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Originally Posted by dawgfan
I guess Jim and/or Arlie could jump in here and address this, but I have a feeling this "wish" is harder to acheive than most people realize. I don't know to what level of detail games like FOF and TPF go to in calculating all that happens in a particular play in their sims, but I have my doubts that they are as intricate and granular in detail as what would be necessary to drive a full 3-D graphical representation like you see in Madden or 2K Sports.
Think about it - they have ratings for various categories of player ability and particular ways of calculating what the end result of any play would be, but are they so detailed that they describe a player juking to his left to dodge an OLB pinching in from the outside, then using a particular kind of stiffarm move to knock a CB on his ass before being forced out of bounds at a particular point because of the speed and angle that the FS had on the play? It's possible, but I doubt either sim goes into that much granularity of detail. And yet, that's what you'd need to drive a 3-D graphical representation (of every player on the field no less), and it's why people complain that Madden (and the other 3-D football games) aren't as realistic in their outcomes as the text-sims - it's levels of magnitude more complex to model AI and physical attributes well enough to represent it in a graphical format that has to come close to matching watching a game live on TV than it is to devise formulas to derive realistic results in a text-sim where you don't actually see the play unfolding or extreme detail in exactly what happened on each play.
Maybe I'm off-base here in my assessments of the current text-sims, and if I am I'd welcome Jim or Arlie correcting me, but I have my doubts that their sim engines provide enough information to drive a full 3-D graphical representation.
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For Madden, yes that wouldn't be doable, since people are playing with a joystick. In other words, a person's actions determine how a play turns out.
For this game however, the output is coming from the stats. If FOF had a sim engine underneath that, the result would determine how the action is played on the field. In other words, if the sim engine would say that there was a 15 yard rushing gain off the right guard, the graphics would simply be used as showing how to show it and it could have a number of creative ways to show how this person gained 15 yards off the right guard.
FOF would already determine the success/failure of a play before it is shown. The job of the overlay is to come up with creative ways to show that success or failure. So let's say that a running back has above average strength, but poor agility. If the FOF sim engine says he went 15 yards and he was tackled by a slow linebacker, it could show this running back running behind some successful blocks as he bowls over a few people along the way.
I am not saying this will be the easiest task, but it is doable. It is just a whole different way of thinking.