Madden Gods

Madden 09 News, Forums, Tips, Cheats, & Strategy.

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against EA Sports

Well it appears EA’s license agreement with the NFLPA could be coming to an abrupt halt as a class action lawsuit has been filed against them in federal court recently. The license agreement they’ve had in place for a few years now with the NFLPA granted them exclusive rights to player licensing such as names and numbers, and other rights that made other NFL games close up shop.

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Have you reserved your Madden 2009 copy yet?

How many of you have already reserved your copy of Madden 2009 scheduled for realase in early August? Better yet how many of you are going to be waiting outside the gates of your video game stores for those midnight relases?

We’d love for you to let us know, so why not head on over to our Madden 2009 Forums and let us know your thoughts right now. Registration is 100% free and so is all our information. There isn’t any reason not to!

Madden NFL 2009 Gang Tackling Pt. 2

Madden 09 - Breakaway Animation System (Alpha)

Madden 09 Producer’s Blog On Ball Carrier Animations

Hello Again, Simon Sherr here, animation director on Madden NFL 09. When I moved to Tiburon this year they were already using our next-generation animation engine called “ANT” (EA ANimation Toolkit). This engine is one of the few game engines that is truly “next-gen” from scratch (not a port of older technology). ANT is also why a lot of our games are now 60fps while others struggle to hit 30, as our engine is designed to make use of the power of the consoles, not just run on them. EA’s proprietary animation middleware is not just a “code library” as I noticed was said on a few posts after my tackles blog. While we do share a common code library for things like math functions, and sending jobs out across multiple processors on the 360 and PS3 (something that can be quite complex and very hard to debug), we also share a middleware animation engine and tool set. This set of tools lets us animate in-game as we construct features. It’s part of my job to evaluate and use the best technology (and EA has yet to say no when I ask for something), like Autodesk’s HumanIK, which is fully integrated into our engine. Internally though I’ve heard people say “it feels like we are bringing a supercar to a horse and buggy convention” when we compare our animation tools to what is out there for middleware. You may ask “how can that be possible?”, We have many titles that share this engine, and every team is working on these tools together and still maintaining complete control over what pieces they choose to use and improve. This means we have literally put a hundred man-years of engineering into a 100% next generation gameplay engine (and continue to improve it every day), something no other company in the world would have the time, or resources to do.


Obviously with so many teams working on it, the engine improves very fast, so when I moved here I wanted EA Tiburon to have full exposure to the tool suite I was accustomed to on NBA Street. We started the year with all the animation engineers working on a substantial upgrade to the latest version of the tools to take advantage of the most recent technology inside of ANT. The excitement around what we could do with the new tools available to us was a fantastic foot to start the year on. I figured I would take the time to fill you in on many of the other dramatic improvements we made to the animation engine this year.


The all-new Ball Carrier
With the new tackle engine being so much more consistent and responsive than before, it basically shut down the running game (especially with the add-on gang tackle system using the new tackle engine). So we had to give offense a weapon to retaliate with.


A small team of dedicated engineers, designers, animators (and me) took the reins and committed to delivering the best running game we have seen in a football game to date. Check out this video:

Click Here for the Ball Carrier Video
Madden’s running game got a complete overhaul this year (and by complete I mean, just like tackling, we took the “Nuke and Pave” approach and actually rebuilt it from scratch). This rework included nearly all of the animations as well. We implemented a brand new transition system that was invented by myself along with a couple software engineers up at EA Canada, which has been used to do the skating control in “NHL”, the skill moves in “FIFA 2008″, the fight trees in “Def Jam Icon “, Trick Remixer in “NBA Street Homecourt”, tricks and movement in “FIFA Street”, and is being used for “Fight Night: Round 4″ (and is even being used by EA LA, and EA DICE, for action titles they are working on). This system works over top of the animation, in a way that gives us full control over interrupting and steering animations without getting ugly “popping” transitions, and lets us iterate in real-time as we work and build new features and moves without the need for new code. We originally thought we would use this system for only skill moves in Madden NFL 09, but as we started to work with it, we decided to use it to totally rebuild the ball-carrier and give the running game a completely new, realistic, intuitive (and very responsive) feel.


Our number one goal was to make the running game realistic while giving you absolute control. A common complaint in Madden NFL 08 was in the lack of gathering or planting animations needed to simulate a real NFL player, so we definitely wanted to bring those back into the game. The problem with canned special move animations though is that feeling of waiting for animations to finish - we don’t want that at all. The great solution we came up with in our new system was the power to allow you to procedurally steer any animation, and interrupt them with plants and push offs. This means that when you are playing a procedural animation move (like a juke or spin), you can still actually “control” that animation. In many cases we tune the steering rate to be a much lower turn rate than normal running for realistic purposes, but you still don’t feel the loss of control or that “stuck” feeling. The great thing is that we also adapt the feel based on the player statistics (like speed, agility and juke ratings). The take-home is that you really maintain control at all times, because even though you juke to the right you can steer it to thread the needle and find the daylight at the line.


Starting with basic left stick movement we rebuilt running from the ground up to create more control, while also improving the visuals. We gave animators control over posing characters in their leans, which made for very believable procedural leaning while running. We made turning feel exactly how we wanted it to for both running and sprinting. We then added the left stick fast cuts. If you ease off the L-Stick you can plant your feet and then quickly burst to the sides in cut moves which can be interrupted at any time; this gives you the ability to shoulder shake your opponents and cut hard with the left stick only, or break an inside run to the outside with an explosive left stick push off (and it feels like “plant… and cut”). Again this is all based on player ratings too so you will not really have any success trying to shoulder-shake DB’s or cut hard against the grain with a big bruising FB.


To really give the ultimate control for the elite players, we implemented the ability to interrupt our R-Stick skill moves, so you can juke to spin to back juke to avoid a defender. Be careful though, the more you do in a row the higher your chances of slipping and losing your balance (especially if you are using a less agile ball carrier…and weather magnifies this as well).


We also added directional diving - so if you are not sprinting you will reach for first down with dive. We also gave you the ability to spin by spinning the right stick from the bottom to the sides, something that makes combo-ing spins far more fluid in terms of right-stick control (but you can still use B/Circle if you like).


Check out this run below: I used this same LT run in the tackles video, but I wanted to show you another camera on it. I read on a post that the initial breakdown was my player being “pulled into a tackle” …when that actually wasn’t the case. In this run I put together a left stick shoulder shake with a juke left and faked out the first defender (no 2 player move played here at all), trucked out of a tackle, then stiff armed a tackle, and then tried to spin out of that last tackle (but didn’t make it, the stat matchup or my timing on the spin put a stop to the run, but it did feel like I tried and got stopped). Note this is the lowest skill level too, I wanted to break a few tackles in a row to show off the fluidity of the new tackle engine. LT is very dangerous but you won’t see him breaking 3 tackles every play (and even when I did bust through half the Bengals D, I think I got about 2 yards in this run..haha, we have put a lot of effort into balancing the new ballcarrier and the new tackle engine, both look and feel far better, both have more depth, but they are balanced well against each other).

Click Here for LT vs Bengals Video

So in summary, the overhaul results in (number one) the most realistic running game to date, but secondly the most fun running game with the most user control (with a lot more depth in deciding how you run the ball).

- Procedural: This means results are changed by the hardware during gameplay - in essence an animation can be changed as it plays back instead of having to be pre-canned
- Locomotion: Another name for basic player movement
- Transition: What an animation does as it starts and blends with the animation playing before it.
- Middleware: Tools used to piece together animations and tune procedural additions to the raw animation data in the game’s real-time environment, basically letting us animate “in the game”.


Character Grounding with Foot-plant
I hate “foot sliding”. I have hated it since 3D games hit the shelves on the PS1 when I was an animation student. It eliminates the weight of the characters in the game. A system pioneered for FIFA 2007 was fully integrated into Madden NFL 09 this year by our “Rookie of the Year” engineer. She implemented the system and gave it some very nice improvements to help compensate for the number of players we have in close proximity on the field. We now have the system well tuned and functional and it really helps the characters have more weight than we have seen in the past. Check out this comparison video from 08 to 09:


In this video I wanted to show you the feet up close, first in real-time and then in slow motion. If you watch in slow motion you can see that the feet are released just before the legs are stretched too far, but when I under-steer that spin move (which is animated to end in the same direction it starts) and turn it into a 180, you can see that the feet stay nice and planted.


Note: I am sorry for the 08 stuff not being as clear as the 09, all the 08 footage I could dig up was captured by Ian Cummings on his PC a while ago, and is not progressive scan footage like the 09 is. It does show the animation just as well, but it’s not intended to be a rendering comparison.
Click here for the foot plant video

Locomotion
Our basic player movement got the guts ripped out and replaced this year. We re-animated all of our run cycles from motion capture and we also implemented a brand new procedural animation system for driving it. We added procedural leaning for momentum changes, and the results are much more visually pleasing than what we have seen in the past. Most importantly, we don’t sacrifice control of our players. Along with this we had the ability to dampen the AI decisions and get rid of a lot of the “jitter” that is caused by needing to make thousands of complex decision making calculations 60 times a second. With the new locomotion system we are able to improve what occurs when all these factors make the AI “change its mind” very quickly. Check out this comparison video from 08 to 09:
Click here for the locomotion video

Transition Control
We gave our artists control over every transition. This is something we have been doing on FIFA for some time, and it’s time consuming and sometimes painful for the animation team, but well worth the effort. All of our animators spent many hours this year in a tool that allows them to see and “scrub” the transitions very much like working in the 3D software we animate in. Based on the visual feedback we can iterate on where animations should break out, and when they do exit, we can set how that transition should look. This system allows us to dive pretty deep into the controls, so you can imagine with about 10,000 of these in our game, we had our work cut out for us. The result is an over-all smoothing of what you see without losing an ounce of controller response.


We never “delay” the transitions, in fact, in pretty much all cases animations will end faster than before, or be interrupted by another state (a feature that was added for Madden NFL 08 and improved farther this year). However when this happens we can now see it, and use the tools to make it look the way want, basically animating control over the blend of current and previous animations to create new motion. This gets rid of the momentum changes and ugly pops that occur when characters transition from one full body animation to another. The result is a much smoother game overall. This is quite important now that we run at 60fps on both the 360 and PS3 because transition pops would be more obvious.

Overall
When it comes to video game animation and quality, I have been told there are 3 factors: Time, Money and Quality, and you can pick any 2 of them. Well, I think this is actually not set in stone because it lacks one crucial factor: The Holy Grail, that is workflow and iteration speed. EA’s animation system is designed to take what used to be weeks and turn it in to a few minutes of turning dials; what used to take us hours (seeing our work in game, or FEELING our animation as dictated by the controls) is now instant and editable. What used to be impossible to tune visually (like transitions), we can now not only tune it but use it to make the game more fun and responsive. These tools give us back time, and time gives us quality. More importantly, we can really quickly “find the fun fast” in our gameplay design.


My overall goal when directing animation on any game is to ensure that realism, response, and fun always come ahead of the “graphics”. I then spend my time trying to make visuals look as good as I can within the constraints set before me by our designers (some of the best I have ever worked with are on the Madden team). That is our number one hurdle. The fact is…reality can tend to feel horrible. If we were to release Madden with PERFECT acceleration, deceleration, and natural turn rates for a human who is sprinting, we would be burned alive because you would feel “stuck” in animations all the time. We work in a world of “plausible reality” where many things are not truly “real” but must look realistic (so that our game is still actually playable, but also has realistic and believable animation).

Because the engine lets us find the fun fast, and iterate on our work hands-on in the game, as well as put our own new animations into the game as animators, it means we can make animation that looks awesome and is specifically crafted and tuned for the gameplay. We are long gone from the days of shoe-horning animations into the game where they get scaled and clipped to feel right. Now we make them feel right when they are animated.


I look forward to hearing your comments and impressions from the new videos. We still have time to tune the game so if you see anything with animations in these videos that you feel needs to be addressed, please visit the following thread on our official forums to post your comments!

Simon

Madden NFL 09 Hands-On from IGN

It’s been said that people should learn to appreciate the little things in life. The same is also true for Madden football. Madden 09 does not redefine videogame football. It doesn’t take the classic Madden formula and turn it upside down. What it does do is it takes so many of the little things from last year’s game and improves on them exponentially. They aren’t details that can be seen by watching a short gameplay clip or looking at screenshots. They’re the things that you don’t realize about the game until you pick it up and play it for yourself, something that I was lucky enough to do recently at EA Sports’ Tiburon studio. I played several games with a bunch of different teams on a handful of fields and can say with confidence that Madden 09 improves on last year’s impressive effort.The first thing you’ll see when you boot up Madden 09 is the man himself, John Madden. He’s been removed more and more from the Madden football presentation and gameplay over the past few years, but now he’s back delivering introductions to the new Virtual Trainer feature that players can use to acclimate themselves to the flow of this year’s gameplay. There are four challenges that you have the option of completing that will set the mark for your Madden IQ and thus your custom difficulty level (click here to read more about Madden IQ and the Virtual Trainer). There’s rushing defense, rushing offense, passing defense and passing offense.

The rushing offense challenge, which happened to be the first in the set, was also my favorite. It’s essentially a constant stream of defenders with a couple of blockers leading the way. It teaches you how to follow your blockers and the button prompts over the head of your running back help you get a feel for when special moves need to be executed. The difficulty continued to ramp up on me until it felt almost like I was in a fighting game and had to combo moves together. It was all very fluid and would have looked very natural if not for the Tron-like overlay that coats all of the Virtual Trainer action.Moving the ball through the air still needed some tuning in the Virtual Trainer as some of the AI chosen routes were streaks to the back of the endzone. Anyone who has played Madden knows that the chance of completing a long bomb is much less than an out or even a fade route. The developer watching me play said that the team was aware of the bug and it would be fixed in time for release.At the end of the Trainer John pops back up on the screen along with a nifty graphical overlay that gauges your skill level in each of the four areas. That is your My Skill difficulty level. You can use it if you want or you can revert back to the four classic options. At the end of each game you play the same overlay pops up and it will adjust your skill level accordingly. You can then hop into the VT and practice any of the four categories if you so desire. The goal behind the My Skill difficulty is to allow for the player to never mess with the settings manually. No more messing with sliders, no more tuning things to your liking. If the My Skill setting works out, this should all be automated. Note the word “should.”Did I feel that playing through the Virtual Trainer and listening to Madden give his speeches was a waste of time? Surprisingly, no. I was among the skeptics when I first read the news of a cheesy-sounding training simulation, but the introductory style approach when you first start up Madden 09 is a nice change. The challenges are short and fun for the most part and there’s still plenty of time to tune the experience before August.

Let’s get this party started.But you’re not reading this preview for impressions on the gameplay in the training simulator of Madden 09. You want to know about the on-the-field gameplay — what it’s like to run around in front of 70,000 drunken Monday morning quarterbacks. Like I said in the beginning, there are numerous small details that flesh out the presentation beyond anything that we’ve seen from the series prior.The kickoff, for instance, now features a dramatic camera swoop that heightens the excitement just that much more. Flash bulbs are going off in the crowd, which has a nice, hazy depth-of-field effect cast over it that, along with a newly designed dynamic camera system, helps give a greater sense of size to the environment. Before the kicker’s foot makes contact with the ball you’ll notice – if you’re the type to check for the most minute of details – players on the receiving team are no longer in a robotic ready position.

New Tackle Animations - Madden 09

ActionCam one of 85 improvements for Madden NFL 09

The ActionCam camera angle eliminates times when you think you have a WR open, but don’t know for sure because his route carried him off your screen. In theory this view is pretty cool and it looks amazing. However I’m not sure what to think about the fact that the ActionCam will shake, rock back and forth, and zoom in and out. It sounds like it will give us the most realistic feel to a football game we’ve ever seen. But I have some concerns on how the head to head play will be with an ever evolving camera angle. (One that changes from second to second)

Rest assured that if it makes playing head to head too difficult, we still have the opportunity to go back to the Classic angles that we use today.

I have to admit, checking out the large image on the Gamestop blog really has me itching for Madden 09. It looks really sharp!

Discuss this new feature on the forums.

What is The Madden Lab?

TheMaddenLab.com is both a Madden NFL 09 strategy resource and a social network that allows you to enhance your skills while meeting thousands of gamers from around the country! You will find Madden 2008 & 2009 strategy discussion at TML, including money plays, madden tips, tricks, cheats, hints, and even glitches and glitch counters! We also deliver all the news pertaining to Madden 09. Furthermore, we offer the most complete offensive and defensive madden playbook breakdowns on the net. We are more than just a strategy resource, as we are a strong community in which you can communicate and interact with the nation’s top ballers!

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Brett Favre Annouced As 09 Madden Cover

On the 20th anniversary of the EA Sports hit video game Madden NFL Football, legendary NFL Quaterback Brett Favre will be on the cover. For the first time in the video games fabled history a non-active NFL player will grace the cover of Madden. This put an end to the Madden Curse for this year atleast any way as well.

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