RSS
October 30, 2006 | 9:59 PM PST
by: Johnathan Law
Advanced Media Network was recently invited to attend Electronic Arts Canada’s Community Day event for the upcoming Xbox 360 version of FIFA 07. For the weekend of October 19-21st, select members of the press ventured northward to beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia to tour the Electronic Arts Canada campus as well as to get some hands-on time with FIFA 07 prior to its release. Due to an unexpected delay in flying out to Vancouver, I was only able to attend the second day of the event, but fortunately I did not miss much and was able to fully appreciate and take in the game while meeting the development team the afternoon of the 20th.
I learned quickly that the EA Sports team was facing a difficult challenge with the development of FIFA 07. They have already released two FIFA games on the Xbox 360 alone, FIFA 06 and FIFA World Cup 06, respectively. These games were not bad, but also did nothing to help make the case for the next-generation consoles that are arriving. The challenge the EA team faced was making a game that truly lookednext-generation and played next-generation. FIFA 06 had character models that were impressive in still shots, but in motion moved and looked a little too close to their PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube counterparts. Virtually nothing had changed in the way of gameplay.
Kaz Makita of the FIFA team gave a presentation on how they had changed the gameplay to truly reflect the nature of the sport itself. The engine being used for the game was built from scratch; the underlying idea behind it was to capture the performance, realism, and unpredictable nature of soccer. One of the biggest challenges was to find new, creative and innovative ways to express the game to the player. Things that were once very simply expressed in soccer games, like dribbling, passing and moving the player, are now extremely impressive feats of technological prowess with FIFA 07.
Kaz went on to express one of the absolute biggest and most profound changes in the way that FIFA was being developed. For the first time, the player and the ball are being treated as two separate entities in the game. Admittedly, this doesn’t sound as profound as it is. In fact, I was a bit skeptical as to how something like that could influence the entire game. I later discovered that because of this, gameplay and graphics had to be developed in a drastically different fashion from the past. The developers can no longer simply add animations for players with the ball, treating them as a combined individual. At all times, the ball is separate from the player, even while dribbling, passing, or shooting. Instead, how the player comes into contact with the ball and vice-versa is at the very heart of the gameplay.
After explaining to all of us about what the starting point was for FIFA 07, Kaz stepped aside and allowed Benoit Lambert to tell us about the artificial intelligence and the challenge presented to gamers. The AI for FIFA 07 is improved at both the team and the player levels. This can drastically alter the way the computer plays against you, allowing it to make far better decisions than were possible in the past. This will definitely be rewarding for longtime FIFA fans as well as soccer game fans looking for a good challenge. However, Benoit noted that there were four difficulty levels, ranging from Amateur to World-Class, setting on Semi-Pro by default. At the amateur level, the difficulty is obviously toned down, and requires less from the player in the way of substitutions, formations, and strategy. As the player progresses and has a harder challenge in mind, those things will become absolutely critical to winning. What’s more, the FIFA team really does take gamer feedback very seriously. You’ll find some new, polished control schemes included in the game, alongside an avalanche of statistics. I was informed that the FIFA diehards absolutely crave statistics, and they will certainly get those in droves with FIFA 07.
Part of an Electronic Arts Community Day event, in Canada at least, is a tour of the massive Electronic Arts Canada facility in nearby Burnaby, British Columbia. This serves the purpose of educating press members about what exactly it takes to make a game like FIFA 07 for the Xbox 360, as well as to show off the incredible contents of the facility itself. (Hey, somebody outside of EA’s got to see them, right?)
One of the stops on the tour was the gigantic motion-capture studio that is set up on the campus in a separate building. We were able to witness a motion-capture shoot firsthand with athletes fashioned in the iconic suits with tracking balls on them. It was there that we began to comprehend exactly how much work had gone into improving the animation for FIFA 07.
One of the biggest and most crucial elements of FIFA 07 was to drastically improve the animation of the game. The FIFA team could not do this with the current engines that they had for the 360, so the only solution was to create an all-new engine for not only the gameplay, but for the visuals as well. Using a derivative of Renderware, the FIFA team set out to make the very core of what will drive the FIFA franchise for at least the next few years.
In FIFA 07, the animation is much improved for all of the players onscreen. There are more model “bones” with less compression and much smoother animations. On the current crop of consoles (PS2, Xbox, etc.) there are a very limited number of animations. You will typically find 2-3 per player, with a maximum of about 5. On the 360 with the new engine, EA is getting about 10-12 per player with a maximum of 25 and multiple animation blends per player, to enhance the smoothness of these animations. For the first time, FIFA 07 introduces momentum animation for all players on the screen by utilizing the “root” bones for each model. In short, it makes characters move extremely fluidly in any given situation, such as taking off running or slowing down.
Also new are the additions of forward kinematics and inverse kinematics. Forward kinematics are quite interesting as they give each joint on a player model a specific rotation, in every frame of animation. Inverse kinematics provide a target for a specific joint, while calculating rotations for all of the other joints in the frame. So if a developer makes an animation where a player lunges his arm forward, the inverse kinematics would compensate for the animation of all the other joints on the player’s body. It cuts down the amount of work needed by individual developers and manages to help make those animations look excellent.
The FIFA team was also excited about the addition of foot-planting (pivoting) animations. To help stop jerky animation, they utilized a specific animation where players “slide” their feet along the ground. This gives the impression of pivoting a players’ foot and thereby turning, rather than simply changing direction from nowhere. Little things like that go a long way towards enhancing the realism displayed. The EA team also stated explicitly that all of the animations are scaled by player. In the past, applying the same animation to tall and short players produced wildly different effects.
In the past, there was a single frame and location of the contact coverage region for passing or shooting a ball. With the new animation and physics engines, this simply would not do. Haroon Qureshi explained that there is now a three-dimensional contact region for the ball and this aids in both the animation and physics presentation. In short, this new coverage region adds a lot of places where a player comes into contact with the ball, rather than an individual or few frames or animation. The new contact coverage region is absolutely fantastic for collision detection in virtually any given situation, and is uncannily precise.
I learned quickly that the EA Sports team was facing a difficult challenge with the development of FIFA 07. They have already released two FIFA games on the Xbox 360 alone, FIFA 06 and FIFA World Cup 06, respectively. These games were not bad, but also did nothing to help make the case for the next-generation consoles that are arriving. The challenge the EA team faced was making a game that truly lookednext-generation and played next-generation. FIFA 06 had character models that were impressive in still shots, but in motion moved and looked a little too close to their PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube counterparts. Virtually nothing had changed in the way of gameplay.
Kaz Makita of the FIFA team gave a presentation on how they had changed the gameplay to truly reflect the nature of the sport itself. The engine being used for the game was built from scratch; the underlying idea behind it was to capture the performance, realism, and unpredictable nature of soccer. One of the biggest challenges was to find new, creative and innovative ways to express the game to the player. Things that were once very simply expressed in soccer games, like dribbling, passing and moving the player, are now extremely impressive feats of technological prowess with FIFA 07.
Kaz went on to express one of the absolute biggest and most profound changes in the way that FIFA was being developed. For the first time, the player and the ball are being treated as two separate entities in the game. Admittedly, this doesn’t sound as profound as it is. In fact, I was a bit skeptical as to how something like that could influence the entire game. I later discovered that because of this, gameplay and graphics had to be developed in a drastically different fashion from the past. The developers can no longer simply add animations for players with the ball, treating them as a combined individual. At all times, the ball is separate from the player, even while dribbling, passing, or shooting. Instead, how the player comes into contact with the ball and vice-versa is at the very heart of the gameplay.
After explaining to all of us about what the starting point was for FIFA 07, Kaz stepped aside and allowed Benoit Lambert to tell us about the artificial intelligence and the challenge presented to gamers. The AI for FIFA 07 is improved at both the team and the player levels. This can drastically alter the way the computer plays against you, allowing it to make far better decisions than were possible in the past. This will definitely be rewarding for longtime FIFA fans as well as soccer game fans looking for a good challenge. However, Benoit noted that there were four difficulty levels, ranging from Amateur to World-Class, setting on Semi-Pro by default. At the amateur level, the difficulty is obviously toned down, and requires less from the player in the way of substitutions, formations, and strategy. As the player progresses and has a harder challenge in mind, those things will become absolutely critical to winning. What’s more, the FIFA team really does take gamer feedback very seriously. You’ll find some new, polished control schemes included in the game, alongside an avalanche of statistics. I was informed that the FIFA diehards absolutely crave statistics, and they will certainly get those in droves with FIFA 07.
Part of an Electronic Arts Community Day event, in Canada at least, is a tour of the massive Electronic Arts Canada facility in nearby Burnaby, British Columbia. This serves the purpose of educating press members about what exactly it takes to make a game like FIFA 07 for the Xbox 360, as well as to show off the incredible contents of the facility itself. (Hey, somebody outside of EA’s got to see them, right?)
One of the stops on the tour was the gigantic motion-capture studio that is set up on the campus in a separate building. We were able to witness a motion-capture shoot firsthand with athletes fashioned in the iconic suits with tracking balls on them. It was there that we began to comprehend exactly how much work had gone into improving the animation for FIFA 07.
One of the biggest and most crucial elements of FIFA 07 was to drastically improve the animation of the game. The FIFA team could not do this with the current engines that they had for the 360, so the only solution was to create an all-new engine for not only the gameplay, but for the visuals as well. Using a derivative of Renderware, the FIFA team set out to make the very core of what will drive the FIFA franchise for at least the next few years.
In FIFA 07, the animation is much improved for all of the players onscreen. There are more model “bones” with less compression and much smoother animations. On the current crop of consoles (PS2, Xbox, etc.) there are a very limited number of animations. You will typically find 2-3 per player, with a maximum of about 5. On the 360 with the new engine, EA is getting about 10-12 per player with a maximum of 25 and multiple animation blends per player, to enhance the smoothness of these animations. For the first time, FIFA 07 introduces momentum animation for all players on the screen by utilizing the “root” bones for each model. In short, it makes characters move extremely fluidly in any given situation, such as taking off running or slowing down.
Also new are the additions of forward kinematics and inverse kinematics. Forward kinematics are quite interesting as they give each joint on a player model a specific rotation, in every frame of animation. Inverse kinematics provide a target for a specific joint, while calculating rotations for all of the other joints in the frame. So if a developer makes an animation where a player lunges his arm forward, the inverse kinematics would compensate for the animation of all the other joints on the player’s body. It cuts down the amount of work needed by individual developers and manages to help make those animations look excellent.
The FIFA team was also excited about the addition of foot-planting (pivoting) animations. To help stop jerky animation, they utilized a specific animation where players “slide” their feet along the ground. This gives the impression of pivoting a players’ foot and thereby turning, rather than simply changing direction from nowhere. Little things like that go a long way towards enhancing the realism displayed. The EA team also stated explicitly that all of the animations are scaled by player. In the past, applying the same animation to tall and short players produced wildly different effects.
In the past, there was a single frame and location of the contact coverage region for passing or shooting a ball. With the new animation and physics engines, this simply would not do. Haroon Qureshi explained that there is now a three-dimensional contact region for the ball and this aids in both the animation and physics presentation. In short, this new coverage region adds a lot of places where a player comes into contact with the ball, rather than an individual or few frames or animation. The new contact coverage region is absolutely fantastic for collision detection in virtually any given situation, and is uncannily precise.
< previous | page 1 of 2 | next >
February 8, 2010
