Another Unlicensed Football Game Coming, This Time With Next-Gen Animation

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/814/814249p1.html

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This is the kind of animation I expected from Madden (and NCAA) on the 360 and PS3. Hopefully they can work out a deal with EA to put this in future iterations of their games...then maybe id can help them out on (drastically) improving the graphics while still maintaining a high framerate on multiple platforms.

 

Yeah, that too. Although for some reason, I still expected something like this from Tiburon. At least by the 2nd or 3rd iteration.

Why I expect great, or even just decent things from EA...I don't know.

I played the demo, and I came away with pretty much the same impressions. The graphics were much worse than I thought they were (and I think there wasn't much improvement with Madden?). Maybe just me, but I think I experienced the turnover issues that people were having in Madden, which I think were also apart of NCAA. Doesn't really make it that fun IMO. The full version might be a lot better with some gameplay tweaks and the some of the various gameplay modes though.

Don't know about the visuals in general, but the animation should be possible in gameplay (assuming that video didn't represent gameplay...although I don't think that is too hard to believe IMO). This company has been demonstrating this type of tech for years (some people may remember me posting stuff about Endorphin animation technology), and those demos had a football demo running in real-time. Basically similar to this video, just without all the fancy graphics tacked on. More recently, I think LucasArts had a few tech demos where they showed what they were able to do with the technology.

These guys are really talented when it comes to animation and physics simulation, so I wouldn't really doubt them when it comes to creating a football game that animates like that video. I'd have my doubts about the visuals (although they didn't seem that great), the gameplay, the replayability, online play, etc. I may even have my doubts about whether the game will even come out at all, let alone anytime soon. Still, the technology to do a game like this should be there.

 

This isn't even a recent breakthrough (if you even want to call it a breakthrough). I got videos of this tech on my HDD dating back to September of 2004 (and that's when I downloaded the video, not when it was created by the guys at NaturalMotion). In those videos, they showed some tackling animations that were easily adjustable with 2-3 player models running in real-time (not sure what kind of PC they were using though). They even offered a version of the technology for people to try out, although it was a bit limited IIRC (not to mention you had to learn how to use it before you could have any fun). They have (newer) videos of this stuff on their website if anyone is curious (NaturalMotion.com). All the football demos do make a lot more sense now.

I think that this has generally used up a lot of CPU processing power, but that really shouldn't be an issue these days I would think. I might be a little worried about simulating 22 players as you said, but I'm assuming they can get around that with enough work (assuming that is too CPU intensive). If nothing else, I'm sure they can scale things back a bit and it would still be really impressive.

 

Yeah, Rockstar confirmed that they are using the euphoria technology for GTAIV (they're still using R.A.G.E. as the game engine though). I forgot the specifics about the different technologies, but I think that endorphin is used to create canned animations (though the animations are created in real-time), while euphoria calculates animations on-the-fly in-game. I didn't quite realize that, so that's probably why it is taking a little longer for games to use this type of technology (though I think euphoria has been around for a while too?). That's what I get for thinking it was just a simple name change for next-gen consoles. They also have morpheme, which is their animation engine, but we don't really need to get into that.

 

Yeah, I think I've even seen a video that is entirely dedicated to EA showing off and describing the new animation technology. It looks nice given what we're used to getting from EA, but not quite what I wanted. Maybe acceptable for Madden 06 on the 360, but I wanted the animation to be a notch (or more?) higher with next-gen Madden, like in this new football game.