This is just a (not so) short note to let everyone know what it going on with the 1.5 update.
The game is now feature locked and testing is progressing. A lot of existing bugs have been addressed and overall, things are going well I think.
I am guessing some are not aware of the new features being built into the game and what you should be expecting. So I'll go through a very quick list below. This is not an all encompassing list of features or changes for 1.5, but a selection of them.
A new graphics engine. The game is now directX 9 based and has some graphical improvements including new ingame dialogs and screens, and the game front end (set up screens) have some new art.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The game now makes use of a technology called Shaders. I've kept the shader support requirement purposefully low using only shader version 1.0, but a video card that supports shaders is very highly recommended. It is distinctly possible you will run into performance issues if your video card does not have at least pixel and vertex shader 1.0 support. The vast majority of quality video cards on the market today support at least shader 1.0 so you shouldn't have too many problems unless you're trying to play the game on a low end integrated graphics card.
To those folks doing custom artwork, there is a minor change required for your field artwork. Endzone artwork no longer needs the sideline stripes. That's taken care of by the game now. So if you leave the side line stripes on your endzone artwork, you'll end up with double thick sidelines. It has no impact on the game play, it would just look a bit off.
Snow and rain versions of field artwork is no longer required. The game takes care of that now.
Uniform art is unchanged. All existing uniforms work with the new version with no changes.
A new sound engine. Driven by necessity here really, with the change to the DirectX 9 engine, a new sound engine needed to be built too.
A new input engine. Probably invisible to most players, the game has new code for working with various input devices. The one area where this is probably most visible is with game controllers. Unfortunately, Gravis no longer exists. It was absorbed into Kensington, and pretty much killed off. So I've moved official support from Gravis controllers to the XBOX 360 controller. I've also added some new features that make special use of that controller and I'll explain those below. That's not to say other controllers won't work, they do still work (Gravis, logitech, etc) but the 360 controller is what I recommend.
-Input Helpers. On screen icons for selecting a play or passing to various receivers now match the input device you're using. This makes it easier to figure out what player should be doing what.
New Arcade play features;
- Trigger passing. If you have the 360 controller plugged in, you now have an optional setting for your passing. The harder you pull on the 360 trigger, the harder the pass. A light tap on the trigger allows you to throw a slow lob over the top. The trigger passing is quite fun I think in that you have a lot more control over your passes. However for those that find it too much, you can turn off the trigger passing technique and just use the one button passing mode as the game currently has.
- Sprint button. A player with the ball has a 'sprint' button that allows him to run slightly faster for about 3 seconds.
- Tackle button. On defense you need to press a button to dive tackle.
- Kicking. kicking is now down in 3 distinct steps rather than 2. The kicking indication on field is improved as well.
- Defensive line shift. On defense, prior to the snap, a button/thumbstick combination allows you to shift the defensive line left, right, opened, or closed.
General Game Changes and Improvements;
- There is now considerably more distinction in player positions. As just two examples, positions like DB have been separated into Safety and Corner and Linebacker has been split up into Inside and Outside linebackers.
- New Depth Chart system. The Depth chart is now slot based to take advantage of the new player break down.
- There is now an almanac of past champions and defunct teams in the leagues screens.
- Databases now import based on League ID rather than file name. This should solve the problem of trying to import two different leagues that may have used the same file name.
- League databases that are removed from the game folder will now be removed from the games internal league list. This cleans up the league deletion process.
- The computer AI will now shift the defensive line to try and counter your play calling tendencies.
- There have been a couple of additional statistical items added as well.
Some additional comments and notes.
Much effort is being put into ensuring that the feature set that is there is as bug free as possible. What that means is that features that some may feel are missing or should be in the new version, may not have been added to allow more time for debugging and testing of existing features. The amount of new 'stuff' added to this verison is considerable so there's lots of new features in the game to explore and to play with, but I feel it would be better to spend a lot of time ensuring that the features that are there have few bugs, rather than spending time adding all the features everyone wanted, but with the end result being that most of those features had lots of bugs.
One specific area this effort has been targeted towards is league play. Leagues and league data should be more stable than it has been in the past.
Around the middle of July, I will be updating all the screen shots on the www.maximum-football.com web page, as well as passing new screen shots to Matrix.
Oh yes, the manual is also being updated as well and from what I understand, Matrix plans on having a printed version available. I don't have all the details on that yet though.
I'd like to thank everyone for their continued interest and support of Maximum-Football.
thanks
David
