Quite the Super Bowl, huh? I honestly had given up on that game about midway through the third quarter, only to be pleasantly surprised with a Cardinals comeback and a great Steelers win. It wasn't the best Super Bowl of recent years but it was entertaining and turned into tightly contested game. My prediction from Friday wasn't that far off the mark, as it turned out.
And speaking of predictions, while I normally avoid "Madden sim" stories like the plague, this year's EA Sports-run Super Bowl simulation with Madden NFL 09 turned out to be pretty darn accurate. Check out these numbers
•Ben Roethlisberger
Sim: 21/28 for 286 yards
Real game: 21/30 for 256 yards
•Kurt Warner
Sim: 27/38 for241 yards
Real game: 31/43 for 377 yards
•Santonio Holmes
Sim: 8 catches for 131 yards
Real game: 9 catches for 131 yards
•Larry Fitzgerald
Sim: 9 catches for 105 yards
Real game: 7 catches for 127 yards
•Score at Halftime
Sim: 21-7 Steelers
Real game: 17-7 Steelers
•Final Score
Sim: 28-24 Steelers
Real game: 27-23Nice job, fake football game!
Of course, the real Madden news out of Super Bowl XLIII was the halftime posting of the first details on Madden NFL 10 on the EA Sports blog. In the post, Ian Cummings, lead designer on Madden NFL 10shows off a new technology that will make its way into the game, and into other EA Sports games this year: procedural awareness. As I understand it, PA allows for an in-game character to accurately follow something--a ball, a defender, a receiver--in a way that doesn't require canned animations; instead, it's generated on the fly by the game engine. As Cummings defines it:
"Alright, so what's Procedural Awareness in a nutshell? 'The ability to procedurally manipulate the spine, neck, head, and eyes on a player in the game; and also add layers of emotion/attitudes on top of those manipulations'."
There's no in-game footage of Madden NFL 10 using the PA system yet, but there is a pretty cool tech demo that shows a rough quarterback model turning his gaze to four illuminated objects in sequence. At one point, as the object is moved by a mouse cursor, the QB's head moves accordingly left, right, up, and down. It's pretty easy to expand that out to how a virtual Ben Roethlisberger might follow his receivers along their routes, running through his progressions until the player choose someone to throw to. As Cummings says in the blog:
"This is definitely pretty cool stuff…we can tune how fast the player switches between different targets, and then also how he behaves when he locks on and follows a target. You can already envision this being used by DB's and WR's when the ball is thrown, QB's as they go through progressions, safeties as they drop in zone, and obviously many more cases. In terms of visual fidelity, PA is also a major step up from any other normal IK head tracking solution."
A second video on the page shows a more fleshed out model of Dwyane Wade following objects, complete with eye blinking and realistic-looking neck movement. A third shows a video of ways to use the PA system to generate facial animations procedurally, which seems like it be a handy way to add more emotion to a sports sim (like after a DB gets burned by a speedy wideout) but also seems like it has uses in many other game genres as well.
So, a bit of a tech demo for our first look at the game and it's only the beginning of our six-month wait until the next version of Madden. In the meantime, I'd suggest EA thinks about changing the name of the game. What, after all, is wrong with 'Madden NFL 2010'?
What do you think of Procedural Awareness and how do you think it can be implemented in Madden to improve this year's game?
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