FHM - 2D in the future as will be Beyond the Sideline Football?

[GMO123]

It was announced that the new game Beyond the Sideline Football will be 2D.
Hopefully in the future FHM will also be 2D.

[Sebastian Palkowski]

Someday yes but it is waaaaaaay down the road.

[BostonStrong]

why would they make a football game 2d and not fhm?

[Bruins86]

Originally Posted by GMO123

It was announced that the new game Beyond the Sideline Football will be 2D.
Hopefully in the future FHM will also be 2D.

Alot of people have asked for this and i wouldn't be surprised to see it sometime in the future, but Sebastian if i am not mistaken has said that programming a in-game engine like that for hockey is extremely hard and time consuming and they have a rather small development team.

Also i think in EHM 07 it took almost all the development time of that version of the game to make the 2d engine they had, and Riz the lead developer of that game has even said looking back it was a bad idea to spend all the time on the 2d engine while letting other parts of the game go relatively untouched. I read that along time ago so i could be wrong but i am almost positive he stated something to that affect.

Edit: and while writing that Sebastian responded lol

[BostonStrong]

Originally Posted by Bruins86

Alot of people have asked for this and i wouldn't be surprised to see it sometime in the future, but Sebastian if i am not mistaken has said that programming a in-game engine like that for hockey is extremely hard and time consuming and they have a rather small development team.

Also i think in EHM 07 it took almost all the development time of that version of the game to make the 2d engine they had, and Riz the lead developer of that game has even said looking back it was a bad idea to spend all the time on the 2d engine while letting other parts of the game go relatively untouched. I read that along time ago so i could be wrong but i am almost positive he stated something to that affect.

Edit: and while writing that Sebastian responded lol

Makes sense fhm is fine the way it is I think I was just wondering why they would make a new game 2d and not fhm but that makes sense

[Hockey13Playa]

I wonder if there is any slight chance of purchasing the code/programming from EHM to use as a foundation for FHM's 2D engine? Would save a ton of time and can make tweaks and edits where need be. Could then improve and build on that in the future when they're ready...?

[Bruins86]

Originally Posted by Hockey13Playa

I wonder if there is any slight chance of purchasing the code/programming from EHM to use as a foundation for FHM's 2D engine? Would save a ton of time and can make tweaks and edits where need be. Could then improve and build on that in the future when they're ready...?

While obviously i am not a dev on this game (wish i was lol ) i have done some programming before and it is not easy to port code from one program to another without having to rewrite 90% of the code to work with the new program. The two games even use a completely different set of attributes to define a player so you would have to rewrite that entire part of the code as just one example.

Also not to mention that SI games would probably never sell part of there code to a rival company. I dont really know what the relationship is between the two company's, SI games did publish a few of the ootp baseball games so who knows

[RchW]

Originally Posted by BostonStrong

Makes sense fhm is fine the way it is I think I was just wondering why they would make a new game 2d and not fhm but that makes sense

The simplest answer is that they are two different products. Only my opinion but if this new game had not come with a 2d engine already it might not have it in its first OOTP iteration.

[old fat bald guy]

2D can be a real problem if it's implemented too soon. I say this not as a programmer who knows the coding issues, but as a veteran gamer (I'm really old) who knows the gameplay issues. Take soccer, for example. Twenty years ago there was a management sim out of Scotland called One-Nil that had a dandy 2D engine that really looked like a soccer match, but it didn't work with the gameplay and in that game, it took close to two minutes to advance the ball from one end of the pitch to the other. Sierra's Ultimate Soccer Manager, which had something akin to what we now call a 3D engine, was the same way. EA had a management sim that looked like an EA game, but it had this problem in an even more pronounced way. Minutes would go by while a keeper prepared to take a goal kick.

And that's why Championship Manager was the soccer management sim from the 1990s that came out on top, with more realistic play represented by text and audio commentary. CM/FM had been around for, I think, seven years before it had 2D and 16 before it had "3D."

EHM got it right, or close to right, at the very end. Even the last edition, before the final patch, featured lovely 2D things like defensemen keeping the puck in at the point and then just skating backward to carry it out to the neutral zone for no reason.

Ideally everything would look like an EA game and play like FM, and maybe someday we'll see that. There was a developer whose name I can't recall who once said that someday we'll actually be walking around in a game, managing holographs. He made it sound like the holodeck on "Star Trek." But his game sucked.

The zone system Sebastian described in his last update sounds like something with a lot of merit.

[dave1927p]

I have a feeling we're 2 versions away before a 2D engine gets considered to be implemented.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by BostonStrong

why would they make a football game 2d and not fhm?

Francis developed the 2D engine for the football game on his own, before pitching the game to Markus, so the long, ugly process of doing that was already largely done by the time he joined OOTP. There are also big differences between developing 2D engines for stop-and-go sports like football/baseball and continuous-motion ones like hockey/soccer; it's a little simpler to design that kind of an engine for a sport where the action is broken into discrete segments with player positioning reset at the beginning of each of them.

And hockey takes it a step beyond soccer by requiring things like in-play substitution of players, a physical boundary around the playing surface, and that surface involving a very different set of physics - I remember Riz's earliest test builds of the EHM engine, it was just a puck you could bounce around the boards, it took him a while to simply get it to slide and rebound in a believable manner.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by old fat bald guy

Twenty years ago there was a management sim out of Scotland called One-Nil that had a dandy 2D engine that really looked like a soccer match, but it didn't work with the gameplay and in that game, it took close to two minutes to advance the ball from one end of the pitch to the other.

I loved that game! Haven't thought of it for years and years.

[old fat bald guy]

Jeff, that's a good point about the boards. Hadn't thought of that. And line changes are a big issue, although I think EHM did pretty well with that at the end.

Continuous play has always been a bear for people trying to develop games for hockey, basketball and soccer, because there's so much action and so few clearly defined events. It's not a problem that started with high-end computer sims. Strat-O-Matic did OK with its hockey board game back in the 1980s, but its basketball game was pretty dire. Baseball and football are much easier.

[drewst18]

Also I think a 2d Engine for football would be much easier to program opposed to a hockey 2d Engine.

In hockey its constant play with the 5 players interacting with each other all the time. But in a football game a lot of it is a 1 on 1 battle that I imagine would be much easier to program. As well the actual presentation of it is pretty easy as its only a 5-10 second play. Have each side run their play and its pretty hard to make it look unrealistic over a quick 5 second span so any holes in the engine won't really show through, where as hockey if theres some holes you will notice them pretty quickly by the movement and placement of the players. At least thats my opinion on it.

[omjo]

I think something similar to Power Play Manager would he good for FHM at this point. I play on a laptop so I actually don't mind the lack of 2D/3D as that will just put a strain on my laptop (try playing FM lol...), but the in-game feed/text could definitely use some improvement.

In OOTP they overjumped 2d engine and landed exactly on 3d engine. So, who knows...

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

I loved that game! Haven't thought of it for years and years.

Yeah, I think that was my first real manager game, too. Mail-ordered from Scotland and it arrived on 3.5" disks in a plain brown envelope. Amazing what they were able to do with a 386 processor and 2 MB of RAM.

[Duranium]

i´m only saying....'Football Manager' from, iirc, Addictive Games on my -fanfare- Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Oooooh, the good old days

[farmkidD2]

Originally Posted by JeffR

Francis developed the 2D engine for the football game on his own, before pitching the game to Markus, so the long, ugly process of doing that was already largely done by the time he joined OOTP. There are also big differences between developing 2D engines for stop-and-go sports like football/baseball and continuous-motion ones like hockey/soccer; it's a little simpler to design that kind of an engine for a sport where the action is broken into discrete segments with player positioning reset at the beginning of each of them.

And hockey takes it a step beyond soccer by requiring things like in-play substitution of players, a physical boundary around the playing surface, and that surface involving a very different set of physics - I remember Riz's earliest test builds of the EHM engine, it was just a puck you could bounce around the boards, it took him a while to simply get it to slide and rebound in a believable manner.

With all the talk about 3D or 2D engines in OOTP or BTS or FHM, when FHM gets theirs, is it going to be just a representation of the calculations that have already taken place in the game?

I can see how this would be much easier in OOTP or even BTS, since you just reset the play and the computer calculates the result of the play based on ratings(more complicated in BTS I'd imagine based on multiple players with multiple ratings), and then it spits this result out on the screen whether it is in the form of text or 2D/3D graphics. The OOTP version of the engine seems simple by comparison. Or at least I assume that is how it works, I'm not really sure.

I cannot imagine how FHM works, let alone with the issues of graphics. I know you cannot divulge your secrets of the inner-workings of the game, but can you shed any light on how FHM actually determines how and when a goal is scored or the results of anything in the game? With it constantly moving around and there always being different variables, I would imagine the complexity would be off the charts of trying to do something as simple as whether or not a pass is intercepted.

And then to come full circle, back to my original question, will the 2D/3D graphical version just simply be a displayed result of what the computer has already calculated, or will stuff like physics actually come into play?

EDIT: I just read the post about the zonal system in the update thread, I should have started there. I don't have the game yet, just so I get it, is that match engine describing what takes place during simulating every game? That answers that question, but I still have the original question about how the visual representations will interact with the match engine(for all three of the OOTP games actually, not just this one I guess).

PS: This game does look great and it is on my list to buy when my wife lets me. I blew my monthly allowance for OOTP 15 pre-order.

[old fat bald guy]

Originally Posted by JeffR

Yeah, I think that was my first real manager game, too. Mail-ordered from Scotland and it arrived on 3.5" disks in a plain brown envelope. Amazing what they were able to do with a 386 processor and 2 MB of RAM.

IIRC I got it from some guy in New England who worked as a U.S.-based agent for Wizard Games and mailed those disks from his house.