Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)

[extremeskins04]

Quote: Originally Posted by Americas Team

Blaming no pro bowl on the current gen hardware, really? If anything it's the software technology their using.

Yea I don't buy it either. If games like Skyrim, GTA 5 and Witcher 3 can be on the PS4 and Xbox One, then you can get pro bowl in Madden.

Just saying.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Americas Team

Blaming no pro bowl on the current gen hardware, really? If anything it's the software technology their using.

I'm gonna guess that they don't have the RAM budget to spare to load all 32 teams' helmet assets (raster / normals / etc.) into memory at once. If that's true, something in-game would have to get cut to get proper Pro Bowl helmets in, be it an across-the-board texture fidelity decrease, fewer triangles / textures for stadiums, less audio / commentary, or what have you. Pick your poison.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by extremeskins04

Yea I don't buy it either. If games like Skyrim, GTA 5 and Witcher 3 can be on the PS4 and Xbox One, then you can get pro bowl in Madden. Just saying.

Open-world games use a lot of tech tricks to look as good as they do which aren't directly applicable to Madden. For example, environmental level-of-detail isn't really relevant to Madden because the in-game environment - the stadium - is pretty static and always on screen at a consistent distance from the gameplay camera. You'll notice polygonal LODs on the player geometry as you zoom in and out, but I don't know if I've seen anything like that on the stadiums.

Environmental LOD is what really makes open-world and exploration-based games go, dating back to Spyro The Dragon on consoles (and probably earlier games as well, but Spyro was one of the first ones to pull it off really well on PSX at least). There's also rarely if any occluding geometry in sports games with which to immediately cull stuff out of the rendering pipeline because another object obstructs it from the camera; if there's something in or near the gameplay area in a sports game, it's most likely visible and ergo getting rendered, whereas in downtown GTA V obstructed cars and NPCs don't even get sent to the graphics card to get rendered because there are buildings in the way.

There's an article floating around on the internet somewhere about GTA V's rendering pipeline and it's god damn insane and optimized to hell and back. If I can find it again, I'll link it.

EDIT: Found it! Enjoy: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/...raphics-study/

[therealsmallville]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

I'm gonna guess that they don't have the RAM budget to spare to load all 32 teams' helmet assets (raster / normals / etc.) into memory at once. If that's true, something in-game would have to get cut to get proper Pro Bowl helmets in, be it an across-the-board texture fidelity decrease, fewer triangles / textures for stadiums, less audio / commentary, or what have you. Pick your poison.

I find game design to be a very interesting topic. How did Madden manage the Pro Bowl helmets on Madden 2005 on the original Xbox? I remember the logos were very low-rez compared to the helmets in regular games, but they found a way to do it. Was it because of everything else being so less detailed compared to today?

Or perhaps it would be low-rez again, and not a product they want to ship (I could only imagine the complaints they'd receive). Interesting to think about.


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by therealsmallville

I find game design to be a very interesting topic. How did Madden manage the Pro Bowl helmets on Madden 2005 on the original Xbox? I remember the logos were very low-rez compared to the helmets in regular games, but they found a way to do it. Was it because of everything else being so less detailed compared to today? Or perhaps it would be low-rez again, and not a product they want to ship (I could only imagine the complaints they'd receive). Interesting to think about. Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

In ye olden days of console gaming in 2003, none of the consoles could push out 1080p @ 30 FPS, let alone 60 FPS. In North America the PS2 - the most popular video game console ever built - topped out at 480i (640x480). The original XBOX I think could do select games at 720p and 1080i, but it certainly wasn't a popular option; Madden never supported either of these output formats as far as I can tell. The hardware wasn't nearly as powerful, so stuff that's taken for granted today like normal mapping (which was gaining mainstream attention in PC gaming at the time) or extensive particle effects just weren't even considerations on consoles. The lower hardware capabilities to some extent freed up RAM to do other things (but only so much; one of my bosses who used to work on The Show on PS2 has told me how they had to repurpose memory which was holding a texture to store game stats in some situations). That's why you were able to see all 32 teams have their helmets in the Pro Bowl in older Madden games; they could put the lo-res helmet images into memory and it'd still look almost as good, because console games could only look but so good in the first place.

As the consoles' hardware have increased in power and capabilities, so too have expectations about what a console game should look like and do. Consoles must output at 1080p at minimum, do all the fun lighting and shading bells and whistles (normal mapping, HDR, particle effects, shadow mapping, etc. etc.). Not to mention the requirements for just the basic textures themselves have increased; because the console can output more pixels to the screen, the textures need to be bigger to show off more detail and not look stretched and muddy. All this stuff takes memory to pull off effectively, and there's only so much memory to go around. AAA game developers are all pushing the console hardware to its limits in different ways.

I think you're right that Tiburon could deliver the Pro Bowl back into the game but in a fashion that no one here, or even they themselves, would be happy with, be it with generic NFC/AFC helmets (which I think was the case at one point? I could be wrong) or lo-res helmets and reduced graphical effects on helmets. The next question would be how much is that addition worth? If they were to do this, how many people would actually play the Pro Bowl? I would guess not many, and I think if the Pro Bowl were to be done right it'd have to be as a byproduct of another component to justify the work. For example, it could be justified if the Longshot story mode had a Pro Bowl chapter, or maybe in franchise the Pro Bowl gets featured as the one place to do 3v3 squads in an online franchise. On its own right now, though, I don't think the Pro Bowl adds enough value to the game to make it a developer focus; there are other places where the devs can better spend their time to get more bang for their buck.

[underdog13]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

I'm gonna guess that they don't have the RAM budget to spare to load all 32 teams' helmet assets (raster / normals / etc.) into memory at once. If that's true, something in-game would have to get cut to get proper Pro Bowl helmets in, be it an across-the-board texture fidelity decrease, fewer triangles / textures for stadiums, less audio / commentary, or what have you. Pick your poison.

Underdog13 liked this post 👍


But yeah mlb the show has the same issue and they have to resort to have a single uniform for nl and al.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

[jmurphy31]

Watched the video. Good to hear about CPU Ai has been improved in game and also new playboy's (and teams will play like their real life counterparts). Though I feel like I heard this before.

Also, I'm just not getting this whole live cfm idea. And also how the commentary updates effect cfm. I get that you can pick up at a specific time of the season and play from there, but once you do that it becomes your cfm not real life. So not sure how the weekly commentary would make sense later in the season of its mixing in real life with your cfm.

In addition, say it's week 7 can you go back to week 2 in real life and start playing from there.

Personally I would never use this feature. When I play cfm I don't need it to follow real life week by week.

[bakerboy]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

In ye olden days of console gaming in 2003, none of the consoles could push out 1080p @ 30 FPS, let alone 60 FPS. In North America the PS2 - the most popular video game console ever built - topped out at 480i (640x480). The original XBOX I think could do select games at 720p and 1080i, but it certainly wasn't a popular option; Madden never supported either of these output formats as far as I can tell. The hardware wasn't nearly as powerful, so stuff that's taken for granted today like normal mapping (which was gaining mainstream attention in PC gaming at the time) or extensive particle effects just weren't even considerations on consoles. The lower hardware capabilities to some extent freed up RAM to do other things (but only so much; one of my bosses who used to work on The Show on PS2 has told me how they had to repurpose memory which was holding a texture to store game stats in some situations). That's why you were able to see all 32 teams have their helmets in the Pro Bowl in older Madden games; they could put the lo-res helmet images into memory and it'd still look almost as good, because console games could only look but so good in the first place. As the consoles' hardware have increased in power and capabilities, so too have expectations about what a console game should look like and do. Consoles must output at 1080p at minimum, do all the fun lighting and shading bells and whistles (normal mapping, HDR, particle effects, shadow mapping, etc. etc.). Not to mention the requirements for just the basic textures themselves have increased; because the console can output more pixels to the screen, the textures need to be bigger to show off more detail and not look stretched and muddy. All this stuff takes memory to pull off effectively, and there's only so much memory to go around. AAA game developers are all pushing the console hardware to its limits in different ways. I think you're right that Tiburon could deliver the Pro Bowl back into the game but in a fashion that no one here, or even they themselves, would be happy with, be it with generic NFC/AFC helmets (which I think was the case at one point? I could be wrong) or lo-res helmets and reduced graphical effects on helmets. The next question would be how much is that addition worth? If they were to do this, how many people would actually play the Pro Bowl? I would guess not many, and I think if the Pro Bowl were to be done right it'd have to be as a byproduct of another component to justify the work. For example, it could be justified if the Longshot story mode had a Pro Bowl chapter, or maybe in franchise the Pro Bowl gets featured as the one place to do 3v3 squads in an online franchise. On its own right now, though, I don't think the Pro Bowl adds enough value to the game to make it a developer focus; there are other places where the devs can better spend their time to get more bang for their buck.

You must be kidding correct? I posted something similar in the comment section for the reference youtube vid on SGO. Clearly Oldenburg is confused and couldn't possibly be serious. The ps2 had 32MB of total system ram and 4MB of video ram. The PS4 has 8GB of system RAM of which 5-6GB can be used by developers. Based on my math this is 250x the memory. I'm curious, how many KB/MB do you suspect a helmet skin takes up? Is it more than MLB the show's fully modeled 3D crowd or they're fully responsive and modeled dugouts. Or how about NBA 2k fully modeled crowed and sideline w/ coaches and assistants responding in real time to events on the court. I hardly take Oldenburg as an authority as it relates to the technical side of development and this is an amateur hour type of blunder.

You incorrectly state that games output @ 1080p. HDR is very new for videogames with not much support ATM and M17 certainly didn't get a patch for this. Madden doesn't have any particle effects nor does it have any dynamic weather/ field degradation systems at play. The crowd isn't anywhere close to MLB the Show/2k and lets not even mention what games like BF1 is doing w/ complex microdestruction/ dynamic weather, expansive maps and 64 players in a session running at a higher resolution than madden(1440p ps4 pro). Have you ever downloaded a high-res costume skin for a character in any game? Please check into that and report back how many KBs that skin takes.