Time for this week’s look at what’s new in NCAA Football 10 for the PS3 and Xbox 360!
I am Adam Thompson, one of the designers on NCAA Football 10. I’ve been at EA SPORTS since 2002 working on every NCAA Football title since 2004. I am in charge of content related features such as art and commentary, and I’m going to show you some of the new updates to the in game experience this year.
Camera Flashes, Field Goal Nets, and Windsocks
One small detail we added this year is camera flashes going off in the stands. The bigger the game, the more flashes will be going off. This will help give the bigger games that “big game” feel. We were able to borrow this from Madden NFL and are tuning the intensity of these now.
Field goal nets have been missing for too long, so we were sure to bring these to the current gen consoles this year. Nothing too exciting, but it brings a little more realism to the game. Another small detail you’ll notice are the wind socks on top of the goal posts. Want to add a challenge to the kicking game? Don’t look at the meter for the wind factor and use the socks instead.
Swappable Bowl Endzones
Ok, enough of the little things. Here’s the addition I’m very pleased to FINALLY get in the game. Team specific bowl endzones! We call these “swappable endzones” as we can swap them around dynamically when we please.
Unlike the previous generation of consoles, the high definition consoles we have today require much more detail for the fields. The technology for having team specific endzones on the PS2 wouldn’t get the job done, so we had to come up with a new solution for the current generation.
Fortunately, our brilliant graphics engineers created what is called the Texture Compositor. This was originally developed for handling created stadiums and uniforms for Madden. It allows the game to take multiple pieces of art and combine them into one as the game loads. Before we had to use a single piece of art for every field. With 120 teams and 38 bowl and championship games there was no way to create a field for every game with every possible team matchup and fit it on the disk (I was going to do the math but gave up quickly!). Instead we have 38 bowl and championship fields with blank endzones, and 120 custom endzones (one for each team). When you load into a bowl or championship game, the Texture Compositor takes the three pieces of art and combines them into one field.
One of the nice things about this system is that instead of getting an endzone from your home field and throwing it on the bowl field (like on PS2), we have a bowl game specific endzone for each school (though for many schools we went with the design of an endzone used on their home field). Instead of slashes across the endzone for Notre Dame, you’ll actually get this:
This addition is long overdue, but we finally have it on NCAA Football 10. Below is a gallery of each team’s endzone. Click each thumbnail for the full sized image.
Be sure to check in every week as we roll out new features, updates and changes that are going into NCAA Football 10. See ya next time!
