I dont know who has the best running animations but I can tell u who has the worst thats EA sports football and live. NCAA is terrible but they may have time to fix madden doe. I think they say they will?

I think changing directions, especially subtle direction change hasn't been implemented well. That's an obvious sticking point for me.

Good post thanks.

I agree. This needs to be better although I think it's pretty good in most sports other than the football games.

I think running is a very hard to implement (hence the reason no has gotten it right). Something simple as body lean is very hard to program... To be honest, I haven’t seen any non-sports game get body movement correct so I don't think this is just a sports game issue.

i think NHL has really gotten it down as far as directions changes and such, but i would say its easier to get skating/"gliding" down pat than running.

Great post, I have been thinking the same thing for a while now. why not use the mo cap to copy how different player really run. I just don't get it, They run more realistic on G.T.A 4, but they can't get running right in a football game, where you run 95 % of the time.

I think using mo-cap to copy a bunch of different people would help the problem but would definently not solve the whole problem. There are a ton of situations that need to be added to the current running styles. when people mo-cap it seems like they try to replicate a sitaution but without actually being on a field that's pretty hard. Unless they start having a full offense and defense at the mo-cap session I don't think we will ever see perfect running in all situations of a game.

I think we all can agree that they (devs) have a long way to go with running animations. I think they may need to rethink how this is captured and also look at adding transition animations. I think they spend all of the time capturing "running" they end up missing the "slow down" , the "jog", the "sidestep" etc. and it makes for a very poor graphical representation of a person running. Since it would appear that the only folks that will be using the tech that Rockstar used and continues to use for any sports titles - I wonder how this will be corrected (outside of Backbreaker)...??

I agree, MM, with your resolutions yet I do not know what it is like dealing with what devs have to deal with whether it be the tech, financial limitations or what. I do have to admit that I seen a TE in NCAA 10 lumber down the field like I had never seen before. That was a whoa moment for me, along with how he went down on the tackle. It was a shoe stringer but he stumbled and finally lost his balance after it looked like he initially was gunna make it however that is beside the point. The lumbering run looked shweet.

Whatever the case, Natural Motion has some great tech and maybe they were a bit too ambitious for this gen because no one is really has used it except Rockstar and Lucas Arts and we see how Nat. Mot. is trying to create their own football game with it. That tech could be the answer if they can blend it with whatever needs a sports game could use. Who knows.

I like how nobody has actually answered the main question, which was, "Which games have the best running animation(s)?" :-)

I personally think that NBA 2K8 and 2K9 have the best running animations and Madden and NCAA 09 have the worst running animations.

DubTrey1, you assume that game studios do not capture transitions; nothing could be farther from the truth. Transitions are recorded all the time and are used for the blends when a guy goes from a sprint to a jog to a walk to a stop.

Mocapping multiple guys sounds easy in theory, but proves very difficult in implementation. You'll have to do an entire "motion model" (walks, runs, transitions) for each body type. And even then, a 6'5" 285 pounder is going to run differently than a 6'10" 285 pounder. So do you mocap for every body type and height combination? Where do you make the distinctions?

If RAM memory on the PS3 and 360 were unlimited then this is possible, in theory. But since you only have 512 MB of RAM to work with and have to load textures, game logic, data, etc., having multiple running animations can prove to be quite a technical challenge.

I certainly agree that a guy like Michael Turner will have a different running style than Steve Smith, and both will be different from Jake Long. The pie-in-the-sky type solution (IMHO) is going to be a smart, physics-based AI system (far beyond what Endorphin does) that will make a 350 pound lineman pull for a block, then lean in as he's about to make contact with a defender (context-aware), while the 240 pound bruiser follows him while running upright so he can see. That kind of thing is not too far off, but is probably not computationally possible at the moment for sports games because the system would have to do 10 (basketball, baseball), 12 (hockey), or 22 (soccer, football) separate computations at every timestep. The computations are incredibly CPU and memory intensive! So maybe when the PS4 comes out we can think about having the "ultimate animation system" (UAS). :-)

I think APF might be the best. FIFA isn't bad either

MLB the Show has great running animations, I wish that company could make a College Football game. Instead we have EA Sports, which is more of a marketing company than anything else. Man they can push some bull s.

Memory, CPU, Computations, Dev Companies, PS4 aside. NCAA Football has the worst running animations comparatively. So that tells me there is a lack of effort, attention, resources, technology etc. But as a consumer, I don't care. As a consumer I see baseball, soccer, hockey and basketball games with better animations. So I know it can be done. And I know it's not being done in NCAA, Madden is in the mix too. The only thing that comes to mind is that most of those other sports have competition, where football doesn't. When you have a monopolistic econmoy, you set the prices, and in this case you tell us how people run. Like robots.

econmoy = economy, sorry bout that