Welcome back to another Monday blog Madden fans! Talk about an eventful couple of weeks in Madden-land…our first Season Preview event on Thursday 4/24, our cover athletes revealed on Friday 4/25 (including a cool guest appearance by Larry Fitzgerald on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), the NFL Draft, and last week we even released a blog on the Wildcat formation. We’re hard at work trying to finish the game while still balancing our media release schedule, so with this week’s blog, it seemed like a good opportunity to dive deeper into one of our most important gameplay features for the year: PRO-TAK.
What is PRO-TAK?
PRO-TAK (which stands for procedural tackling) is a new animation technology for us, built as a custom animation system to sit above our motion captured animations and procedurally manipulate them as the game runs. “Why?” you may ask? It’s simple really…motion captured animations playing back ‘as is’ can limit the amount of control you as the gamer has while playing the game. In order to truly match the look of the NFL, motion captured animation is still the answer to stay authentic and be realistic. But you can only fit so many animations in the game because of the memory limitations of the hardware. So knowing all that, we knew the way for us to truly build dynamic and fun NFL gameplay was to use a mixture of run-time manipulation and motion capture. This approach can make one animation look totally different every time you see it, while still retaining an authentic look that can be controlled artistically. Why not go 100% procedural you may ask? Moving to a full runtime solution and getting rid of motion capture (like a Havok physics system for example) means handing over full control of your visuals to your code (and away from your artists)…which to us is not an acceptable approach being that we are tasked with creating a true NFL simulation.
At its core, PRO-TAK is actually a collection of a few animation technologies. Though it stands for ‘procedural tackling’, we were able to create some new features sharing the technology (that we are also putting under the can PRO-TAK umbrella):
1. Dynamic gang tackling: New never-before-seen tackling engine in a video game that allows up to 9 players to be involved in a tackle – including offensive and defensive players pushing the pile forward / backward.
2. Steerable tackles: Dynamically manipulating tackle animations based on player ratings means the difference between a first down or a punt.
3. All new OL/DL Interaction system: With steerable and branch-able animation technology, we can now create a true dynamic pocket around the QB as well as a true “flow” to the ball on run plays.
4. QB avoidance: Branch-able animation technology allows for QB’s to shift around the pocket as well as break out of sack animations after they have already started.
5. Fight for the fumble: Dynamic fumble pileups allow possession to change hands while at the bottom of the pile.
Throughout the year we will go into more detail on each of these aspects to PRO-TAK, but this week we wanted to dig deeper into the new gang tackling and how it plays out in Madden NFL 10. With our theme this year of “Fight for Every Yard”, we had a few goals for tackling early on in the cycle:
• In real life, a defense playing against a big bruising player (like Brandon Jacobs) often will need upwards of 2, 3, or 4 defenders to bring him down. These players need to be able to fight for extra yardage at all times - we wanted the bigger stronger players to be relevant in Madden like they are in real life. Speed is not the only factor for success in the NFL; it shouldn’t be in Madden either.
• A shifty / smaller player (like a Chris Johnson) should not need large numbers of defenders to be brought down
• Yardage outcome should be dynamically determined by the ratings and weights of the players involved in the gang tackles. This was the key detail for us to make sure things were procedurally driven – the animations need to be manipulated during the animation playback.
• Defenders with high ‘hit power’ ratings should be able to “hit stick” a tackle – meaning they should be able to dramatically alter a tackle in progress by pushing it in another direction.
• Offensive players should sometimes have the ability to push a tackle forward for extra yards
• Good defensive players (and teams) should swarm to the ball - adding on to the ballcarrier dynamically to ensure him not getting extra yards
• User controlled and CPU players should have the exact same abilities
So with these goals in mind, I wanted to let our animation director, Simon Sherr, talk about the features of this new system and how it all started.
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When I moved here from EA Canada nearly two years ago, right before starting work on Madden NFL 09, Ian Cummings gave me a goal to reach for. On my first day at Tiburon he asked “do you think you can solve gang tackling?” Ian always says “I want this game to look like football, not a football video game”. Very nice of Ian that the very first thing on the list I was challenged with was trying to solve a problem that no one had solved in a football video game (well, any video game) before. :) Sure there are many things missing from video game football to 100% recreate the sport accurately, but arguably the most important (and obvious), is that tackling is a team sport.
Well, how do you gang tackle? It was clear at that point that in order to have a solution for this, we were going to have to take what I like to call a “nuke and pave” approach with our tackling engine, and do something with a foundation built around the idea. The plan for gang tackling was hatched and prototyped over the next few months, and from there, a design for a totally new tackling engine emerged.
One of the major challenges of working on a game like Madden NFL (and most sports games for that matter) is that we release them yearly, this means that anything that needs to be done to benefit the game needs to be fit into our year over year cycle. We don’t have the 2-7 years action games get to do massive innovation, so we need tools that let us build on each other, and that is exactly where EA Sports has gotten. All our games steal technology from each other for the EA Sports engine called “ANT”. However, when we do something no one has done before (like PRO-TAK) which will take more than a year, what that means for our development team is that work must be broken up into chunks that give YOU (our customers) something every year. Last year we gave you the breakout system (the ability to break out of tackles) as well as a much more predictable, much smoother, and more refined experience when it comes to tackling, but it was a piece of a much larger picture, which you will see this year in a video game first, a true gang tackling system. This was spear-headed by some very talented engineers on our team (especially James "Superman" Sweeney) – folks that have been working tirelessly on this system with the goal of revamping the way multi-character interactions can work in Madden (and eventually all EA games).
The first thing that Ian gave us was reference. We knew it was going to be extremely tough to match the visual targets
perfectly, but we wanted to do as much as we could in one cycle to lay
the foundation for the future. Here is a perfect example video of what we were looking to emulate:
We then built the bread and butter feature to PRO-TAK – which is what we’ve been calling “N-Man Gang tackling” internally. As the name indicates, we can now have a large number of players add on to a tackle once it is already playing. This includes adding on and pushing the tackle in any direction procedurally, and also even if you are powerful enough, immediately knocking everyone over. There is nothing like having nearly half the players on the field involved in a tackle…it’s something that really does change the game. One extra request from Ian and the design team was that we also allowed offensive players to push the guys forward if applicable. This again adds to the ‘game-changing’ moments…you may be tied up fighting at the goal line with no chance at scoring and here comes big Jon Runyan to push everyone into the endzone…it’s a really cool feeling.
So I wanted to show you two quick video examples of PRO-TAK gang tackling. Keep in mind this is very much in progress and we have plenty of work to do to finish this out from tuning to blending to animation. Regardless, I think you can see that even in rough form this system is going to help change the way the game is played forever. Here is Brandon Jacobs carrying a few Cowboys for some extra yards (PS we know the numbers on their shoulders are broken), but having his forward progress stopped right at the end and pushed backwards.
And here is the swarming Ravens defense making sure that Lendale White will not “Fight For Every Yard”.
Keeping with the spirit of the breakout system from 09, we extended the ball-carrier’s ability to break out of tackles so that you can even shed these large gang tackles… This means as a ball carrier you can seek the daylight and “fight for every yard” by breaking out of this large mass of defenders. Now don’t panic, it isn’t going to be an easy thing to do (as this happens maybe only a few times per season in the NFL), but we did want to make sure it was possible to shed multiple tacklers with a skilled back, especially if you can find a direction to sneak out of that doesn’t have a defender trying to hang on and bring you to the ground. This was our visual target - a slippery Steve Smith breaking out of the clutches of quite a few defenders:
(Sorry, we don't have an in-game video yet to show but it will come soon)
“Steering” the tackles is another huge aspect to gang tackling and PRO-TAK in general. When a defender and ballcarrier collide, we not only take into account their mass and ratings (like trucking or hit power or what have you), but also their previous velocities and impact angle to manipulate the hit after impact. This allows the ratings and the real momentum of the tackle to have a bigger role in where a player ends up after he is hit. This also means that a defender “knows” to try and keep players out of the endzone or sideline or first down marker - our runtime code can manipulate the playback of the animation accordingly to steer it in the desired direction. Accounting for all players’ momentum leading into the impact, and following those physics calculations through into the tackles (and the falls), means that tackles are no longer out of control pre-canned motion capture…they can be driven and moved all over the place. We wanted you to have to fight for every yard, and we can now more easily ensure that sure you do. This was a huge help for us as we worked on re-vamping blocking this year, as we were able to use this technology to dynamically form our pocket. Here’s an example of the same exact blocking animation in ANT with drastically different results based on dynamic procedural ‘steering’:
One of the most dramatic (and fun) gameplay features for me personally, is being on defense. What PRO-TAK gang tackling allows is that as a gamer I can now add-on to an existing tackle before the knees hit the ground (and even after that as well…more on that later) to nearly ALWAYS change the result of the play. An extremely rewarding action is to wrap up a ballcarrier with one tackler (say a cornerback), then switch off to a linebacker, run over, and deliver a crushing hit stick on the ballcarrier to clean up the play. In general what I love about this feature is hearing from everyone that “it just looks like football”. But even more important than the visual fidelity, we also deliver an experience that allows YOU to make the play far more often.
Well Madden fans, that’s it for this week’s blog and hopefully some good info on how PRO-TAK has allowed us to never before seen moments in a football game. We look forward to hearing what you think – post away in the comments section below or put your ideas or suggestions in the forums [here].
- Simon Sherr (and Ian Cummings)
Madden NFL 10