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!
- On May 28, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: gang tackling, ian cummings, madden 09
GameStop was off a day due to the Memorial Day holiday, here is Madden Monday week 7.
but·ton mash·ing: The act of a gamer repeatedly pressing buttons, often in a random order, in the hopes of achieving a desired result, usually associated with a low rate of success, gnashing of teeth and use of colorful metaphors.
If there were a Webster’s Dictionary of Gaming, you might find find a similar definition for button mashing as listed above. It’s an ancient technique passed down from console generation to console generation. For years, gamers have waited for a more responsive sports game that would alleviate the need for said mashing. Madden NFL 09 could be the game that breaks the cycle. EA SPORTS showed us another part of Madden NFL 09’s vast feature set, the Total Control Animation System. Besides having a catchy name, this new animation system looks to change one fundamental flaw in sports games past: the inability to break out of moves when the one you have initiated clearly isn’t working.
For example, how often have you triggered a spin move to evade a defender, only to have him wrap you up with one hand? You think to yourself, “Hey, I’ll just stiff arm this clown and continue my merry stroll to the end zone.” That’s when the button mashing starts. Result: The whistle hasn’t blown, but you know the play is essentially DEAD. Not anymore. The Total Control Animation System will allow you to branch out of one animation and into another, giving you the ability to perform combo moves even after you’ve been wrapped up. Now, be warned, as Newton’s Third Law of Motion will tell you, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Total animation control applies to both offense and defense. Yes, you can follow-up a half-spin move with a juke and a stiff-arm, but all of this will ultimately extend the play and lead to a higher risk of the ball being stripped. So when you think you’re being sneaky and breaking out of tackles, just remember that the defender may actually be holding you up in an attempt to jar the ball loose.
To become a part of the new, non-button-mashing generation, you should pre-order either the Standard or 20th Anniversary Collector’s Editions of Madden NFL 09, which release August 12th. Remember to come back next Madden Monday for another exclusive sneak peek at Madden NFL 09.
- On May 27, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 1 Comment
- and it is filed under: Madden NFL 09
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).
- 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).
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
- On May 23, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: EA & NFL News
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.
- On May 23, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: EA & NFL News
Today we’ve learned of yet another exciting new feature that will be released for the up coming Madden 2009 game due out in early August. This year players will be able to rewind plays, or take them back and do it all over again! Its basically a Mulligan for Madden!
Say you’re playing, and your opposition runs a kick return for a touchdown! Well now you can prevent that and take your chances on defense! With this feature you can improve your game, or cause some unruly riots to break out from doing it to much!
So far we know you’ll be able to select 0, 1, 3, 5, or unlimited rewinds when you begin a match, and you’ll be able to use the new feature on Offense, Defense and Special Teams. You won’t be able to rewind plays online however!
- On May 20, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 3 Comments
- and it is filed under: Madden 2009 News
- On May 15, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: EA & NFL News
Each team will be able to trade players only for other players that have played the same number of games in the league, ensuring a nice even spread. Once a player has been in the maximum number of games, he is no longer eligible for trade.
- On May 14, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: Madden 2009 Preview, 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!
- On May 14, 2008
- Posted by admin.
- There are 0 Comments
- and it is filed under: 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!