[Ian_Cummings_EA]

Quote: Originally Posted by Nza

Which is why a pure physics engine where animations aren't pre-recorded and loaded, but rather animations are real time displays of movement made on the fly based on various influences, has got to be the holy grail here. What you describe is a big reason why the gaming world is shifting towards animation systems that place complexity and importance in the generation of the animation itself, not the code determining the right animation and the man work making the right animation. I believe you guys have already somewhat started - unless I read wrong, Madden 09 will feature catch animations that track hands (and hence arms) to the ball, no? In other words, player arms are now moving in (hopefully) realistic ranges based on the human body freely to go after the ball rather than produce a static animation which occasionally sees the ball "merge" to the hands like in previous Madden's. This animation concept is what needs to be applied to all aspects - not static, but dynamically generating animations that are produced for the exact specifications and requirements of the situation at hand. Now THAT is "next gen" animation, but perhaps too much so for today's hardware.

Great point...but this is a fine line here with what's achievable. You can kind of see from our animation director (Simon Sherr) is that pretty much his whole reason for being is to find ways to reduce the amounts of animation to make features "work", and let the tools and code figure out the rest. This makes it so we can spend all our time on variety instead of on "coverage". The new tackling and catching systems are very good examples of this. But in the example I stated above about blocking, there isn't really anything close to a solution that could procedurally generate the movements needed for blocking animations - and honestly that'd be a LONG way out. Just think of all those subtle movements of edge rushing or hand fighting or pancakes or what have you...where we'll be able to attack procedural / runtime animation in that situation is with a new tech we're working on implementing for '10 called "interaction scaling", that will work to match up interactions based on player heights and scales. NBA Street had this so that a 5'11 guy and a 7'0" guy could use the same dunk animation and then scale at runtime to match their hands to the rim. You'll also see this a LOT in Facebreaker because their player sizes are so diverse...the punch animation may be the same but the GAME moves his fist to make contact with the other guy at the right spot, whether he's 3 feet tall or 7 feet tall.