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:

“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

Ever felt like you needed more of a challenge?

As we creep closer and closer to the NFL draft and our cover athlete announcement (as well as many other events), it’s getting to that time in the year where our features are getting locked down and we can start talking about some bigger ticket items. We’ve been doing these weekly blogs for quite a while now, so I’d encourage you to take a look back and give them all a read if you have a chance.

This week though, we wanted to really dive into a new feature that we are really excited about – Adaptive AI.

Why Adaptive AI?

In nearly every sports game that you’ve ever played, there usually comes a time where someone discovers some sort of gameplay strategy that is extremely successful (in an unbalanced way). Often times these are considered ‘exploits’ because they are either impossible or extremely hard to stop. You may find it on your own, or you may learn it from someone abusing you with it online, or you may even pay to find it on a shady website. Regardless, these exploits can often extremely hamper the replay value of a game because at some point, nearly everyone gets tired of doing the same thing over and over again and beating up the CPU by 100 points…and at this point the game typically comes out of the tray. Whether it’s an exploit or a “money play”, it’s all frustrating…so from the start of the cycle we knew that we wanted to create an Adaptive AI infrastructure in our football games. Two of our most experienced gameplay / AI engineers – Daniel White and Ryan Burnsides – took the reigns with designing and implementing the majority of this system so I hope this blog does it justice. :)

What does it do?

The adaptive AI framework that we’ve built for Madden NFL 10 is rather simple at its base, but its power is in its ease of use and integration to the game. Any designer or engineer can use a tool to set up any number of inputs (variables that come in from the game), as well as outputs (how the AI should react to those variables), and save them off and quickly preview how those changes come out in game. That may sound really technical, so here’s a good example.

Input: QB scramble outside tackles 3+ times for 5+ yards
Output 1:  Defensive hot route: defensive end to flats
Output 2: Defensive play call: Boost to QB spy plays
Output 3: Defensive hot route: corner blitz on scrambling side

Simple right? At its basic core, it means that we as a team can add some ‘success’ parameters to our tool, and give the defense some simple commands that they can try to use to stop them. The cool part is that we basically create these rule sets by collecting data on how we actually play. If someone is burning you with constant passes to the flats, then you call plays with more flat zones. If someone is burning you with dives up the middle, then you pinch your line and crash them. If someone is burning you with corner routes, then maybe you’ll double cover the receiver or drop back more into a cover 3. All of these situations are extremely easy to add, and we can add these types of decisions into the CPU (coaches and defenders) to help them react with whatever is happening to them in the game. When we dictate what ‘success’ actually means (which is often the toughest thing to judge), we can choose that based on total yardage gained, average yards gained, percentage of total plays run, or other factors.

Another really cool part of this system is actually the ability to directly modify attributes under the hood, simulating true on the fly “learning” of a defender. For example, if an offense is running the exact same play over and over again for big gains, we would boost the defense’s play recognition ratings to emulate them learning for their mistakes to have a better chance to react when they see the same look again. Same goes for something like continuous out routes…a defender will get better and better at man coverage if you keep running the same route over and over again, but would drop back down to his original rating if you keep mixing it up. It should also be said that were keeping some integrity by not modifying physical attributes like speed, jumping, or acceleration.

Having individual defenders make realtime adjustments meant that we could implement Adaptive AI for online and head-to-head play as well (i.e. not just for the CPU players). So if your opponent starts running something that is becoming overly effective, and you don’t feel like you can’t stop it with your play calling, then at least your teammates will start learning how to stop it on their own.

One key detail is that we can also change the ‘output’ numbers per skill level. So for example on rookie or pro mode,  the defense may actually know what you’re doing and have a solution for it, but we might actually have them wait a little longer and let you run the same thing a few more times before they start stopping it.

We have added a ton of inputs and outputs that allow us to really tweak the AI in a relatively simple manner. Here are some examples:

Play Types
- Play Action
- Screens
- Counter
- Draw
- Pitch / Toss
- etc

Play Style
- Scramble
- No Huddle

Route
- Entire Route Tree (i.e. in, out, comeback, streak, etc)

We don’t have everything covered here, so this is an area we are really looking forward to continue developing out in the future.

Summary

First and foremost, we hope that our Adaptive AI will add a ton of replay value to our games this year by forcing you as a gamer to continue to mix up the way you play to have success. Football is a very complex game of chess – and this is a great first step towards re-creating that. Secondly, we hope this feature will continue to show our commitment at the Tiburon studio to creating a realistic simulation of football, as it exists in both NCAA Football 10 and Madden NFL 10.

That’s all for this week – please feel free to leave feedback in the comments section or discuss in the forums!

- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10

Many caught on right away, but I wanted to officially clarify that the image we released this morning was an April Fool's joke.
http://insideblog.easports.com/archive/2009/03/31/creating-quot-next-gen-quot-quarterback-play-in-madden-nfl.aspx

 Some may say it was cruel, so we are sorry if you feel that way, but after all we are making video games here, we aren't government officials so it seems fitting to have a little more fun right?

Here are the key details I thought would give it away:
- Calling the feature 3.0 when there hasn't been a 2.0
- Green being worse than yellow 
- Different shading for lob / bullet
- Jagged lines seemed like a dead giveaway to me - that would be absolutely impossible to understand
- Removing the ability to actually run with your QB (eek!)
- Using an extremely complex button combo to even activate (or de-activate) the feature

In our first blog for the year we made clear that we weren't about delivering gimmicks...we wanted to deliver a PURE and authentic NFL experience. This went pretty much 180 against that vision. :) 

To be clear, there will not be a QB Vision 3.0 in Madden NFL 10. But it looks like we still tricked a few of you. Kudos to Josh Looman for coming up with QB Vision as our piece to play the joke.

To extend an olive branch and show that we're not totally heartless, I figured I'd touch really quickly on a REAL improvement to gameplay for Madden NFL 10 (via new animation technology and AI) in the area of sideline catches.

If you have played pretty much any version of Madden, this has probably happened to you: 
 

You throw a nice pass to your receiver as he breaks open on an out route towards the sidelines, but your WR plays a catch animation that gets his foot just out of bounds, nullifying your perfect vision as a QB (sorry, bad pun). This is one of the more frustrating occurrences across all skill levels for every Madden player. We knew we had to fix this.

There are three main things that we will do for Madden NFL 10 to improve this area: 
1. Added AI to make players dynamically slow down as they approach the sideline (instead of running full speed)
2. Allow early animation branching at the end of certain animations so they learn to better drag their feet
3. Dynamically "steer" the catch animation as he approaches the sideline. This emulates what a real NFL player does as he tries to keep his feet in bounds...he will try to 'curve' upfield to maximize his shot at getting his feet down where possible.

Check out the video below - an example from Madden NFL 09 is on the left while the new technology you'll see in Madden NFL 10 is at work on the right. You can pretend that the out of bounds line is the edge of the grid. In the example, you can see how just a slight bit of "steering" on a catch animation can mean the difference between a pass being incomplete and complete. You'll also notice how the same animation can branch into a more realistic "toe drag" ending and make the player look much more aware of his surroundings. We can also make players with higher awareness and agility ratings actually "steer" even more upfield, which could hypothetically even keep guys in bounds and able to keep running up field (probably wouldn't apply in this example though).

In summary, we hope this makes up for our little April Fools prank. This new "steering" technology is being used in many other areas that we'll be talking about soon, but even in this simple example I think it's evident how we can really improve the passing game with this addition.

- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10