NaturalMotion for future NCAA Football games

[Rodster]

Quote: Originally Posted by LBzrule

That quote says nothing about it being in for this year's game. It only says how time consuming and difficult adding that to a video football game will be. I do know they are working with two engines. Can't say this is one of them but I know Havok is one. And if they have not made overnight strides in getting it in then it won't be in 2007 (slim chance). It might have a chance of being in PS3 and Revolution since they come out later who knows, but I'm not hopeful for it being in 360. We'll see but it is more likely not than is.

I'm missing something here. Why would it be on the PS3 and Revo but not on the 360?

The system is already out and EA has made mention that all future games will be ports from the Xbox360.

[thmst30]

Quote: Originally Posted by kneebon5

Madden NFL 06 Interview @ team xbox What about the on-field physics? Have you been able to implement advanced collision detection and other goodies to recreate a more reaistic game? Jeremy Strauser: Ultimately we ended up re-writing our animation engine and physics engine from scratch. This is a great first step, it is very good and looks great – but we can take this even further in the future with real time physics engines. Real time physics is a huge undertaking on the grand scale needed for a football game, so we didn’t have time to get this type of system in this year’s game. While we are very happy with the animation and physics systems we have, we’re looking forward to even bigger and better things here in this generation of game engine. link to article http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/...6-Interview/p2 im guessing that they had enough time to get it in this year, i mean they are only going to have a year every year, so i dont see why not, but who knows, hopefully we can get that, because each hit would have its own taste, and then some in air hits, and yeah, this would be sweet.

If you read it closely you will see that he says THEY meaning EA rewrote their physics engine. That means no Natural Motion. That means we will have to use whatever EA came up with. I guarantee it won't be near as good or realistic as NM. EA is always too damn proud to use anyone elses stuff, so they always make their own crap that isn't near as good.

[LBzrule]

Quote: Originally Posted by Rodster

I'm missing something here. Why would it be on the PS3 and Revo but not on the 360? The system is already out and EA has made mention that all future games will be ports from the Xbox360.

It was highly assumptive on my part since PS3 and Revolution come out in November they may have enough time to get it into the current engine. It's not like the PS3 and Revolution will be an entire new engine. It'll just be that added to the same engine. But it won't happen. They'll just wait until 2008 Madden and have it in all three. If the 360 won't have it in August then I highly doubt PS3 and Revolution will have it. I just mentioned them having a very slim chance of having it due to Tiburon having more time to work with the physics and implementing them to the current engine. If it's not in the 360 in August then maybe Madden NFL 2008. And that's maybe because I don't think they have settled on which one is going to be better for football video games yet; whether that be Havok, Endorphin or some other engine.

[blacksun]

Quote: Originally Posted by LBzrule

It was highly assumptive on my part since PS3 and Revolution come out in November they may have enough time to get it into the current engine. It's not like the PS3 and Revolution will be an entire new engine. It'll just be that added to the same engine. But it won't happen. They'll just wait until 2008 Madden and have it in all three. If the 360 won't have it in August then I highly doubt PS3 and Revolution will have it. I just mentioned them having a very slim chance of having it due to Tiburon having more time to work with the physics and implementing them to the current engine. If it's not in the 360 in August then maybe Madden NFL 2008. And that's maybe because I don't think they have settled on which one is going to be better for football video games yet; whether that be Havok, Endorphin or some other engine.

The problem is that they would need to totally rewrite the engine to put this kind of physics in. Its not possible to just add it on. In fact, the change to a "real-life" physics engine is easily the largest change since switching from sprites. Almost certainly larger. What that means is that the gameplay will probably suffer when the change is made. We'll have awesome physics and animations, but I expect it will take a couple of years to get the gameplay back where it was. That is another reason EA won't make the change lightly, they will get blasted if they make the change and gameplay suffers. Eventually they will be forced to make the change or sports games will fall so far behind other genres that their bottom line will suffer. Until then, they will keep making minor modifications to the current engine. I expect that the soonest we have any real chance of seeing anything like Havok will be NCAA '09 or '10.

[LBzrule]

Quote: Originally Posted by blacksun

The problem is that they would need to totally rewrite the engine to put this kind of physics in. Its not possible to just add it on. In fact, the change to a "real-life" physics engine is easily the largest change since switching from sprites. Almost certainly larger. What that means is that the gameplay will probably suffer when the change is made. We'll have awesome physics and animations, but I expect it will take a couple of years to get the gameplay back where it was. That is another reason EA won't make the change lightly, they will get blasted if they make the change and gameplay suffers. Eventually they will be forced to make the change or sports games will fall so far behind other genres that their bottom line will suffer. Until then, they will keep making minor modifications to the current engine. I expect that the soonest we have any real chance of seeing anything like Havok will be NCAA '09 or '10.

Which is why my first response was not anytime soon I just went with 2008 to give people hope but you're right probably 2009 or later.

[stiffarmleft]

Quote: Originally Posted by blacksun

The problem is that they would need to totally rewrite the engine to put this kind of physics in. Its not possible to just add it on. In fact, the change to a "real-life" physics engine is easily the largest change since switching from sprites. Almost certainly larger. What that means is that the gameplay will probably suffer when the change is made. We'll have awesome physics and animations, but I expect it will take a couple of years to get the gameplay back where it was. That is another reason EA won't make the change lightly, they will get blasted if they make the change and gameplay suffers. Eventually they will be forced to make the change or sports games will fall so far behind other genres that their bottom line will suffer. Until then, they will keep making minor modifications to the current engine. I expect that the soonest we have any real chance of seeing anything like Havok will be NCAA '09 or '10.

Unfortunately, I completely agree with you, this would be quite a large undertaking. My hope is that EA has been playing coy and have actually been working on using a physics engine longer than we're speculating. Hopefully the developers had the forsight and insight to realize that this is the next level for sports games. I dont think the engine EA uses will be quite as robust as the Natural Motion engine, more than likely is will be a combinatiion of motion capture and realtime physics and still have pre-determined outcomes, there will just be alot more of them and be more granular. To have a complete physics/animation engine like natural motion and apply it to a football game with 22 players all with complex AI routines and high resolution graphics, would take quite a powerful machine and honestly I don't think any of the next gen systems could handle it, at least not until they can fully tap their respective power.

[jfsolo]

I'm even more pessimistic than most of you here. Depending on how long this new generation console life cycle is, I think we may not see this kind of technology in sports games until the PS4 and XBOX-whatever- era.

I say this because its probable that the top sports developers won't be ready to implement the new tecnology into their games until at least the middle of this new cycle. Are they going to want to completely revamp every aspect of their games for, say a three year period, when they may have to turn around and start from scratch again for the next-next gen hardware?

Also, if sales are strong enough they may see no economic incentive to change at all. Unless gamers are so taken with the application of this technology in other genres, that there is a total public outcry for it to be in sports games, sports developers may continue to live and die with the current mo-cap/animation technology.

Edit: I concur with Stiffarm 100%

[ODogg]

Quote: Originally Posted by jfsolo

I'm even more pessimistic than most of you here. Depending on how long this new generation console life cycle is, I think we may not see this kind of technology in sports games until the PS4 and XBOX-whatever- era.

I unfortunately have to agree. We won't see this type of thing in existing sports franchises on the next gen 360's and PS3's. We will see this in non-sports games though alot, probably starting next year, but to implement this in sports games, as has been said, is a major undertaking and with the short 7 or 8 month window they have, it would be practically impossible to do. The only sports games we may see it in are brand new type games, for example if High Heat is resurrected by Microsoft. Even then it'd probably be 2010 or so before we see it there.