MULTIPLAYER and general league question

[Enforcer]

I have a few questions-

Will the game be a career mode?
can you play head to head with all 32 teams owner by real people?

[David Winter]

Yes, the game has a full carrer mode.

You can play head to head but there is no internet player to player in this edition.

[AxnXcamr]

You say no internet in this edition...does that mean that internet support might be implemented in a future expansion or update? Or do you mean Maximum Football 2 (god willling) could have it.

[David Winter]

IP H2H is such a complicated thing to do I can't say what the time line for getting that working is. It's definately on my list of things to do, but it would be a considerable undertaking to make that work well enough to be worth while.

[AxnXcamr]

Gotcha...here is hoping for the future!!

[mudrick]

ORIGINAL: David Winter

IP H2H is such a complicated thing to do I can't say what the time line for getting that working is. It's definately on my list of things to do, but it would be a considerable undertaking to make that work well enough to be worth while.

I don't doubt this anymore. Just look at Fbpro. They had a Sierra team put together a H2H game and it is shabby at best. It works, but not well. The OOTP baseball text sim tried to put together a H2H version and had to scrap it. It would just be nice if someone gave it a shot. It is a great feature, and without a doubt a great draw for sales.

[Title95]

Yeah, I think you're right. There was a good deal of anger over at the Ootp boards when H2H was scrapped, but everything I've read on the net (And I admit, I know nothing about programming.) seems to indicate that H2H is a difficult, difficult proposition.

[David Winter]

For a dialog game, I don't think it would be overly difficult. A 3D game would get out of sync pretty quickly. There are systems (called deterministic algorythms) that help keep that to a minimum for online games but Maximum-Football is not setup to use those. They're not a trivial thing to build.

[Sef0r]

David, I want to try and understand this...

Is it difficult to program H2H online play for this game because of it's 3D engine?

Is it hard to do because you have the option of playing the game via a joystick (i.e. controlling the players, passes, runs) rather then just calling a play and having the game execute it?

If online H2H was doable but only via play calling and not play execution (i.e. actually controlling the players) would you still do it or would it not make sense as you may alienate some gamers? I'm hoping this isn't one of the reasons as I'm sure these people can buy Madden (*cringe).

[David Winter]

Online doesn't care what is driving the players to move in given directions. The root generator could be assignment processing or gamepad input. The 'online' portion of the code wouldn't care. The problem is keeping all those players in sync in both games and ensuring that the any required random number results are the same on both machines. So the short answer is, making two 3D games show the same thing at the same time via a network is a tremendous amount of work.

[mudrick]

Yes, out of sync is a major problem in some h2h games. Fbpro has out of sync problems. The new game Rome Total War has it. The only games i've never run into out of sync problems with are games like Quake and doom. The only exception is the game Total Annihilation. This is a game with futuristic armies that battle eachother in real time. Never have i gone out of sync with it.

[Frenzy]

I think Total Annihilation was a tile (2d) game so determining the location of something was much easier. I read a while ago that FPS games don't need to be exactly precise. If you are close, good enough. With a football game I imagine you would need to be much more precise for all 22 players on the field.

As for a coach only H2H mode I am all for it. I realize this is something that isn't going to happen soon (possibly in a patch/upgrade/next version) but I would like to be able to "watch" the play as the opposing coach watches the play as well. Off the top of my head here's how I envision coach only H2H working:

1. Coach A is the host and Coach B is the remote
2. Coaches make their play choice
3. Results are run on Coach A's machine
4. Host machine updates remote with results that include a graphical representation of the result
5. Coach A and B see the result
6. repeat step 2


I'm not sure how easy or viable this would be but lacking an arcade H2H (which I don't care about) this would be a very cool thing to have.

Hopefully somebody will do a 3rd party util similar to Netscoreboard. It was very basic graphically but it allowed all the coaches in the league to "watch" a game by simply replaying the game logs and showing a graphical result. The beauty was that coaches could chat as the game was going on and the extra "uh oh", "No way!", and "wow" type comments could really get you on the edge of your seat especially during a big game.

[bigticket]

David, does the game allow for byes during the season? On FBPro the defensive AI wouldn't bite on fakes making fake pumps, etc. useless, how does it work on MaxFB?