The Take Out' Game

[TheWatcher]

Quote: Originally Posted by neuroticomic

Fair enough. give me their home addresses. I actually liked a few of the presentation things in 06 for 360. One being the LOS camera view.

Neuroticomic,

are you referring to this:



Or this?



The first one is a camera view that we should be able to select. Reminds me a bit of the stuff you could do with 2K5. The second one is a nice preplay camera angle. Both should've never left the game. I never understand why they get rid of cool stuff like that.

[neuroticomic]

Quote: Originally Posted by TheWatcher

Neuroticomic, are you referring to this: Or this? The first one is a camera view that we should be able to select. Reminds me a bit of the stuff you could do with 2K5. The second one is a nice preplay camera angle. Both should've never left the game. I never understand why they get rid of cool stuff like that.

Watcher, thats exactly it.
Mostly referring to the first 06 hot, but the 07 one was hot too.
Loved that immersive feel.

[BezO]

Quote: Originally Posted by Fillycheze

When we transitioned to next-gen, we started over. Literally. We made the choice to almost completely re-write the game vs. just porting it over to the new platforms.

Why did so many of the problems from last gen find their way into this gen with the re-write?

And could you briefly explain what is meant by "re-writing the game from the ground up"? Until '09, there didn't appear to be anything radicaly different on the field.

Lastly, can you list some of the major advantages to re-writing the game for this gen? And would you make the same decision if you had it to do over?

[Ian_Cummings]

Quote: Originally Posted by BezO

Why did so many of the problems from last gen find their way into this gen with the re-write? And could you briefly explain what is meant by "re-writing the game from the ground up"? Until '09, there didn't appear to be anything radicaly different on the field. Lastly, can you list some of the major advantages to re-writing the game for this gen? And would you make the same decision if you had it to do over?

"From the ground up" means all underlying tech. Examples:
- Our rendering engine started from a blank page of code, meaning that every single stadium, texture, helmet, piece of equipment, etc had to be re-authored.
- Our animation engine (i.e. tools & technology) was started from scratch with the objective of sharing among all EA Sports games. The tool & core technology was extremely early in development so Madden had MAJOR pains getting this up and running while having to re-add and tag every single animation in the game
- Models & skeletons were all re-created from scratch, so every single animation from current-gen had to either be re-captured, thrown out, or re-purposed (which is why you still see a few animations that made it over from PS2 days)
- We re-authored our entire UI system to not be a homebrew tool but rather a company wide solution - again, same thing as animation - lots of growing pains as we had to re-author every single screen in the game
- The entire game went from being written in normal C to C++, so nearly every line of code had to be refactored.

So those base level technologies all being re-written caused a major amount of work. When you talk about things not being radically different (I assume you mean gameplay because obviously graphics obviously are different), it's mainly because there was a ton of time that had to be spent to get ALL of those technologies up to an ultra-high quality, and in the meantime plenty of code had to be ported over or maybe re-worked a bit. As another example, I know I've seen you mention things like 'suction blocking' before - that's actually a totally different issue at it's core between the two animation engines, but to the consumer it may look the same. It's a problem of having enough variety in matching animations vs. the AI going to find those animations...but the way that problem manifests is 100% different between the two generations.

There is also a whole hidden layer to you guys of how your development tools support fast iteration time, and if your technologies don't create an easy-to-tune process it doesn't matter how good they are (since you can't make changes rapidly). This is something that we are REALLY seeing improve drastically across the board at Tiburon & EA as a whole and it's one of those things that really can separate good games from the bad.

As for your last question, I would likely not re-write the whole thing again...it'd be in chunks. We did have some major advantages of not being shackled (i.e. we really would just not have been able to do a lot of the things we do now in the old animation system), and I don't think there's any way we could move over to the shared animation tech (the ANT tool) at this point if we didn't do it back then, but that could have been selectively attacked instead of dropping EVERYTHING. It's just not acceptable to lose all your features AND start fresh with a whole new suite of gameplay and animation tech. And believe me even after all the pain of the 1st transition, I hope I'm the guy that gets to make the calls this time.

FIFA did a damn good approach on the transition - they added a secondary R&D team to work and rebuild their animation & gameplay engine for FIFA 07, while putting their core team on figuring out rendering and stuff for 06. I think this was probably better than the 2k approach of basically just up-rezzing, but now I look at NBA 2k7, 2k8, 2k9 and see that you still can obviously make a great game by doing that approach. The trade-off I think is that you keep your depth but you might be more limited graphically or maybe with future growth (just speculating on that).

[BezO]

Quote: Originally Posted by Ian_Cummings_EA

"From the ground up" means all underlying tech. Examples: ... - Our animation engine (i.e. tools & technology) was started from scratch with the objective of sharing among all EA Sports games. The tool & core technology was extremely early in development so Madden had MAJOR pains getting this up and running while having to re-add and tag every single animation in the game

This is where I don't see much change.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ian_Cummings_EA

When you talk about things not being radically different (I assume you mean gameplay because obviously graphics obviously are different), it's mainly because there was a ton of time that had to be spent to get ALL of those technologies up to an ultra-high quality, and in the meantime plenty of code had to be ported over or maybe re-worked a bit. As another example, I know I've seen you mention things like 'suction blocking' before - that's actually a totally different issue at it's core between the two animation engines, but to the consumer it may look the same. It's a problem of having enough variety in matching animations vs. the AI going to find those animations...but the way that problem manifests is 100% different between the two generations.

Ahhhh. Cool. That explains alot. Do you feel you're turning the corner with the animations? Without revealing specifics of course, do you think someone like me will notice a major improvement in animations next year.

I've seen you mention a few times that we're not seeing all available animations. Facemask animations for example. Same reasons? Have you all conqured this hurdle yet?

Thanks for the explaination.

And yeah, I'm talking gameplay(animations & AI). Graphics are MUCH improved.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ian_Cummings_EA

FIFA did a damn good approach on the transition - they added a secondary R&D team to work and rebuild their animation & gameplay engine for FIFA 07, while putting their core team on figuring out rendering and stuff for 06.

I agree with the results. Great game.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ian_Cummings_EA

I think this was probably better than the 2k approach of basically just up-rezzing, but now I look at NBA 2k7, 2k8, 2k9 and see that you still can obviously make a great game by doing that approach. The trade-off I think is that you keep your depth but you might be more limited graphically or maybe with future growth (just speculating on that).

With the exeption of MAYBE graphics, I haven't seen the downside to NBA 2K's approach. Another great game.

[AlexBrady]

I wonder why they took out the signature running styles in 07.

[TheWatcher]

Quote: Originally Posted by AlexBrady

I wonder why they took out the signature running styles in 07.

Me too. And I'd like to reiterate that they were doing a lot of things right with that game, and sig styles were one of those things.

There were plenty of things needing to be fixed in 07, there is no doubt about it, but it wasn't all wrong. What got me is that with 08 it seemed like they wanted to completely distance themselves from everything and start over, which they did but in the process they dropped a number of the great things they'd done along the way and in my opinion it was part of what killed Madden 08. It was like the game had just gotten smaller and went into a cocoon. Thankfully, 09 emerged from it and we're getting back on track.

I think every year they should have a session and discuss not just what new things to do, but about what old things can absolutely not be canceled. Polling the community will certainly bring up a lot of feedback there. Just as a framework, things like sliders and options should always top the list of things that shouldn't be removed.

[poopie]

i hope they take out all that fake emotion that seems to happen after every play.no one in the NFL does that crap,maybe after a crucial first down or a sack.and whats up with all the player chatter.it would be better if the players were seen reacting to one another instead running away from each other