As Out of the Park Baseball 17 continues steamrolling towards release, many have discussed and debated this year’s feature list. Several of these long-awaited additions have pleased the OOTP community, going a long way to appease both the hardcore fan, as well as the casual crowd.

I was asked to discuss a couple of my own favorite features as we approach the March 22 release date, and to share those thoughts with the OperationSports community. This creates a dilemma: I’m quite aware of what crowd I represent. Outside of that audience, who’s going to read this and say, “Oh, that’s what John Comey likes. Good to know?” Heck, I’m pretty sure I’d read it and say, “Who do I think I am, anyway?”

Thankfully, when faced with a bruising of the ego, I can become quite resourceful. In this case, I pinged two of my friends for a roundtable of sorts to see what grabbed them the most regarding the upcoming release.

Thus, OOTP’s originator, Markus Heinsohn, and Matt Arnold, who has become an indispensable developer on the game, were generous enough to give me a few minutes of their time.

When approached on the topic of which new feature they think the community will enjoy the most, Markus was quick to respond:

Markus Heinsohn: I think my favorite feature is the new Historical Exhibition mode. It opens a whole lot of possibilities. You can pit any two teams in history [1901+] against each other and see how they perform in an environment you’ve defined. For example, if you play the 1996 Braves against the 1927 Yankees and select 1927 as the era, then the Braves will act as if they’d travel back in time and put up realistic numbers that match league environment, including game strategy, pitcher fatigue and so on. On top of this, you can also play any historic World Series matchup, including accurate World Series rosters. So, as a Phillies fan, can you avoid the Game 6 defeat in 1993? This new game mode opens up a whole new world and is very easy to set up and use.

Despite my sadness at the cruel reminder of the ’93 Phils, I asked Markus what led you to add historical exhibitions? Was it based in the community, or his own ‘A-Ha’ moment?

Markus Heinsohn: I wanted to add that feature a while ago, but I knew it would be quite a bit of work. Then a couple of months ago I still had it on my list but was unsure if the time needed would be worth it, so I asked our community. The response was quite clear. Many voiced their opinion that they’d probably enjoy the feature, so I sat back, designed it and then started coding. In the end, it didn’t take quite as much time as I thought, and the awesome World Series rosters that our community member -- and long-time beta tester -- pstrickert contributed, helped a lot. When the feature was done, I played around with it and realized that it is indeed pretty exciting. You can play all sorts of interesting matchups with it, and examine the results. I hope that even users who are usually not much into historical games will try and enjoy the Historical Exhibition mode a lot.

When asked what two teams Markus would match up, he was quick to respond to that as well:

Markus Heinsohn: I loved watching the Braves in the mid '90s and am fascinated by the Babe Ruth-led Yankees. I’d probably pit the 1995 Braves against the 1927 Yankees and see how that plays out.

Matt Arnold, however, went with the nerd route; in all honesty, though, this excited me as much as historical exhibitions:

Matt Arnold: If I had to pick a top choice, I’d say the threading/speedup. But that’s thinking as a programmer first -- it was a fun challenge to work on, to see some pieces like the “Shop-A-Player” just zip by, whereas in the past I sometimes had time to go grab a coffee before the sim had finished shopping a player. It is quite rewarding.

Of course anytime you attempt to make internal improvements on speed, there can be hurdles. After all, shopping a player has historically been a slower process. Thankfully, Matt was happy to elaborate:

Matt Arnold: OOTP has always been single-threaded up until now for the calculations. What that means is essentially everything happens sequentially. So, for example, if we have to go through and set every team’s roster, what we would do before is go through each team one by one setting them. However, most modern computers can actually run multiple calculations at once. Essentially one per core in your machine. Most have either two or four cores, plus hyperthreading, which is a way the computer basically cheats to run twice as much stuff through. So for a lot of cases, computers can run four or eight things at the same time at the same speed as it would take to run one thing. With the new threading, we can essentially change it to now build the lineup for 8 teams at the same time in parallel, and when you actually do the calculations, it will run a lot faster than before. Technically, it may not run eight times faster, but you can easily expect it to be four times faster.

This is extreme nerd speak, and it is also a needed refresh. It’s very exciting to see OOTP finally take advantage of new chips and new processing technologies now arriving on the market. With new tech though, come new issues:

Matt Arnold: There are drawbacks. The biggest one is that you have to be very careful that you don’t have two threads working with the same data at the same time. One place where that comes in, for example, is in free-agent calculations. Each team has to “talk" to the same free agents, but we have to be careful that each free agent is only talking to one team at a time, otherwise everyone just gets all confused. Or even a case where each game has to make sure its stats get uploaded to the league stats -- if you have two games that end at the same time, you need to be careful that they wait for one another before writing their stats. So the biggest challenges are identifying what areas would actually benefit from being run in parallel, and then making sure that they don’t try to use the same stuff at the same time. But I like to think of some of those things as fun challenges. When working on it, it really makes your brain think, trying to figure out how something can go wrong.

When asked to quantify the improvements, Matt was not able to be totally concrete; after all, not everyone has the same rig. However, he did give some indicators.

Matt Arnold: As for benchmarks, it’s hard to get explicit benchmarks since you run the game twice -- things will happen differently each time. I know Markus ran some tests on his machine in the fall and found in general it was about 30 percent faster. One of the beta testers took a large league and simmed a full year, and it went from 53 minutes in OOTP 16 to 30 minutes in OOTP 17. However, there are other pieces that have also gotten faster that won’t show up on there. The “shop a player” function, for example, got a great boost, and is easily four to eight times faster than it was before. As they say, results may vary, but I think everyone will notice a substantial improvement.

So, not only is the program still adding intricacies and depth, it is gaining speed. This is instrumental as the program grows.

Both were unanimous when voicing their support for their other favorite feature, the 3-D model. It's a continual work-in-progress like everything else in the game, but the 3-D model is considered a considerable triumph for the team.

Markus Heinsohn: Finally you see little player symbols moving in 3-D, making plays and smacking balls out of the park. It’s fun to watch, and it’s a feature which we will continue to work on and improve over the years.

I asked both when they finally felt satisfied with 3-D, and when they felt it was ready for the public:

Markus Heinsohn: It was when playing out a game a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to reproduce a non-3-D-related bug, so I had to play a while, and it really was so much fun that I stopped caring about the bug, but rather played the game and another one right after. Watching those little things go after the ball is really entertaining!

Matt Arnold: Honestly, the first time we got a basic groundball working, I knew it was pretty awesome. That took a surprisingly long time to get going, and then I saw that first around-the-horn double play, then I was like, yeah, that’s freaking awesome. We have to also give a lot of credit to Jorin, our 3-D developer, who handled all the hard parts of animating the players and ball movements. He’s put in a lot of late nights to fix issues with the 3-D movement and make sure that players are getting to the spots they’re supposed to be.

When asked about the biggest hurdle 3-D brought, Matt gave an answer I’d expect, but also said that he had an interesting process for making sure each play came out as authentic as possible.

Matt Arnold: The biggest obstacle for me is the sheer variety of plays. So while fly balls are easy to handle, think about the number of different ways a double play can happen, making sure everyone is moving to their right spots at the same time. More than once I have to just sit back and basically act out the play in my living room so that make sure I have all the pieces coming together. It’s definitely a work in progress, but when I first saw the little guys on the field execute an around-the-horn double play, I think I sat there and watched that replay for like five minutes just amazed at how cool it looked.

When asked about where the future of 3-D goes next with Out of the Park Baseball, Markus was directly coy.

Markus Heinsohn: We’ll take it one step at a time. We’ll definitely keep our focus on the view which allows you to see the entire field, so we don’t have to worry about close-up camera angles. So in the short term we’ll also concentrate on getting all the plays done that the engine can generate, plus all the rare ones. And also improve the realism of ball flight and player movement in general even more. The ultimate feature, which I want to see in the game within a couple of years, is Build Your Own Ballpark. We already have a clever idea for that, but won’t tell you about it yet so nobody can steal it [he added with a wink].

Out of the Park Baseball 17 is currently available for pre-order, either by clicking this link: http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/out-...aseball-17.php, or via Steam. The game will release on March 22, but any pre-order made prior to March 18 will give you the final Gold Master beta, which will release four days prior to the official release, and come with an additional OOTP 17 Steam key.

The cost is $39.99, and it is available for both Windows and Mac.


John Comey has been in the sim gaming community for nearly twenty years, and has justified his bachelor's in journalism by writing close to 5,000 pages worth of content for various online leagues over the years. He has been the creator of several failed blogs, as well as a LiveJournal or two...not that there's anything wrong with that. He is also the author of the worst technical manual in gaming history (Total Pro Football). He has collaborated and contributed to products with Wolverine Studios, Grey Dog Software, and Out of the Park Developments. Comey now lives in Mystic, CT, home of the world's oldest drawbridge, as well as thousands of Long Island tourists. He is the recent target of a box-and-one defense in a 35+ basketball league. You can find Comey in social media...but good luck finding him. He thinks he has a Twitter, but is hazy on what it is, exactly.