At the Ashes Cricket 2013 preview event last week Chief described the game while we watched a example of England vs Australia at Lord's. We're going to split this into parts as it's quite long.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 1 said:Hello all. What we?re going to do is take you through a gameplay demonstration. Ravi?s going to play and I?m going to talk. I?m just going to re-iterate that the game is brand new and everything in it is new; motion capture, sounds effects. All built from scratch in order to implement some aspects of the game we thought were most lacking in earlier cricket titles.
The first thing you probably notice is the physics system. Previous iterations of cricket games have never really captured that unpredictability in cricket. They?ve done far too much to make everything look really clean so batsmen either miss the ball completely or you find the ball hits bang in the centre of the bat and there?s no real difference in between. This has largely been down to animation systems in the past and trying to make everything look clean but actually we wanted to get much less control over the ball in this version and use real physics to determine it.
[The game loads up and the commentators are heard]
So that was Mark Nicholas and Michael Slater introducing the game. You?ll also hear David Lloyd involved in the game. They switch commentary depending on the game that you?re playing.
We?re going through the final polishing stages. Some of the last bugs to fix are basically the animation sequences, some animation glitches, some of the commentary not in the right place because there?s such a huge variation of those. It?s usually the last thing put into place before we finish up.
If we start having a look at some of those physics things I was talking about what you?ll see is you get a lot more edges and not just edges but variations of edge. Wispy ones off the side or you might sometimes be getting really thick edges that go over the slips or over the wicket keeper. You get things flicking back into the stumps, you get bat and pad deflections which is something we?ve never really explored before. And mis-timed shots that just send the ball into the floor or loop it straight back up in the air towards the bowler. These things don?t look pretty, they?re poor cricket but they?re equally as important in cricket as the ones that come out the middle of the bat and go over the ropes and yet over the years it really hasn?t been correct in games. You can still ping the ball around with perfect timing but bad timing will show real variation in where the ball ends up.
There are about 80 different batting animations in the game and some of those animations blend into others during the shot so if the ball moves in the air the animation will blend so the actual total number of animations in incalculable (by which I mean that it is calculable but I can?t do maths with big numbers) but it's lots.
So if we simulate that through. If you decide that batting?s not your thing or bowling?s not your thing you can use the simulation tool to actually generate the score for that innings.
So before the England/New Zealand test last week we simulated the match and put the predicted score online (there is evidence, I?m not making it up). In our match England won by 180 runs which is only 9 runs out from the actual result due to some pretty nifty bowling in the final innings.
Really interested to read about the new "line & length" bowling mechanism along with fielding & catching.
