Natural Motion, Is it in for 2010?

[cdon2k]

About a month ago there was a rumor that EA was buying or licensing Natural Motion.... An announcement was supposed to be at Leizpeg...

Did anyone find out what the outcome of that was, or what the announcement was? Ian?

[Birdman18]

Quote: Originally Posted by cdon2k

About a month ago there was a rumor that EA was buying or licensing Natural Motion.... An announcement was supposed to be at Leizpeg... Did anyone find out what the outcome of that was, or what the announcement was? Ian?

i also heard a rumor that EA was looking to buy Epic, which was shot down quickly by the Prez of Epic, Mark Rein.. i would love to see madden running on the unreal 4 engine

[Cod]

I don't believe the Madden developers will ever obtain a game engine license from a third-party company. It is my understanding from talking with collegues, reading articles, etc. that EA Sports develops all of their game engines in-house. With that said, if they don't already, EA needs to hire some developers soley for "sports engine" production. That way, you could have a group of developers that's sole purpose with the company is to keep building and updating the game engines used in EA Sports titles instead of having the same engines (ie NBA Live) in games year after year.

Off-topic somewhat, why does everyone think the Euphoria engines is the answer? As far as I know, Euphoria has never been used in a released sports title; so it gets all this hype, but we don't know how well it will really work when it comes to sports gaming. BackBreaker "LOOKS" nice, but like with any marketing ploy, you're only going to get what's the absolute best (hence why we haven't seen any passing from the BB game).

In conclusion, the Madden-series just needs to be re-tooled from the ground up. Other people on these forums have it right when they say that EA needs to take two years to put out the next Madden while keeping 09 updated as much as possible.

[cdon2k]

To answer your question, Euphoria is a true physics engine. When a tackle happens in Madden currently, it's just a series of animations to make it look like a tackle happened. Yes the game does have a physics engine, but as someone said it's an EA engine and it's actually kind of rudimentary. To me, it doesn't simulate a tackle, it's more of just a problem solver (like, oh crap two players are colliding, I better do something!) What it comes down to is how well EA can make it look like the two or more players are interacting, and we have seen the result...

With natural motion, a game has a true physics engine. It's the latest and greatest technology and while EA's engine is struggling to get 3 players to interact in a tackle, natural motion can probably simulate both teams interacting if that were possible. Another thing natural motion features is called predictive physics. Let me give in an example. GTA 4 uses natural motion. Lets say my character is standing on a ledge in the game and I fall off the ledge. With an old physics engine, a programmer would have to program my character reaching up as he fell to grab the ledge to try and hang on to pull myself back up to the roof. With natural motion's predictive physics, my character reacts to his environment automatically and grabs for that ledge without any programming from the developer. Now I am not sure how this would work for Madden, but imagine if a 4 man gang tackle was just built into the engine instead of the two years that EA has spent building what we have now, which is really only a 2 man tackle. To go further, it is due to the lack of a decent physics engine that we have NEVER seen a pileup in Madden.

Now lets talk that "other game", it had an emphasis on physics versus EA's emphasis on motion capture. Motion caputure is actually taking guys doing the movements and captuing their moves to the letter via a computer. Ian has even asked which technique people think is more condusive, but I can't imagine that people even thought that captured moves is the answer. THAT is the reason we keep seeing the same 5 tackles OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again He argued that physics make players look a little rag dollish and dead, but THAT CAN BE TUNED and I will definetely take that over what we have now. To further the point, with all of EA's emphasis on motion capture, why is it that we don't have signature animations? But I digress, this is not meant to be a negative thread. There's your answer anway.

[LBzrule]

The only problem with getting that and anything else is they would be starting over again and patience is running thin, VERY thin. Unless you are willing to accept another 4 to 5 years to "get there."

[cdon2k]

Good point LB, but at this point, most agree that the game needs to be rebuilt because the fundamentals are so broken. I am all for starting over and yes my patience is wearing thin. I just don't think they can achieve what we want by moving in the current direction.

[tbbuccaneer87]

im gonna sound stupid here, but what exactly is a gaming engine? i don't understand it at all.

[Joborule]

Quote: Originally Posted by tbbuccaneer87

im gonna sound stupid here, but what exactly is a gaming engine? i don't understand it at all.

In general, it's the foundation of how the game plays. How are the attributes put into effect. How are animations triggered. How is physics applied in the game. The general foundation of the gameplay.