I finished up the updates I wanted to get done post-week1, and we’re ready to head into week 2.
Here is the list from Week 1:
To be attempted before the next game- Blitzing
- Add new plays
- Passing investigation
- Defensive pursuit angle
- Missed tackles
For later:- Depth chart refresh
- New camera control
- Keep an eye on speed rushing
Blitzing is fixed now. It was a pretty simple fix, and I’m surprised I didn’t catch this sooner. The problem goes way back to when I created the master AI controller. I never updated the blitz AI to work with the new controller.
Passing has been fixed. The problem here wasn’t the passing formulas, but how the WR velocity was being calculated. Once I made that calculation more stable, it started working again.
Missed tackles (and tackling in general) has been significantly upgraded. I changed how we calculate missed tackles, to bring in back into a more realistic range. I also put some extra features into the system that turns off collisions for players who miss tackles, so they don’t block other players. It’s a little bit of a hack, but it will do until I put the final missed tackle animation in there.
Defensive pursuit angle has been fixed. I really struggled with this one, until I changed how I was thinking about it. Originally I was thinking in terms of the wolf and the rabbit. The rabbit runs around, trying to avoid the wolf who wants to eat him. The wolf doesn’t run straight at the rabbit, he tries to anticipate the rabbit and cut him off. That’s what I wanted for the defensive pursuit angles. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to figure out the math, and the equations I was generating were complicated, and were going to slow down the engine even more. I was trying to solve too much of the problem all at once. All I needed was to solve the intercept point for a single AI cycle. I don’t necessarily need to anticipate what the rabbit
might do in future cycles.
So instead of the wolf chasing the rabbit, I thought in terms of simply giving the wolf a shotgun. Now all the wolf needs to do is know how fast the rabbit is going, what direction, the distance between them, and how fast his pellets go. He just aims for the point where the rabbit and the pellets will intersect. Now if you do this calculation each AI cycle, any speed/direction/position changes for either the wolf or rabbit will automatically be adjusted for. This also takes care of that final close-range calculation to actually hit the rabbit, because the distance is so small that you’re essentially putting the barrel of the shotgun right on the rabbit. [end metaphor]
I can also eliminate all the other pursuit AIs, and just use one!
I didn’t get any new plays added yet, but enough stuff has been updated that we can move on to week 2.