not thread-safe, as in the actual implementation.

ClassManager

The program contains a single ClassManager instance which is used to dynamically access different subsystems within the game. These subsystems are registered via a string identifier(class name), an instance pointer, the class id and another unknown integer, they can then later be accessed using the class name. The following classes are registered in BF2.exe:

GameServerSettings

HudInformationLayer

DistributedLightRenderer

LocalProfileManager

ProfileManager

RankManager

ClanManager

NewsManager

AutoPatch

Persistence

MenuTeamManager

GlobalSettings

VideoSettings

AudioSettings

ControlSettings

GeneralSettings

HapticSettings

ServerBrowserManager

SwiffHost

DemoLibrary

ServerLogoManager

ModInfo

The rendering module(RendDX9.dll) also registers the following classes:

SwiffRenderer

Terrain

LightManager

GeometryTemplateManager

StaticMeshRenderer

SkinnedMeshRenderer

ParticleSystemManager

HemiMapManager

DecalManager

DecalShadowManager

RoadCompiledRenderer

RoadEditableRenderer

NametagManager

SkyDome

UndergrowthSystem

LightingManager

WeatherManager

RainManager

RenderView

EnvMapManager