DICE Employee Explains Thread Safety Is The Main Technical Issue With Battlefield 4

An employee of DICE on a Swedish gaming site sought to explain why Battlefield 4 has become notorious for its unstability, citing thread safety.

First off, we need to tackle that idea head on: what even is thread safety? In the programming world, a sequence of instructions is referred to as a thread. Threads can be handled inside or outside a process, and when multiple threads are handled in a single process, this is referred to as multithreading.

Now, thread safety relates directly to multithreading. A piece of code is called thread safe if it works in such a way that it guarantees safe execution of multiple threads at the same time. Thread safety is a relatively recent concern, since it was not until the 90s that operating systems even used multiple threads to execute code.

And this is precisely the kind of change the anonymous DICE employee (posting under the name HonK_sWeMoB) alludes to. As we know, DICE made the call to iterate on Battlefield’s engine Frostbite in the process of developing BF4. They also decided that Frostbite 3, their latest game engine, should make use of 8^th generation console hardware more efficiently, and so it is with this line of thought that they enabled multithreading.

Simply put, the code they came up with for BF4 is not thread safe. However, the crashes and general instability is apparently a coincidence. Threads can run on independent schedulers, or timers, if you’d like. Different hardware with different operating systems and background processes have different timers within them. This is at the crux of the game’s quality control issues.

Now, to be clear, this is not the complete explanation some Battlefield players may be looking for. However, it is the necessary technical explanation, which explains what the particular nature of the setback is, as well as what exactly DICE is doing now: playtesting the game in different setups to ensure the game works well on all of them. As always, DICE claims they are working around the clock to fix these issues, and this employee concurs that they needed more time. It’s a shame that DICE is now caught up in the firestorm of controversy, but at least for the players, I hope they can resolve these issues sooner rather than later.