Quote:
Originally Posted by VanillaGorilla
Ya know what would would be sooooooooooooooooo cool for the game and enhance game play but would require nothing more intense than what an Apple IIc could handle is using Microleague graphics integrated with ball flight and runner speed/baserunning awareness, and if we could just see where the runners are in relation to the ball and fielder when making a "send the runner decision" that would be so awesome.
Heck, even dots moving on the base paths at different speeds to illustrate the difference between Vince Coleman and Ron Cey (sticking with the Apple IIc era theme, here) going towards third and home on a single to center would so rock.
No need to knock me out with exploding scoreboards, or signature HR trots....just give me THAT and the game play improves immensely, and you haven't changed the game engine one iota.
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I remember Microleague and I played the crap out of that game, but I would submit that even that level of an engine wouldn't be used so much...
1. The game already does half or more of what MLB did back in the day with the animated ball flight. The ball flight could stand to be shown in parabolic terms a bit more, but as one of my previous mountain-of-text posts demonstrated, that's not as easy as it looks.
2. Of the other half or less, MLB really and honestly did not do that great of a job. There was an animation for an error and an animation for a successful throw that you could see the difference between within a couple frames of the animation. As it is, your example would call for separate animations for hits, outs, and errors to each location. Even if you only had 3 of each, for each of the 68 locations that is not an insignificant number of animations they'd have to come up with, and really, we'd need more than 3 (you'd want bunt animations for most of the infield ones, double play animations, throwing errors vs. muffed grounder errors, and then a bunch of other non-hit location related things like baserunning plays on batted balls and stolen base attempts).
2a. The fewer separate animations you have, the more quickly it gets boring and the fewer people you have using it. Even with FM, where the game engine informs the stat-producing engine instead of the other way around, and where they've had several years to keep churning out new player animations, a great many players play the game "dark" or highlights mode only.
3. Which gets me to this point: even a system such as the one you describe would take a programmer most if not all of the offseason programming time to complete. Since you presumably want Markus and Andreas to continue to improve the game engine itself, and since their training to this point has been much more in database programming and the like than graphics and calculus, that means you need to bring in at least one more guy, a guy who, by the way, can probably get a six-figure job at a AAA studio fairly easily if he has the skillset to actually churn this stuff out in a few months, to do this. Maybe he ends up paying for himself but you've got to understand that from M&A's perspective such a massive ramping up of expense could easily kill the franchise.