Hello everyone. Well today I captured some video to answer a post over at OperationSports about our implementation of gang tackling (vs. 2k’s).

Here is the youtube vid:

Though I know you guys may get tired of hearing this, here’s where I am genuinely so totally stoked that we have started posting on the forums and can interface directly with you guys. Why? Well, here’s the short (or long) story:

As you may or may not know, I was taken off of gameplay for the past 3+ months to work on some super-secret stuff. This has been great for the forum feedback because I’ve still been involved but I also haven’t been going through the huge crunch (thus allowing me more time to post to you all). So when I wrote the post that our gang tackling implementation was the same as 2k’s, I knew I was right on. But here’s where it starts getting interesting. As soon as you all answered my request for 2k clips that you thought were really impressive, I had to capture something to back up that statement. Well, I sat down today to capture, and I was able to get examples that show we’re doing exactly the same thing (the first 3 in the video). But as I sat down to do this with a fellow designer, we found a few pretty major issues in our gang tackling logic / animations. In the interest of being candid with you guys (and not make just a highlight video), I went ahead and added these problems in my “lowlights” section of the video.

These issues were:
- Defenders slowing / stopping once tackles started (was not fixed correctly from Simon’s initial video)
- Animations not consistently matching (even though I knew we had animation coverage)
- Still an old NaturalMotion gang tackle or two in there

Here’s why I’m so stoked. I am 99% sure that these would have shipped in Madden NFL 09 if LBzrule hadn’t created that post on OS.

So I immediately went down to the gameplay engineers and designers and just sat down trying to figure this stuff out. Two of our best engineers took each problem (Ryan Burnsides on the pursuit problem, VJ LeBlanc on the animation problem), and within like 30 minutes we had figured out the solutions. The player slowing down issue was a legacy problem from when we didn’t have proper gang tackle “coverage”, so Ryan fixed that pretty much right away. The animation matching issue was a series of numbers we were able to tweak - they were the initial degrees of a defender’s position to the ballcarrier that made an animation valid to play.

Hopefully by the end of day tomorrow, I’ll be back with a new video to show you that WE WILL HAVE TRIUMPHED, THANKS TO YOU - THE COMMUNITY! Stay tuned!

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