Interesting In-game Injury Identification Idea

[Bonegavel]

Just thought of a nice way to visually represent a player's injuries both past and present.

Somewhere on the player card place a silouette of the entire body (like the classic Da Vinci body, minus the extra arms and legs and nads). Various shades of red are placed at the points where past injuries occured and the colors would decrease in brightness with age. Current injuries could be shown in another color or just be the brightest red (another color would probably be better).

If you've ever played Sim City and have seen the map overlays for Crime, land value, etc. you will understand what I mean.

In one quick glance, you could easily ascertain a player's:

1) current health
2) history of injuries
3) injury proneness (nice word). With a little mentalizin' you can get a rough estimate of how injury prone a player is by taking years in the league and measuring it against the amount of red.

To me, a player's injuries are a huge part of football and the games don't reflect past injuries. All you know about a player is if they are healthy or currently injured.

Just thinking out loud.

[Vince]

Nice alliteration. I like the idea, too :)

[Mac Howard]

Excellent idea! I knew there must be a reason for visiting this forum :)

[SirFozzie]

What, the random flaming and incessant insanity doesn't do it for you, Mac? :)

[GoSeahawks]

Great idea

[VPI97]

http://www.nbalive-asl.com/FOF2K4/body2.jpg

[Franklinnoble]

That's such a cool idea, there's just no way it'll ever happen.

[Daimyo]

That is a great idea.

[Ksyrup]

All together now:

"Head, shoulders, knees and groin, knees and groin."


Actually, I like this idea. I don't save my seasons individually, so when I'm looking at free agents and notice that they missed time the previous year, but had put up great numbers prior to what appears to have been an injury, it's impossible to know whether they actually lost anything ratings-wise, or whether they put up those numbers on their current ratings (or something close to them). This would be a step in the right direction.

[Bonegavel]

Yes, that is the essence of the idea.

The above would basically read: His shoulder is the most recent injury (though not current because it is red- which means an historical injury) and his right leg and wrist injuries are probably a few years old.

There has to be a way to easily (that is the key) also note the total amount of times the part was injuried, or surgery was performed. I guess you could put letters or what not in there (s-surgery, m-multi) but a person versed in visual mumbo-jumbo would be able to figure that out.

[Ksyrup]

I like the idea of a graphical representation, but ultimately, what I would want to get out of this information, is what effect has the injury(ies) had on the player's development/ratings? A simple listof injuries and the rating/potential hits attributable to each injury (if any) would work just as well, if not better, for me.

[Bonegavel]

Well, it would obviously force the game to care about them (why else represent them) but, say that past injuries do matter. You would definitely use this info for the draft. A Willis McGahee in the draft would start your monitor on fire when you looked at it. Injuries play a major part in the contract deal. You look at a player that is head to toe red with only a few years in the league, I don't think you will care if all his bars are maxed to 100. Or maybe you are a risk taker. Or maybe, this can now be part of the contract process - hey, I'm offering you a lot less than what you want because you are made of balsa wood.

This would be yet another great tie-breaker for Free Agency. You have 2 players that are very similar, but one has a lot of color around both his knees and the other is nearly injury free...

Like I said, this would force the game to incorporate past injuries in the mix which may be too much info for the engine to handle on top of everything else because an injury table in a DB would grow very large very quickly. Unless, it only kept players that were current and wasn't an archive for every player to ever be injured.

[VPI97]

Warrick Dunn
http://www.nbalive-asl.com/FOF2K4/dunn.jpg

Steve Young
http://www.nbalive-asl.com/FOF2K4/young.jpg

John Wayne Bobbit
http://www.nbalive-asl.com/FOF2K4/bobbit.jpg

[sabotai]

Like I said, this would force the game to incorporate past injuries in the mix which may be too much info for the engine to handle on top of everything else because an injury table in a DB would grow very large very quickly.

Before I address this, I love the idea. Now, the quoted part. Keeping a record of injry history would not, imo, be a large file. We're only talking a few variables. A long int for the player ID. A few shorts for the injury ID and when it happened (Let's say a short for the Day, Month and Year). So we have 4 shorts and a long. (Waiting for that to be Fritzed.....and continue). A long is 4 bytes and a short is 2 bytes (X 4 shorts = 8 bytes). So each injury would take up a whopping 12 bytes of space (memory or disk space).

That'd be roughly 12 megs after literally a million injuries.

[Ragone]

Vpi.. that first one isn't warrick dunn.. its Longfellow Deeds.. note the frostbitten foot :)

[Bonegavel]

VPI97 -- excellent graphic, in both concept and the humor. And, on my drive home tonight, I was thinking of black as a color for a surgery as well (if that is what you meant with it).

And Sab, good point about the file size. Not sure why I was figuring it would be out of hand (damn, i'm just giving Fritz more ammo).

As far as the NFL goes, I would think it goes without saying that scouts/coaches look very heavily at a player's injury history and this would just be a quick and dirty way to see it without having to pour over a textbox full of info.

[SackAttack]

I think the word you're looking for is 'pore'. :D

[corbes]

I might enjoy the old color scale to indicate severity of the injury; or, how much of a ratings hit the injury created.

Say the scale is light yellow to an angry, flaming red, where light yellow represents a pulled muscle or some minor injury andt he flaming red represents a Torn ACL. And if a guy keeps reinjuring the same thing, (like my franchise QB, who has a left knee made out of balsa wood) it will eventually turn red.