Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Nothing really new, but I like the straight forward style of the Q&A here. The best thing that I heard was that Anthony White was/is working on CPU A.I. That dude knows his stuff.

<a href="<iframe width=" 560"="" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0BmniwiTP9k?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="">">
<a href="<iframe width=" 560"="" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0BmniwiTP9k?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0BmniwiTP9k?rel=0" allowfullscreen="" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Some of the best stories I heard at EA was Anthony White's meetings with John Madden, how they'd get into minutia nobody else could understand. He knows football. I wish he were in more of a design position rather than production, but it's where he wants to be, where he likes to be, and he's probably the only guy there qualified to do what he does.

Some of my best memories of EA were sitting with Anthony BSing about football for hours. At one point it was proposed by someone that he and I do a weekly podcast, but it never really progressed.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Since we now have off ball injuries if they just make the CPU A.I better when it comes to setting depth chart, drafting, and free agency then I will be perfectly happy with CFM this year.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I think I'm going to do some old MaddenMania style CFM labbing and see if I can't find ways to improve the mode.

If I get data on what the draft classes really look like, compare to the main roster, I can come up with ways to unify them better, improve progression, play with the team options to see how they effect AI. Maybe I'll do a Madden Manifesto 2018:)

If anyone wants to help out, PM me.

Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Auto subs worked on that's good info with off ball injures , tram tendencies , new playbooks !!can't wait . Still want more but cfm is coming to where we want


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I regards to the playbooks, I'd like to see them give the defensive playbooks some attention and actually scale them back so that every playbook doesn't have basically the same plays. The formations might be different for every playbook, but every playbook seems to have the same coverages and blitzes

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Blaming no pro bowl on the current gen hardware, really? If anything it's the software technology their using.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

How do you know? Lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Yea I don't buy it either. If games like Skyrim, GTA 5 and Witcher 3 can be on the PS4 and Xbox One, then you can get pro bowl in Madden.

Just saying.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I'm gonna guess that they don't have the RAM budget to spare to load all 32 teams' helmet assets (raster / normals / etc.) into memory at once. If that's true, something in-game would have to get cut to get proper Pro Bowl helmets in, be it an across-the-board texture fidelity decrease, fewer triangles / textures for stadiums, less audio / commentary, or what have you. Pick your poison.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Open-world games use a lot of tech tricks to look as good as they do which aren't directly applicable to Madden. For example, environmental level-of-detail isn't really relevant to Madden because the in-game environment - the stadium - is pretty static and always on screen at a consistent distance from the gameplay camera. You'll notice polygonal LODs on the player geometry as you zoom in and out, but I don't know if I've seen anything like that on the stadiums.

Environmental LOD is what really makes open-world and exploration-based games go, dating back to Spyro The Dragon on consoles (and probably earlier games as well, but Spyro was one of the first ones to pull it off really well on PSX at least). There's also rarely if any occluding geometry in sports games with which to immediately cull stuff out of the rendering pipeline because another object obstructs it from the camera; if there's something in or near the gameplay area in a sports game, it's most likely visible and ergo getting rendered, whereas in downtown GTA V obstructed cars and NPCs don't even get sent to the graphics card to get rendered because there are buildings in the way.

There's an article floating around on the internet somewhere about GTA V's rendering pipeline and it's god damn insane and optimized to hell and back. If I can find it again, I'll link it.

EDIT: Found it! Enjoy: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/...raphics-study/

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I find game design to be a very interesting topic. How did Madden manage the Pro Bowl helmets on Madden 2005 on the original Xbox? I remember the logos were very low-rez compared to the helmets in regular games, but they found a way to do it. Was it because of everything else being so less detailed compared to today?

Or perhaps it would be low-rez again, and not a product they want to ship (I could only imagine the complaints they'd receive). Interesting to think about.


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

In ye olden days of console gaming in 2003, none of the consoles could push out 1080p @ 30 FPS, let alone 60 FPS. In North America the PS2 - the most popular video game console ever built - topped out at 480i (640x480). The original XBOX I think could do select games at 720p and 1080i, but it certainly wasn't a popular option; Madden never supported either of these output formats as far as I can tell. The hardware wasn't nearly as powerful, so stuff that's taken for granted today like normal mapping (which was gaining mainstream attention in PC gaming at the time) or extensive particle effects just weren't even considerations on consoles. The lower hardware capabilities to some extent freed up RAM to do other things (but only so much; one of my bosses who used to work on The Show on PS2 has told me how they had to repurpose memory which was holding a texture to store game stats in some situations). That's why you were able to see all 32 teams have their helmets in the Pro Bowl in older Madden games; they could put the lo-res helmet images into memory and it'd still look almost as good, because console games could only look but so good in the first place.

As the consoles' hardware have increased in power and capabilities, so too have expectations about what a console game should look like and do. Consoles must output at 1080p at minimum, do all the fun lighting and shading bells and whistles (normal mapping, HDR, particle effects, shadow mapping, etc. etc.). Not to mention the requirements for just the basic textures themselves have increased; because the console can output more pixels to the screen, the textures need to be bigger to show off more detail and not look stretched and muddy. All this stuff takes memory to pull off effectively, and there's only so much memory to go around. AAA game developers are all pushing the console hardware to its limits in different ways.

I think you're right that Tiburon could deliver the Pro Bowl back into the game but in a fashion that no one here, or even they themselves, would be happy with, be it with generic NFC/AFC helmets (which I think was the case at one point? I could be wrong) or lo-res helmets and reduced graphical effects on helmets. The next question would be how much is that addition worth? If they were to do this, how many people would actually play the Pro Bowl? I would guess not many, and I think if the Pro Bowl were to be done right it'd have to be as a byproduct of another component to justify the work. For example, it could be justified if the Longshot story mode had a Pro Bowl chapter, or maybe in franchise the Pro Bowl gets featured as the one place to do 3v3 squads in an online franchise. On its own right now, though, I don't think the Pro Bowl adds enough value to the game to make it a developer focus; there are other places where the devs can better spend their time to get more bang for their buck.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Underdog13 liked this post 👍


But yeah mlb the show has the same issue and they have to resort to have a single uniform for nl and al.

Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Watched the video. Good to hear about CPU Ai has been improved in game and also new playboy's (and teams will play like their real life counterparts). Though I feel like I heard this before.

Also, I'm just not getting this whole live cfm idea. And also how the commentary updates effect cfm. I get that you can pick up at a specific time of the season and play from there, but once you do that it becomes your cfm not real life. So not sure how the weekly commentary would make sense later in the season of its mixing in real life with your cfm.

In addition, say it's week 7 can you go back to week 2 in real life and start playing from there.

Personally I would never use this feature. When I play cfm I don't need it to follow real life week by week.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

You must be kidding correct? I posted something similar in the comment section for the reference youtube vid on SGO. Clearly Oldenburg is confused and couldn't possibly be serious. The ps2 had 32MB of total system ram and 4MB of video ram. The PS4 has 8GB of system RAM of which 5-6GB can be used by developers. Based on my math this is 250x the memory. I'm curious, how many KB/MB do you suspect a helmet skin takes up? Is it more than MLB the show's fully modeled 3D crowd or they're fully responsive and modeled dugouts. Or how about NBA 2k fully modeled crowed and sideline w/ coaches and assistants responding in real time to events on the court. I hardly take Oldenburg as an authority as it relates to the technical side of development and this is an amateur hour type of blunder.

You incorrectly state that games output @ 1080p. HDR is very new for videogames with not much support ATM and M17 certainly didn't get a patch for this. Madden doesn't have any particle effects nor does it have any dynamic weather/ field degradation systems at play. The crowd isn't anywhere close to MLB the Show/2k and lets not even mention what games like BF1 is doing w/ complex microdestruction/ dynamic weather, expansive maps and 64 players in a session running at a higher resolution than madden(1440p ps4 pro). Have you ever downloaded a high-res costume skin for a character in any game? Please check into that and report back how many KBs that skin takes.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

it was a great interview

on the pro bowl maybe they couild go back to the Red A and blue N helmets

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Being someone who was screaming for the "quick season" from NCAA 14 to come into Madden, I LOVE the sound of this "Play Now Live" feature. Sounds exactly what I want to play. No off-field fluff just legit rosters and stats to pick up and play a full season.

Im sure CFM fans arent excited about this but I am.lol

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Clint is really matter-of-fact and it's refreshing.

What I'd really love from Live Seasons is for every game you're not involved in to get the result from real life if you pace yourself to match the season or start late. I.E. I wait until the playoffs to begin my CFM, every game that is CPU Simulated gets the real life results.

You'd have to address how injuries are going to work there, but I think it'd be cool.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Just got around to watching this. Liked that he mentioned the Auto Sub sliders should be working better but he only talked about it from the user standpoint so I'm guessing it will still be the same for the CPU. Like that he talked about upgrading late game AI for the CPU but didn't like how the question about playbooks and play-calling turned into not seeing the same playbooks and plays in competitive. Having a bunch of new plays is great but if the AI is still restricted to 20 plays per situation and will only use ~40% of their playbook then they're still going to be hamstrung and largely incompetent.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I know that a 512x512 texture takes up four times the memory of a 256x256 texture. I also know that to display a geometry with normal mapping (so that light reflects off it properly) requires an additional texture, which the PS2 didn't have to store because asking the PS2 to do normal mapping was a non-starter outside of maybe one or two very specific applications. I also know that displaying a game in 4K with high fidelity is going to require some pretty massive textures relative to what we're used to seeing get into a video game. Finally I know some texture dimensions required for custom teams in Madden 08 PC; the largest is the end zone art at 1024x256, helmets were 256x128 at minimum and I believe the game supported 512x256 as well. All these texture sizes have likely at least quadrupled over the past decade as the graphical expectations of consumers have increased with new hardware.

Oldenburg is a gameplay designer so he might not be the most up-and-up on the technical side of things, but I trust someone inside the building who actually knows about the day-to-day problems of building the video game over the opinion of some armchair quarterback on the internet telling him he's bad at his job. At the very worst he has his ear on the wall for high-level technical conversations with respect to how far along engineering is implementing systems he helps design.

Not sure why bringing up the crowd in other games is relevant as Madden renders a crowd which is at least partially 3D as well.

1080P and HDR aren't the same thing. One refers to pixel density, the other refers to color space and lighting.

Consoles have been able to output at 1080P since at least the last console generation. Forza Motorsport 2 ran at 1080P native in 2007, for example. I'm reasonable sure Madden on XBOX 360 ran at either 720P or 900P and upscaled to 1080P. Madden 17 certainly runs at 1080P on current-gen hardware, and Tiburon claims that Frostbite will get Madden running in 4K @ 60FPS during gameplay on PS4 Pro / XBOX One X. FIFA 17 achieved that and I saw Madden 18 achieve that with my own eyes at EA PLAY last week, so that's not an unreasonable claim by any means.

You are correct that Madden 17 didn't support HDR; already-released PS4 Pro games required title updates to support that, and M17 never got one. However - and I could be wrong on this - I think HDR is handled by the GPU and it's basically doing some fancy ray-tracing with virtual light rays to produce a more accurate color, and that in-and-of itself doesn't require any more system RAM to achieve (it'd obviously required a better GPU, though). Point being it doesn't have any bearing either way on the issue of getting Pro Bowl helmets into memory.

Incorrect, every time a player makes a hard cut on a field-turf surface there are particle effects spawned from the players cleats. So there's one. Super Bowl confetti would be another. I'm sure there are others, especially with pyrotechnics in player / team intros being a thing now thanks to Frostbite.

I've never played a Battlefield game so I've never downloaded a high-resolution character skin, but I'm a seven-years-experienced client engineer for an independent video game studio so generally speaking I have an inkling as to how these things work.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Well if you happen upon any DLC type skin or costume in any videogame on current gen, you'll find that these are miniscule downloads to say the least. Remember these games have capacity of 50GB on disk and virtually unlimited when downloaded. The Madden team uses <20GB of this capacity, therefore its not difficult to see how one would question any claims they make in regards to memory as they routinely leave 60% of disc space on the table.

I am particularly amused that you reference the pebbles kicking up from player's shoe's and superbowl confetti as examples of particle effects. I was more so thinking about explosions, dynamic light sequences etc.

Madden may run @ 1080p however this resolution has hardly been a standard for this gen. Mostly you'll find this achieved in racing games w/ static environments and other games that are not very resource intensive(IE Madden). Unfortunately alot of the more impressive titles run around 900p and are upscaled to 1080P(IE Battlefield series). I'm aware of what HDR is as I own an LG B6 Oled.

The fact that Tiburon routinely uses <40% of disc space for their entire game in no way adds to their credibility in regards to memory utilization. Additionally, lets not forget that Scorpio(aka Xbox one X) has 12GB of GDDR5 memory. Are you telling me that EA is unable load ~32 helmets/unis(actually only 22 at most and won't even be this number as we'd expect several players from same team) into a session with an additional 4GB of ram. Keep in mind that by my previous calculation, this is approaching 400x the memory of PS2. Not only that but several devs are able to stream assets directly from the disk. However, unfortunately for Tiburon, the assets actually have to be on the disc in order for them to be utilized...:y13:

Are you genuinely stating that you believe that the cause of this omission is related to memory?Oldendburg is wildly misinformed at best or blatantly lying(or gross incompetence) at worst. Either way, this is hardly a matter of memory.
of lack

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I certainly trust his opinion - informed by more importantly his continued employment at EA Tiburon and his working with people who possess the specific technical know-how as to why Madden can and can't do things, but also by my own knowledge having worked as a client-side engineer in 3D video games - over yours.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

THIS is the exact type of comment that is really not productive. Its also probably against the rules here.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I guarantee that the majority of people, like myself, would skip the pro bowl. I'm sure this is not a high priority and the extra ram can be used for other more important aspects of the game.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Pro Bowl is simply not a priority. If it was, they'd figure out a way to make it happen...

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Does anyone watch the Pro Bowl? 4.6% ratings?

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com...straight-year/

It would be and is way down on my priority list.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

:freddy:sure

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I agree. No one watches it in real life. Maybe they just give you "stats" and stories from the game. Unless they do that already. To be honest, never even bothered to check. I'm hard on ea when it comes to franchise mode improcements or lack there of, but this I agree with them.

Now about adding a weekly cgi wrap up show.......

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I think the problem that the .00005% of people who are screaming for Pro Bowl and individual helmets and such are focusing way too much on it existing on older gen. Just don't work that way that if something was in past gen that it automatically must go in the new versions and/or that "it's easy".

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Yeah, this is completely ridiculous.

It has nothing to do with technical specifications or limitations, it has everything to do with development priority, driven by revenue. There isn't a revenue incentive for EA to spend the development time building in a Pro Bowl. Yet, there is the revenue incentive for EA to make an Ultimate Feast Turkey MUT card



There's nothing technical preventing anything, it's about revenue priority. For Madden NFL Football, turkey-based trading cards are a higher revenue priority than accurately portraying an NFL season.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Based on the TV ratings alone, it's barely in the conversation as part of the "NFL Season."

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

pro bowl is boring and useless

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I couldn't care less about the Pro Bowl in real life or in Madden.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I did enjoy Clint's response about HC.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Listen, man, gamers want things. If devs can't be bothered to rewrite the rules of physics to give them what they want, then it's obvious they are just lazy or bad at their jobs. Gamers are special, beloved creatures, and the mere existence of their desires is clear evidence that what they want is possible. Why do you hate gamers???

Stop covering for the overlords of gaming that continually deprive gamers of their entitled wants.

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

Pro bowl isn't in the game because there isn't a pipeline built that can allocate the memory to handle 32 helmets. It's not "there isn't enough memory," it's "allocating the memory would require far more man hours and potential bug introduction than a feature that a fraction of a fraction of players care about is worth"

Call it lazy if you want, I call it priorities. The people complaining about it here are approximately 87% of the people who watch the real Pro Bowl.

Sent from my SM-G930P using Operation Sports mobile app

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

I think the answer Oldenburg provided to this question in addition to his overall body language towards the interview itself is the issue ppl have. It's not about the pro-bowl feature. Its more-so about the fact that there's always some excuse as to why fill in the blank feature couldn't make it into the game. This is even more apparent when you see other game devs doing everything they can to ensure they cover most if not all of the features that their respective customer base expect. B/c they know if they don't provide it, then one of their competitors will. Oh wait...

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

If something isn't in the game there is a reason for it. It's not "an excuse" as you call it. Other games aren't all inclusive and have things left out of them as well. They too have reasons for it.


Sent from my iPad using Operation Sports

Re: Madden 18 CFM Interview with Clint Oldenburg(Sports Gamers Online)
 

As someone who has wanted the basic season mode back since CFM was introduced, I'm hopeful you can have 32 team control in the Play Now Live mode and avoid the butchering of the rosters that simming preseason does every time. Has anybody heard if 32 team control is in play now live?