Deep analysis of the Ashes cricket game

[barmyarmy]

Well it was in development with Unity for 2 (3?) years.

 

[silverthorne]

The fielding system (including batting running) is the biggest problem. From what I know it was re-written in July for reasons unknown.
The build I saw in May did not have overthrows, runouts and teleporting.

I think they were using the old set of DLLs which they had no rights to. When they tried to replace that bit, all the hell broke loose.

 

[barmyarmy]

That's not the case. There was no rights issue with the previous system.

 

[silverthorne]

That's not the case. There was no rights issue with the previous system.

How did the game go so bad? The AC 2009 analysis suggests that none of the original ideas or knowledge contained within is in AC 2013.

 

[BigAntStudios]

The fielding system (including batting running) is the biggest problem. From what I know it was re-written in July for reasons unknown.
The build I saw in May did not have overthrows, runouts and teleporting.

You don't rewrite for no reason, it will have been smoke and mirrors or incredibly flawed.

 

[barmyarmy]

A combination of design decisions, budget decisions and building from scratch I would say. As you might know the AC2009 and IC10 codes were owned by Codemasters and sold to a third party but I don't know how blurred the line is in game development in terms of utilising institutional memory.
They really ought to be have been able to produce a playable game. What I've found too is that if you manage to get past the game breaking bugs you still find a deeply disappointing gaming experience. Minimal shot variation from AI, shots straight to fielders regardless of timing or placement and batsmen teleporting to off stump to play a 90mph ball outside off into the leg side.

Half the time you're left with no idea what just happened.

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You don't rewrite for no reason, it will have been smoke and mirrors or incredibly flawed.

Especially as the time extension was apparently to get working console builds not to re-write major parts of the PC version.
All I can say is that they must have been very good smoke and mirrors for no-one to notice anything unusual.

 

[silverthorne]

Well it was in development with Unity for 2 (3?) years.

I don't know if it is even developed in Unity for that long. You can assume man-months. If they hired a team of 5 unity developers, you would get 5 years of work in 1 year.


If they were proficient, this game would not be so bad.

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You don't rewrite for no reason, it will have been smoke and mirrors or incredibly flawed.

Maybe they scripted the game-play to do what it does, and then Mike (or whoever) was presenting the video capture as the real deal. You get the idea

 

[barmyarmy]

I don't know if it is even developed in Unity for that long. You can assume man-months. If they hired a team of 5 unity developers, you would get 5 years of work in 1 year.


If they were proficient, this game would not be so bad.

I think there's some staff turnover which won't have helped. Also I've got no idea how good their commenting and design systems are if new people are taking on inefficient and badly written code halfway through a project it's only going to make the codebase even worse.
If I leave a project for more than about a month I totally forget why I coded it like I did!

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Maybe they scripted the game-play to do what it does, and then Mike (or whoever) was presenting the video capture as the real deal. You get the idea

Nah, it was definitely being played live. Wish I'd watched more closely!

 

[silverthorne]

The deep analysis of the game contains PS4, XBOX 360 references.


I do not think the game runs poorly on PS4 or XBOX 360. If the other game publishers can get their game to work, that is no excuse.


I do think, they need at least Xeon top of the line 32-CPU server to play this game without being slow or erratic

 

[barmyarmy]

I think it was Mike Fegan posting here who said that they were having memory leak problems on the Xbox 360.

 

[silverthorne]

I coded it like I did!

There is no code. Only examples, demo codes all thrown in. See posts #1, 2 3 of this thread.

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I think it was Mike Fegan posting here who said that they were having memory leak problems on the Xbox 360.

That is probably rubbish.


Have you ever seen a main menu consuming 20 megs of memory where 10 megs is the size of the images on disk for the main menu?


The graphics, animation are unoptimised. If they optimised the graphics, animations, models, the game would fit into the XBOX or even iPad 1.


How did Shane Warne Cricket fit their game into the 64MB Sega Genesis Megadrive?

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I think it was Mike Fegan posting here who said that they were having memory leak problems on the Xbox 360.

The XBOX 360 has twice as much as the original XBOX. This is almost the same as the iPad 2, iPad 3, PS3.


Why did they not complain about memory leaks with the PS4? If you port to console, both the PS4 and XBOX 360 are almost the same specs.


If other people can get their Unity game to work on Android Gingerbread, Android Ice Cream Sandwich, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1, iPad 2, iPad 3, that is no excuse for insufficient memory.

 

[BigAntStudios]

They had the license, the time, the budget. They had it all.

It was a swindle. Simple.

 

[Biggs]

The fielding system (including batting running) is the biggest problem. From what I know it was re-written in July for reasons unknown.
The build I saw in May did not have overthrows, runouts and teleporting.

You don't rewrite for no reason, it will have been smoke and mirrors or incredibly flawed.

I think they were using the old set of DLLs which they had no rights to. When they tried to replace that bit, all the hell broke loose.

I think the last bit from silverthorne is plausible. Here's a thought: They Frankensteined elements that they had from IC10 to get the game "going" then figured they would perhaps reverse-engineer everything once they had it set up and running. They achieved that, (to some extent) and had everything running limited, but okay, at the Lords premiere event. Then went back to the drawing board in July (when it was re-written) to cover everything up - that seems to be where everything started to go wrong. They couldn't find a way to reverse engineer the IC10 code, and we got this mess.

 

[silverthorne]

They had the license, the time, the budget. They had it all. It was a swindle. Simple.

and if you look around, government grants too. There's references about TrickStar game being awarded some money from the government as grant.


You should write-in and complain about it. It is absolutely a waste of money. IMHO, they should consider taking back the money and give it to BigAnt games instead

 

[barmyarmy]

@Biggs - I'm not sure that works if you compare the two fielding systems:
IC10 - manual throws and manual catching
AC13 - all automated