[Syd Thrift]

I think that not only is something like FM's balls-with-feet model doable in future editions, I will go so far as to say with pitch F/X giving us more and more insight into the everyday physics of the sport, eventually "graphics" (really, in this case, the sense of space on the field) is going to be the long-term direction of micromanagement intensive baseball sims.

The issue with graphics of any kind, not just 3D ones but, admittedly, the extra dimension does make things worse, is that they are *extremely* math heavy in a way that a non-programmer just flat-out is not going to see. For example, a batted ball is never going to bounce off the bat in a precisely straight line - it's going to fly off in a parabola whether it's a ground ball, a fly, or even a line drive (a liner is just going to have a shallower parabola). You can write and/or copy an equation to describe that parabola fairly easily (although technically this *does* require knowledge of calculus) but feeding variables like bat speed, pitch speed, how on-the-nose the ball was hit, and even things like wind speed and direction make this equation significantly harder.

And then on top of *that*, you often have to write graphics in a different, lower-level language than the one you can get away with writing the rest of the game in because graphics do more things and require you to manage more stuff directly. For instance, I code in C# pretty regularly as part of my job now (and, luckily or unluckily, never have to deal with graphics beyond jpegs), but if I wanted to stick with .NET and manage my code more heavily I'd have to switch to that ancient beast known as C++. I'm not sure how well I can explain *why* this is the case without introducing a lot of boring programmer terms like pointers and bitmasks but suffice it to say that in many cases you need someone fluent in an entirely different language than the one you're currently using to succeed at graphics.

Even a smallish-seeming game title like FM (well, it's smallish compared to Madden or FIFA) has waaaaaaaay more programmers on it than OOTP's... 3, I think they're up to (if you count Paul from PISD)? "Please add more graphics" is one of those things that sounds nice and simple until you dive into the specifics and really understand what you're asking.