Glossary- 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".
Intro 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.
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).
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).
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