Today is Tuesday, and despite yesterday's announcement that we're in manufacture, there's still lots to do!
Having announced that the demo will go live at midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning, we now have to get all the demos built and tested.
It would be a lot easier if we just did one demo, with one league, and one language, but not everyone has great bandwidth, or speaks English, so we're sticking to our policies of 2 different types of demo, the second of which can be downloaded 3 different ways, so that's more builds to do, and bandwidth to find. It all takes a long time to get sorted, and can be very frustrating, but we'll get there!
Today's in depth blog is from Des, who joined SI just over a year ago to work on the 3d match side of things. Below this, is some answers to some of the hundreds of questions that have been sent in so far from people reading the blogs (
blogs@sigames.com)
So, over to Des...
Football Manager in 3D.
I have a confession to make. I hadn't really played the game prior to commencing work at SI. FM is the kind of word-of-mouth game that any football fan needs to play just to see what all of the fuss is about. I could not resist SI's ambitions for the 2009 version and it was a joy to become a part of the SI team.
For fans of the FM, there is an inherent imagination factor. On cold dark winter evenings you can almost smell the cheap hamburgers smothered with brown sauce. To the uninitiated onlooker, I might be staring at a green screen with coloured circles battling over possession of another black and white coloured circle, but to player the game was like life and death, only more important.
This year we have moved to a full 3d graphics engine, showing step overs, headers, shots and saves like no other game we have created before.
I think most gamers will appreciate that we have not compromised the match engine for the sake of 3d eye candy. All the moves the players make happen inside the AI, the 3d is simply playing back the results of the match engine simulation. The only thing we needed to change was the ball physics because it looked quite strange in 3D without turbulence and drag, something that was never really an issue in older versions of the game.
Even though there are just over 200 motion captured animations, it seems like so many more. There is a lot of variation in the player behaviour; I think it must be that good old imagination factor creeping in all over again..
This year we are releasing the game for the first time on DVD. The pitch graphics take a hefty proportion of the space as do the sky graphics. You don't tend to see the sky during gameplay, but it is used to calculate the light and mood of the stadiums.
Talking about the stadiums, we have built some customisation into the game. If you are so inclined you will be able to make your own stadium and the graphics engine will recognise it. There are lots of shareware 3d modelling packages out there, try Googling for one with Wavefront OBJ support.
We hope you enjoy the new look Football Manager 2009 but we have left in the classic mode for the die hard old schoolers out there.
And back to me... Or, rather, over to you...
Nikola Mastilo asks "Will there be rules changes in further seasons of European competitions like in real life?". Yes, Nikola, there will be. Whatever we had confirmed as being definite as the time of going to master we have attempted to replicate.
Many different people have asked about new leagues for Football Manager 2009 - well, there are no new leagues. We think 51 countries leagues and
over 5,000 playable teams being covered is more than enough for now.
Kieran Driscoll asked "Will Harry Redknapp be set at Spurs in time for the release date?". No, Kieran, he won't. It happened a few days after the master was first made, unfortunately.
Mark Gatehouse asks "This isn't about the actual game, I was just wandering if you ever get fed up with the game? You work on Football Manager all day, surely like any job you don't want to mix work with homelife all the time. I would imagine somedays the last thing you want to do when you get home is put your copy of Football Manager into your computer."
No Mark - I don't have a job, I have a vocation. I don't play the game every night, because I enjoy lots of other forms of entertainment aswell, so probably play 2 or 3 nights a week.
Another Mark, this time Mark Thompson, asks "Is there ever going to be a feature to transfer between PC and PSP - so you can review players, opponents and other stuff when you absolutely have to leave the PC - you know, for things like work and other boring stuff...".
That won't be possible, Mark - the PC and PSP games are completely different, with little code in common, so it won't be possible. It's why they have different names too!
That'll have to do for today, as I'm about to go into meetings about FML, then the patch, then a catch up with Ov Collyer, co-founder of Sports Interactive with his brother Paul and the lead on FML, who's over in the UK at the moment. Then a meeting about the demo. It never stops...
Oh, and don't forget that there are new feature announcements every day this week at shortlist.com, and all the info about our demo release, and system specs for FM2009 can be found over at our forums, which are based at community.sigames.c
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Cheers
Miles (and Des)
