Natural Motion Football - Backbreaker
 

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/814/814249p1.html

This looks incredible. We'll see how it turns out.

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Um, you're not aiming very high are you?

I've seen demos from Natural Motion before - the products they make are very cool. It's a nice product to have to create animations that you just can't easily get from motion-capture (i.e. really dangerous and/or difficult stunt work). With some time and experience using the software, you can generate some very impressive results.

However, if you try to run their software at runtime as a real-time physics simulator, it's a tremendous performance hit. I'm not surprised that they are saying the camera for this game is going to be a close 3rd person view - I'd bet they'll have real trouble running 22 players in real-time using their physics simulation without really slowing their frame rate. I'll be very curious to see actual gameplay footage to see just what they are able to run at an acceptable framerate, and what camera views they may be limited too in order to achieve this (or what they have to cut or limit elsewhere in the game to maintain respectable framerate).

Anyway, seems like this is primarily a way to advertise their product - we'll see how much depth there is to the game outside of just setting up collisions and watching the results.

From reading that article, I think they are just trying to advertise their engine more. However, it wouldn't shock me if they really are working on a deal with EA and they end up buying the engine to use in a future version of Madden (assuming the limitations that dawgfan mentioned can be overcome.)

Beat me to it. :)

EA Tiburon is already using the Natural Motion product Endorphin to both enhance existing motion-capture data and create new motions from scratch. I'd be fairly surprised though if they can use the full capabilities of Natural Motion's real-time product Euphoria within their Madden or NCAA game engines, for the reasons I noted above - real-time physics/IK solutions are very expensive from a frame rate standpoint, and when you have a game like football with 22 players running around at any one time and most of them on-screen, even with the Xbox 360 and PS3, that's a tough expense to overcome.

Great, I'm already anxiously awaiting the next next-gen consoles now. :)

Why wouldn't they use the product to create the animations and then store them to disk instead of rendering them real-time? It seems like it might make it easier to up the total number of animations shipped with the game.

You can't really do that.

You could use the product to generate and store animations but the reason they look so good is because they are realistically keying of the actual events.

If you canned the animations, they would look 'funny' when triggered without the exact circumstances of the original.

So you'd have to start manipulating surrounding players to set up the animation.. and all of a sudden, you're back in Madden territory!

I guess you could use this to add some animations, but I'd say for the majority of required animations, you'd get something just as good / better from mocap.

which I guess is what they're already doing!

It's funny - we may look at this years from now and just laugh that all the games of this era used canned animations as an "I can't believe I used to think that was acceptable."

They could use canned animations (some generated by Natural Motion) for most stuff, then switch to the runtime engine where it matters (tackling).

I'd wager this is actually what they're doing.

It is extremely difficult to procedurally generate realistic human animation.

In fact, there's no way they're doing that.

What they'll be doing is similar to many FPS's (starting with Hitman? the vertlet integration stuff? - dunno) where they use canned animation for everything where the user has control.

Then when you just want to flap around, switch to the ragdoll system.

The vid doesn't look exactly like most ragdoll stuff that I've seen, but I bet it's basically a ragdoll system customised a bit for football.

It's cool though :-)

I'm thinking the same thing.

It would be amazing if they could somehow combine this with Blitz and AP2k8 to create a great football game.

No, actually their stuff is pretty cool. They've added muscle influences to the ragdoll / IK stuff, which is what most ragdoll systems are missing. It's also why it is too expensive to have 22 guys using constantly throughout the engine (although maybe if they can dedicate a couple of cores to it because they aren't doing a lot of other physics or intensive computation, maybe they CAN do 22 guys at once.)

Yeah, it's definitely cool stuff - very fun to play with. I'd be worried if I had a seat of Endorphin that I'd just spend all day playing around with the various parameters and not actually get anything else done. It's also very expensive - hopefully they are selling enough seats to places like EA where the price can start coming down (as they pay off all their up-front development costs).

Yeah, maybe they could have them all running around in real-time fully IK, but at a tremendous expense to other functions. I would think that AI would have to be extensively simplified on order to allow the game to run at 30fps if all 22 guys were using real-time, fully IK rigs.

I buy that as the way that they handle the 'flop' - ie, when tackled and user control stops - the kind of places where you expect ragdolls to be used. It's what I meant when I said "customised a bit for football".

But there's no way that they'll be using IK for 'normal' animations like running / jumping / throwing the football etc...

They *might* be using canned animations with a bit of IK blending but a true IK / procedural approach to things like running etc.. would be way too expensive (in terms of processing power) to be worth while.

Plus things like changing direction and cutting would be nigh on impossible to do dynamically in real time.


I think it'd need more in the region of a supercomputer to run 22 guys at 30fps with real IK. It has to be using mostly canned animation.

Well, that was my first inclination as well, but I deferred when Greg (a developer) thought it might be possible. I would suspect you're right though.

I know that when Natural Motion pitches Endorphin, most of what they show is taking existing animations and layering their IK on top of the motion, and using it as a way to blend between two different existing animations. For example, a running and jump animation and stand up from a crouch, while using Endorphin to create the leap and fall in between those two existing animations.

It would make a lot of sense that most of their football game animations are canned and that the real-time computation only happens once a major interaction is ready to happen like a possible tackle.

What would be even more interesting is to see how they handle blocking. When I was working on football games I thought that was a harder interaction to get "right" than tackles.

Not sure if any of this has been posted in the various console threads, but I'll bump this and put them all here.

The developers of Backbreaker have been making Developer Diaries of the progress of Backbreaker in IGN.

Diary #1 - The euphoria engine: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/828/828188p1.html
Diary #2 - The morpheme engine (animations): http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/838/838035p1.html
Diary #3 - Crowds: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/841/841936p1.html
Diary #4 - Rendering: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/847/847497p1.html
Diary #5 - Audio: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/855/855627p1.html

They've been doing one abount every month.

And here's a recent interview: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/854/854993p1.html

Terry Tate: Office Linebacker

I've been eyeing this a bit the last couple of days, but so far there is basically nothing about the actual GAME. The technology sounds pretty sweet and all - but what about the game? If this has a franchise mode, etc I'll definitely want to give it a shot - but the lack of any discussion there makes me wonder.