We're gold!
It's Monday, and the weekend has involved a lot of waiting around for news about whether the game has gone into manufacture or not, doing interviews with various lots of magazines and websites, catching up on email, getting over man flu, and even managed to go to the cinema. And a drink. And watch football, although only on the TV.
This morning, I got to shave off my beard. Which means Football Manager 2009 is now in manufacture!
That also means that today we've announced information about the demo for Football Manager 2009 and the system specs for the game. The demo is coming out on Saturday night/Sunday morning at midnight, and you can read more about it on our forums at
http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=53492This weeks new feature announcements will not be taking place here, but will be taking place at
www.shortlist.com, with one new feature a day.
Instead, HMV's Sports Interactive blogs will be taken over with more indepth information about some of the new features in Football Manager 2009, starting with co-founder of Sports Interactive, Paul Collyer, talking about the match engine.
I've also got a backlog of questions here from people who've emailed via the blogs
blogs@sigames.com), so I'll be answering loads of those tomorrow, along with the next indepth look.
But, for now, it's over to Paul.
Pointing the way to 3D
The last year or so has been one of the most challenging and motivating from a match engine development point of view. The Football Manager Live Beta, and the introduction of a 3D view in FM2009 have challenged the match engine to improve like never before. Firstly by taking the FM2008
match engine into an environment of 1000s of human vs human matches, and all the tactical variations that come from that via Football Manager Live's beta, and secondly by exposing the engine to a 3D representation where flaws never noticed in 2D now jump out, and so the need for realistic looking football is magnified many-fold.
Lets start with Football Manager Live. We were aware of some of the issues people had with the Fm2008 engine, and of course the FML beta environment would accentuate these, especially with there needing to be a human loser for every human winner etc! So some time into the beta the subject of the tactical arrows was raised, as there was a growing feeling amongst some users that they caused more problems than they solved, because of the way they worked as secondary positions for players. The main issues were exploitative tactics, which made defensive AI work into a kind of groundhog day, and also a lack of clarity given by their existence. For example, why have the forward run instruction as well as an arrow forward, not to mention the mentality slider? After some discussion we decided that we would run an experiment, and remove the arrows from the beta for a week. Instead we would improve the use of the forward runs instruction, as well as a player's own awareness of space, to achieve more realistic player movement within the tactical shape. The debate was fierce, and not just outside of SI, but we went for it, and lo and behold the match engine suddenly moved to another level of realism and balance! Many of the dissenting voices disappeared into the background, while many revealed they had been won over. The experiment had worked and things had become clearer. Sure, there were complaints that you couldn't make players drift wide easily, but some managers found that could be done to a point with the right combination of tactics, while others were happy with the overall picture, as well as our promises to look at adding instructions at some point down the line once it is clearer what is lacking. We also compensated visually by creating simple arrows that controlled the player forward runs instruction, so retaining an important visual characteristic of our game.
So, FM2009 will be without the old style arrows, and no doubt a second debate will rage. In fact it has already started raging. All I ask is that people try the demo, and keep an open mind. There are people on our own tactics forums, and also sites like FM Britain, who have an amazing insight into the FM tactical engine, and also deserve to be listened to by those in need of guidance. You will be hearing more from some of them in the coming days and weeks. In terms of your tactics, just remember that the use of forward runs plus space to make them will equal intelligent attacking movement, and you should be ok.
Now onto 3D. The idea was first raised some 3 years ago, but it wasn't really until about 15 months ago or so that we started getting our teeth into it. With our first ever 3D coder Des Owens coming onboard we started by creating the basic 3D side, before the actual match engine started to be rendered in it early this year. Obviously this threw up many challenges. The first and most obvious was that that our old ball "quasi-physics" engine wasn't going to wash at all. So first major task was to create a new one, which is based in real physics. This would impact the entire match player AI code of course, although in many ways it simply got more out of it. Then there were things like player facing direction to re-assess. A 2D circle looking in an illogical direction doesn't always attract the same attention as a 3D animated player doing so. That sort of thing caused lots of bugs, but at the same time fixing them was making the whole match experience more and more believable. I could see progress anyway. Around early summertime I stopped using 2D to debug the match engine, and only used 3D. This forced standards upwards further as more unrealistic AI is exposed. The final stage was to hook in the animations we had to the match engine. Again, much of this was intrinsically linked to the AI side, so I had to take a lot of responsibility for selecting animations and tuning and tweaking AI to get the best results.
All in all, its been a long road in a short space of time, but I actually think the challenge has taken the match engine to a new level. Of course, there is a lot more we can achieve on all fronts, but the main thing is that we want to get there, and as ever, the contribution of the FM community will be a huge part of that.
The FM community contribution is actually pretty exciting, but I'm going to save that for info for a blog after the demo comes out. Got to have something to talk about when you're able to see the game for yourself!
Cheers
Miles (and Paul)
