What the future of PES should be!

[H4RDY]

Guys,

I am sure you are familiar with the infamous GTA series. Something, which many of you will not know is that this year, they used a new gameplay technology to create motion for characters on-the-fly. What this meant was that very little was keyframed, the majority of the animations were all 100% natural and created on-the-fly by the consoles processor. The technology is called Euphoria.

To see a demonstration of the technology see the links below, the first is from the developers website, and the other is a demonstration of an american football game using the Euphoria physics engine:


1. http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm

2. http://www.backbreakergame.com/


The football game looks STUNNING! No other word for it. (check out the video section for more)

In my honest opinion, that should be the future of PES. On-the-fly generated motion, which would provide for an ever-changing and far more natural experience.

That is true next-gen.

 

[winston]

Looks great, very natural movements. They say it was done on a next-gen console; I presume they mean PS3/Xbox360. I wonder how the processor would cope with 22 players on the pitch, as well as ref and linesmen.

But no doubt, some day we will be getting footy game that look that natural. I just hope they play as well as they look.

 

[jeblo05]

check the interview with EA Sports Vice President regarding Euphoria:

Now on to the super cool stuff: NaturalMotion. We had previously speculated that EA was going to buy NaturalMotion to prevent the technology from getting into opposition’s hands and thus turning their sport brands into out-dated rubbish. The tech seemed a perfect fit for the genre. We were half right… or half wrong… we guess. Andrew told us that absolutely, discussions on the matter were had, but that ultimately Euphoria didn’t work with the FIFA concept. And his reasoning is quite fascinating.

Key to the way FIFA works is the concept of individual player attributes. One player is slightly faster than the next, another is better in the air, another is bigger or stronger and can muscle to the ball more effectively and yet another still is Peter Crouch, some sort of fucked-up alien. Plus this year there is a big focus on ‘effort’: on a player, via input from the user on the controller, going that extra yard to try and get the ball, be it with a desperate diving lunge, or a wild diving header – stuff you do see and experience while playing the game.

According to Andrew, Euphoria - in its current state anyway - is unable to be harnessed and controlled in a fashion that can allow the huge databases of player attributes to remain identifiable while operating in a dynamic fashion. If you are unaware of what Euphoria is you’ll find a detailed analysis in our article, The Top 10 Technologies of the Next-Generation, but it basically takes away the need to provide and call on specific animations for each in-game action – like a slide-tackle – by allowing the character model to act intelligently to the situation of its own accord. It exists best in GTA IV, but can also be seen in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. In the cace of FIFA though, the game needs to know that a specific player can jump an extra pixel or two higher, or is brave enough to drive head-first for a ball, or be a back, not a striker, and Euphoria cannot facilitate those differentiations.

Super interesting stuff (did we just nerd out?), as we would have thought that Euphoria and the sport genre were destined to make sweet love together. But not at the moment: clearly though an objective has been set for NaturalMotion in its creation of Euphoria 2.0. It may also explain why the company’s internally developed Euphoria driven NFL game Backbreaker has gone AWOL.

 

[H4RDY]

Good shout jeblo05!

Based on that quote its fair to say it is not quite there yet as a technology that would benefit the sports genre. However, I believe it will be a matter of time before the engine is furthered to such heights that will indeed be scalable for use in a football game, with player specific attributes.

It is clear that the technology is relatively new, and as such will need time to be perfected in order for it to become more mainstream. Whether or not EA are doing the right thing by passing on the opportunity to buy them out now, we will find out.

But somehow I doubt Konami will ever win a bidding war with EA, if push ever comes to shove.

The day that animations are created on-the-fly is the day when a true next-gen experience can be had in this genre. Cometh the day.