3-D Graphics

[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.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

Look at the history of PC baseball sims and why they failed. Graphics is one of the leading causes of failure.

Really? I would have thought low sales was the reason. Or are you suggesting low sales were caused by graphics? Either way, you need some citations for your claim.

I'll simply point out that graphics in terms of simply showing what's happening on the field (as in FM) is an entirely different beast from graphics in the sense of a typical console game where the user is directly taking on the role of the baseball player. It seems to me some folks are confusing the latter with the former.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

"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.

Exactly. My stepsister says the same thing.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Really? I would have thought low sales was the reason. Or are you suggesting low sales were caused by graphics? Either way, you need some citations for your claim.

Graphics killed several PC baseball games, most noticeably Earl Weaver. These facts are not "claims," but are fairly common knowledge.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

Graphics killed several PC baseball games, most noticeably Earl Weaver. These facts are not "claims," but are fairly common knowledge.

Lack of supporting evidence noted. Appeal to "common knowledge" instead of citations to factual references noted.

Now, care to try again? Can you cite actual evidence to support your claim that graphics resulted in the demise of PC baseball sims? Be aware you do need to show a clear cause and effect relationship. Correlation is not causation. (I should hardly need to tell you that.)

[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.

[Syd Thrift]

I think the argument re: graphics isn't so much that graphics = there goes your game, it's that doing something as large as creating a new graphics engine for a game isn't necessarily something that can be accomplished over a single year (much less 4-5 months, which is really how long Markus and Andreas have to actually work on new versions of the game every year). Even if you don't necessarily need more programmers / programming hours (you kind of do, but I'm playing devil's advocate here), you need different programming skills, and then when it comes time to test you need a different kind of person for that. Where in previous years some of the best beta testers were the guys who turned the game on in the background, ran a couple hundred seasons with it, and compared the results, a group beta testing graphics has to watch things on a game-to-game basis to make sure that each and every animation works and so on. And unlike the current iteration, where a Mac ought to be just as able to read from a database and make a few simple calculations as a PC, graphics beta testing must be tried on a wide variety of OSes and hardware because with low-level programming that kind of thing can in fact make a difference.

It's not even something you can kind of half-ass for one version and continue to refine in additional ones. I mean, that's kind of what FM does, but they only can do so now that they've built up an underlying graphics engine which they know is stable and relatively non-buggy. There are no real intermediate stages from the current "no graphics" system (yes, I know ball flight exists) to FM-style graphics, at least none that you can use as a building point.

I don't know the story of EWB other than that they never came out with a version after 2, which had amazingly awesome graphics for the time, but the inability to make significant upgrades year after year is what killed FPS: Football (well, specifically what happened was that they tried to make too large of a leap with their last version and released an extremely buggy product which was eventually recalled) and is a huge part of why Madden tends towards sameyness year after year (I think a bigger factor is the lack of a good rival since Visual Concepts left football alone in the mid-2000s, but I've certainly seen interviews that support this). Even Football Manager IIRC had to take an extra year off to get the graphics into gear.

Graphics, like pimping, ain't easy. If it was, AAA level game devs wouldn't have to bring in 5 or 10 guys to work on this stuff for a year and a half before releasing a game to a beta team, and for that matter you wouldn't see so many indie game companies adopting "retro" styles which, in addition to sometimes being cool in a throwback kind of way, take a *lot* less time to develop.

[Syd Thrift]

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.

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.

[VanillaGorilla]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

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.

All your points are well taken, however, you are complicating my request.

1) I don't care about ball flight (hey, do it right, great, but isn't needed).

2) Just have dots moving at corresponding speeds to the base runners. No need to show the ball going to shallow center and the CFer approaching it.

Take the text description we have now, and the exact same parameters that prompt the user for a baserunning decision. Have a dot placed in shallow CF representing where the play is occurring when we are prompted to decide to send the runner based on the OFer's arm, as is currently.

The game already decides if Coleman is going to score without a prompt, or if Cey will only go to third without a prompt.

Let me see a fair (no need to be NASA mission precise) representation of the runner's speed on the bases and the location he is on the base path when I am prompted for the decision.

3) Of course I want the game improved.....I think this is a very basic request that requires the tiniest of graphical effort and would be a complete added joy to the game.

If this request is not doable, then there is no need to suggest anything with graphics, ever.

No parabolas...no calculus (however, showing the guys with better baserunning skills round the bases more efficiently would ROCK....but I aint asking for that.....at this time). Point to point with 90 degree turns only would really add a lot to the exciting in game call by the user (and it would no longer bother me that the popup blocks out the speed of the runner for whom I am making the send/hold decision).

[knightdreamer2k]

I think some people are going for the extreme here. It seems alot of people are going back to MLB: the show graphics which is not being asked for by many people. I also have seen mentioned about games that have came out ages ago that are a different style than OOTP.
OOTP is and for the foreseeable future a text sim. Even if you add graphics it will still be a text sim. FM is still considered a text sim.

Graphics don't have to be 3D right away. It is best to start small. Start with 2d then improve that before going onto 3D.

[VanillaGorilla]

Originally Posted by knightdreamer2k

I think some people are going for the extreme here. It seems alot of people are going back to MLB: the show graphics which is not being asked for by many people. I also have seen mentioned about games that have came out ages ago that are a different style than OOTP.
OOTP is and for the foreseeable future a text sim. Even if you add graphics it will still be a text sim. FM is still considered a text sim.

Graphics don't have to be 3D right away. It is best to start small. Start with 2d then improve that before going onto 3D.

Piggybacking on this thought...

It is a text sim. Any graphic priority should be to enhance the game play of the text sim. OK, it would be cool if you had freezeframe of different spins for different pitches and an absurdly complicated algorithm for ball speed, bat speed, point of bat contact, point of swing contact, temperature, altitude, humidity, and barometric pressure all coming together to give something super close to "real" ball flight.....but how does that improve the game play? It can be cool to look at, but it will get old. We "see" all of this, already, in our mind's eye.

What we are not seeing is pertinent information in regards to baserunning decisions.

If you have all the ball flight and fielder movements in a perfect representation, but the base running is inaccurate, then how does that improve game play?

Represent baserunners with dots that move at different speeds based on player traits that give the user game related information that can be efficiently used in a game decision that is already employed as part of the OOTP User experience.

This isn't eye candy....this is useful information to be used by a player of the game during actual game play.

[Cryomaniac]

I've posted this quite a few times, but a good way to start would be to simply animate play outcomes (doing every one might take a while, but they could probably be crowd sourced to some degree if an editor for them was made) using dots for the players and a smaller dot for the ball, and the play them as required to sync with the PbP text.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Lack of supporting evidence noted. Appeal to "common knowledge" instead of citations to factual references noted.

Now, care to try again? Can you cite actual evidence to support your claim that graphics resulted in the demise of PC baseball sims? Be aware you do need to show a clear cause and effect relationship. Correlation is not causation. (I should hardly need to tell you that.)

It's common knowledge. Read the Wikipedia article on Earl Weaver Baseball or talk with Eddie Dombrower about it online. There are other examples. It may not be common knowledge in Canada, but it is here.

[The Wolf]

And I'll say it again: adding graphics is a huge risk that need not be taken. Read Syd's comments about how hard graphics are to implement.

You people want to risk the future of the whole game for some silly video images? If you do then I don't think you understand the complexity involved, or the stakes.

[SandMan]

Why not release two versions of the game: OOTP15 and OOTP3D. Keep the base text game a text game and give other users the OOTP3D version when it can be done 5 years from now.... Do not incorporate the game into one and have a option for this because you will have a lot of the graphics people complaining of the 3D graphics if it came out too early and was not good. Long live the text sim without the silly graphics.

Just my opinion. I think graphics could not be implemented before the release of OOTP15. Plus the expense of hiring a team of graphic programers since Markus has already stated that graphics programming is not something he can do without a graphics programmer. The expense of having to pay another programmer for a version of OOTP with graphics that may take a year or more to implement into the game is something that must be considered. Start the programming now and it may make it in OOTP17 or later.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

It's common knowledge. Read the Wikipedia article on Earl Weaver Baseball or talk with Eddie Dombrower about it online. There are other examples.

It's never a good sign when someone refuses to provide direct citations to support their claim. It's an even worse sign when they offer a backhanded reference that, when found and actually examined, does not support their claim in any way whatsoever. There is nothing in the Wikipedia entry for Earl Weaver Baseball which supports the notion that the addition of graphics caused the downfall of the game. The claim doesn't even make sense since the first edition of the game already had graphics in it, which immediately renders it inapplicable to comparisons with OOTP.

No, the problem with Earl Weaver Baseball 2 was that, according to the Wikipedia entry, it was released prematurely by EA and then not patched to fix issues in the release. In other words, the same publisher behaviour that all too often plagues the video/computer game industry.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. As The Wolf has provided no evidence at all to support the idea that the addition of graphics is directly attributable to a baseball computer/video game's failure, the claim is, for now, dismissed.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Kobeck

I was not clear.

My point was that 6.5 cost like $10 and was well worth the money.

I am in no way advocating going back. Just that the money was well spent IMO.

I think dropping a few dollars on a 2D graphic engine would be money well spent. Even if it is absoutly nothing but a stand alone 2D dots moving around thing.

I wouldn't buy it and I'd feel like I was getting 3/4 of a game.

[VanillaGorilla]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

The Wolf has provided no evidence at all to support the idea

Standard.

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

And I'll say it again: adding graphics is a huge risk that need not be taken. Read Syd's comments about how hard graphics are to implement.

You people want to risk the future of the whole game for some silly video images? If you do then I don't think you understand the complexity involved, or the stakes.

Amateur developers are producing mobile phone and tablet apps with graphics that are light years beyond many games that were done on a PC or on consoles just 10 years ago.

Sorry, while it requires time, effort, and investment, it's not as difficult as Syd or anyone else claims. See also the thousands of graphics-driven apps and games that proliferate the mobile and personal computing markets. If it's that difficult and the risk is that high, it would be impossible for the graphics-driven gaming industry to be producing billions of dollars in revenue every year.

While the rest of the world has the courage to innovate, cowards talk about how there's too much risk to try. If we left it to the cowards, America would never exist because the Founding Fathers would have considered the risk of being hanged for treason to be too great to justify leading a revolution.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Sorry, while it requires time, effort, and investment, it's not as difficult as Syd or anyone else claims. See also the thousands of graphics-driven apps and games that proliferate the mobile and personal computing markets. If it's that difficult and the risk is that high, it would be impossible for the graphics-driven gaming industry to be producing billions of dollars in revenue every year.

While I agree, the main issue is probably not actually creating a graphics engine, the main problem is probably then integrating that into the current OOTP systems.