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

    virtual int release() {
        if (--m_refCount == 0) {
            delete (RefCounted*)this;
        }
        return m_refCount;
    }
private:
    int m_refCount;
}

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

Besides these, 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