I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game engine.

[Haval93]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Why the world would they scrap their engine, when they have been working towards it for years and invested millions of dollars into? The engine is more than fine. No way in hell would any company actual rebuild their engine line by line, it would takes years to do so and would make zero sense. The biggest problem regarding Live has been their animation quality and how they transition from one another. Animation blending is a difficult aspect in gaming, not only choosing the right state to transition to but blending it as well can be difficult to do. For animation quality, they can have a more rigorous approach to it by phasing out any animation that was captured past a certain number years ago and making sure they got good capture footage.

I know a lot of users like to say just capture day and night and add thousands of new animations, but this comes at a huge cost to the animators. Now for ever new animation you just added, you have to make sure it is correctly rigged for the player, and on top of that, if you make any changes to the players rig or model, you have to go back and re-animate each animation. That is a lot of busy work and only grows with more animations.

Some animation need to be scraped period, but in my opinion, the biggest issue with Live 14, 15, and 16 animations were transitions to the correct animation relative to speed or velocity of the player, to many times does a player do one move and quickly/jumps to another animation were the following animation is either (speed up or speed down) in comparison to the previous animation(Causes sliding, herky jerky movement and so on). That needs to be addressed, and that's something that can be fixed with time and man-power, not by re-writing the engine.

[King_B_Mack]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Until they give Users the options to Edit the game you wont really know. It could be as simple as some tweaks to Ratings and Tendencies that could take care of what you are seeing. Look how many issues get fixed by Edits in NBA 2k Series.

As others have said, we will have to see what the DEMO holds this year before digging deep into this Conversation.

Ratings and tendencies tweaks can't fix what's wrong with Live's animations. The way guy's look when performing certain actions just looks wrong. The way the ball comes off a guy's hand going 10 feet in the air on a finger roll and then just dropping into the basket. The non contact in the paint and forcefielding through them to finish your dunk/layup, that kind of stuff isn't going to get fixed by being able to edit a rating or something like that.

[Vic Viper]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Why the world would they scrap their engine, when they have been working towards it for years and invested millions of dollars into? The engine is more than fine. No way in hell would any company actual rebuild their engine line by line, it would takes years to do so and would make zero sense. The biggest problem regarding Live has been their animation quality and how they transition from one another. Animation blending is a difficult aspect in gaming, not only choosing the right state to transition to but blending it as well can be difficult to do. For animation quality, they can have a more rigorous approach to it by phasing out any animation that was captured past a certain number years ago and making sure they got good capture footage.

I know a lot of users like to say just capture day and night and add thousands of new animations, but this comes at a huge cost to the animators. Now for ever new animation you just added, you have to make sure it is correctly rigged for the player, and on top of that, if you make any changes to the players rig or model, you have to go back and re-animate each animation. That is a lot of busy work and only grows with more animations.

Some animation need to be scraped period, but in my opinion, the biggest issue with Live 14, 15, and 16 animations were transitions to the correct animation relative to speed or velocity of the player, to many times does a player do one move and quickly/jumps to another animation were the following animation is either (speed up or speed down) in comparison to the previous animation(Causes sliding, herky jerky movement and so on). That needs to be addressed, and that's something that can be fixed with time and man-power, not by re-writing the engine.

Thank you bro. People work hard with this game. It's not like they had years to build up after NBA Elite 11. They scrapped NBA live 10's cycle after one year then NBA Elite 11's cycle was scrapped. You bring in NEW DEVELOPERS to work on a NEW CYCLE in 2011. This is only 4 years in the making. Those 4 years of work should have been put to use prior to NBA Live 12 (never released) and then they could have brought out a better product. Keep in mind their cycled started when the next Gen consoles were announced. So you are starting from scratch with a new development team on a new next generation console....

It's not clock work. You can't just make things happen from nothing right away. It takes time. It takes man power. It takes hours upon hours looking at a screen to get it right. The development window isnt even that big. They cant work on the game all year. The developers get paid to improve their game and they have. It has gotten better, but the engine isn't out of date, it's that their isn't enough time and development for this engine should have started 4 years early. They should have kept NBA live 10's engine for another 3 years to help.

I know people are tired of hearing this because they think it's an excuse or a crutch, but it's gonna be NBA Live 17 or 18 that shows what the engine is about. Video Game designing is tough....some people work on games for 3-5 years before their game is released and they watch it get canceled. Let's be realistic people.

2K has been on the same engine for years upon years, but they perfected their engine through hardwork and patience. Their engine wasn't perfect at first, but when have time to breathe and follow through with cycles, you will start to see results. This is EA's 3rd game for this cycle. Let the game breathe and walk.

[vtcrb]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Ratings and tendencies tweaks can't fix what's wrong with Live's animations. The way guy's look when performing certain actions just looks wrong. The way the ball comes off a guy's hand going 10 feet in the air on a finger roll and then just dropping into the basket. The non contact in the paint and forcefielding through them to finish your dunk/layup, that kind of stuff isn't going to get fixed by being able to edit a rating or something like that.

Ok. I have heard the same thing with NBA 2k before, animations cant be fixed. We have unlocked Many over the years, that didnt appear before Edits, and have stopped many bad animations, by Zeroing out the Tendency. Honestly doesnt matter, as we wont be able to do any under the hood tweaks this year.

[DakkoN]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

The funny thing is they have said on more than one occasion in the past that they rebuilt the game from the ground up. That's like their go-to phrase when they want to let you know they've been working hard on something.. "rebuilt from the ground up"

The last time I know for sure was after the scrapping of Elite. I think their definition of rebuilding from the ground up and my own definition of it are vastly different because it seems to me they've just been adding onto the same engines for the past 10+ years. When I think of that phrase, I imagine them scrapping all existing assets and starting over so that no traces of the original engine can be seen or found.

[GStera7]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

I am playing the demo now.

I am definitely buying this year.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[XxSpiritHunterX]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Me personally I never saw anything wrong with the engine Tiburon has used in NBA Live. Sure, 14 was bad and 15 was decent at best. But the way I see it it's more like a design style. I'm glad that Live doesn't play close to 2K because it's what gives it an identity. 14 was robotic, 15 was the same with slight improvement, but from what I've played of 16 so far (in shootaround) and seen of 16 today, Live is beginning to make that style THEIR style. It won't be perfect for sure, but then again 2K's isn't close to perfect either. I'm just glad that I finally have two good/great basketball games to switch between from time to time.

Besides, none of us want another NBA Elite

[RICH72601]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

I always reserve judgement until I actually feel things for myself, but after looking at previous vids and live-feeds, I see a lot about this game, animation-wise that just makes this game still seems like it has a long way to go. I will admit that it looks improved, but all the sped-up, hitchy animations really take away from this sharp-looking game. It still looks very "floaty" in a lot of areas and dated. I'll definitely give it a try, but not sure if I can justify a purchase, especially with no editing of rosters and such.

[ThaLiveKing]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Don't 'judge based on live stream.

[Kurupt_XxX]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Don't 'judge based on live stream.

https://twitter.com/cLap2k/status/643633904738541568?s=09

Damn, it looks so bad.

[RICH72601]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

If I'm looking at actual game footage, it's hard not to go by that. I'm not really concerned on how the person controlling the game is playing. I'm not condemning the game. The main thing that I always look at is the movement of the players, and to me it just seems like it really needs to be tightened up and some animations needs to be completely thrown out or slowed down. Overall, it looks significantly better than Live 14 &15.

[swac07]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Yeah man something has to shake if i can do a hop step and jump again while im in mid air
Check the video below! I had the bulls playing on allstar difficulty

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yxVmNpIlR9Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[kevhova]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Well let me say this.... Me and my homeboys have had the demo since around 4pm Monday and yes we had a lot fun playing pro-am we also had a lot of fun laughing on how this game animates now in some places the game is smooth but I have to say this game has some of the worst lay up animations I have ever seen! There are still some rocket dunks in here! This game just doesn't animate well and I don't know why... It's really crazy that the game is in their 3rd year and the game still looks like this! Pro-am is fun tho but not fun enough for me to purchase this game... My 2 cents

Sent from my 0PCV1 using Tapatalk

[Sundown]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

Bad animations don't have anything to do with the engine here. They're just bad animations.

Unless they're being procedurally created (which don't look to be the case), or look bad because of blending issues (which Live actually does a decent job with), the problem is the animations captured were wacky and are often played out of context.

The weird animation bugs are definitely an engine issue though which can be improved on.

[Sundown]

Re: I think it's time for EA and the Live crew to consider overhauling their game eng

The funny thing is they have said on more than one occasion in the past that they rebuilt the game from the ground up. That's like their go-to phrase when they want to let you know they've been working hard on something.. "rebuilt from the ground up"

The last time I know for sure was after the scrapping of Elite. I think their definition of rebuilding from the ground up and my own definition of it are vastly different because it seems to me they've just been adding onto the same engines for the past 10+ years. When I think of that phrase, I imagine them scrapping all existing assets and starting over so that no traces of the original engine can be seen or found.

As meaningless as "rebuilding from the ground up" means, it doesn't necessarily mean the result is automatically better before the new engine is mature. Usually it means a lot of issues in things that used to work-- some of what we're actually seeing-- until the code is developed and well tested after multiple iterations.

If anything, the glaring issues that are apparent-- animation bugs, bad AI, problematic gameplay balance-- those are all indicators of a rewrite of core components, some of which might have been unnecessary.

And there's really no such thing as throwing out all code and starting from "public class NBAGame {}". That's just silly software development. All software is built on existing software. You just wouldn't get anywhere if you constantly had to write everything from scratch. There's nothing magical about a rewrite that makes things better unless the rewrite was focused on specific components that just don't work properly with the new requirements.

Any lead of such a large project that just throws everything out for... reasons would (and should) be automatically fired. The last time Live got a real rewrite from the ground up, we got Elite. Well, we got nothing for 3 years... because that's what it takes to write something from scratch and get to where you were before.

That said, they shouldn't use old, terrible looking animations. Because they're just bad. It has nothing to do with the engine itself. If anything, it seems that the Elite "rewrite" probably actually tempted the team(s) to use existing art assets to save time, rather than focusing on developing a specific area to take it to the next level.