3D UI

[jsteele14]

I keep seeing references to 3D UI and how much time and resources it comsumed. I have not seen any detail specifically explaining it. Can someone provide some insight into this new UI and why it was so time and resource consuming?

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[CarryTheWeight]

"3D UI" most likely refers to what we've seen in Franchise screenshots (e.g. Jason Garrett at his desk in the main menu or the OBJ/Henry/Wentz model behind their respective player cards).

FIFA 18 already laid the groundwork for this last year in its Career mode. You had news stories featuring 3D player models as well as contract negotiations in your manager's office with players and agents.

I think the Game Informer article's info about a "real-time" NFL Draft might play into this as well. Certain players will walk out onto the stage after their selection, and something tells me that this will be a part of the UI.

I think this has something to do with the architecture of Frostbite and how efficient it may be in terms of UI integration, but I guess we'll learn more about this after EA's Franchise and Presentation deep dive blogs.

[jbd345]

Hopefully this also means some sort presentation upgrade too. Menus and a draft are great. But in-game franchise presentation is in serious need of a fresh coat of paint.

[adembroski]

Quote: Originally Posted by CarryTheWeight

"3D UI" most likely refers to what we've seen in Franchise screenshots (e.g. Jason Garrett at his desk in the main menu or the OBJ/Henry/Wentz model behind their respective player cards). FIFA 18 already laid the groundwork for this last year in its Career mode. You had news stories featuring 3D player models as well as contract negotiations in your manager's office with players and agents. I think the Game Informer article's info about a "real-time" NFL Draft might play into this as well. Certain players will walk out onto the stage after their selection, and something tells me that this will be a part of the UI as well. I think this has something to do with the architecture of Frostbite and how efficient it may be in terms of UI integration, but I guess we'll learn more about this after EA's Franchise and Presentation deep dive blogs.

Frostbite, as far as I know, has no bearing on CFM UI. CFM runs on a proprietary engine that came along with the switch to the GameChanger asset manager and FranTK testbed.

I don't know *why* 3D UI was so tough, I just know it was repeatedly shelved because we didn't have the resources. It would come up constantly and every experienced designer in the room would just hang their heads like we were utterly handcuffed. We all loved the Head Coach '09 UI and wished we could replicate that.

Part of it is the obvious; it requires its own assets. There were pipeline problems. That is, displaying assets built for in-game on the front end, where those assets existed.

So as I'm not an engineer or UI Artist, I couldn't in a million years provide a satisfactory answer, I do know it was a pretty massive undertaking just to get generic 2d images to display in-game models rather than generic images (you might remember before '18 you'd get action poses in the news feed, draft class guys would be in generic black uniforms. That in and of itself was hard).

The best I can say is it's not how the UI was built, so they basically had to rebuild it.

I could be wrong, it might have come right over from Longshot with very little work, but given how CFM was basically it's own menu/asset system completely removed from everything else, I doubt it.