Official News from www.championshipmanager.co.uk (http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/shownews.php?id=58)
BGS Unveils New CM5 Match Engine
by Alex Whittaker - 28/05/2004


Match Resolver


Football is the core of ChampMan - sure there is a plenty of logic in the simulation for the players, managers, press, fans etc. off the pitch, but all of that rests on a consistent, believable and accurate representation of the beautiful game. Not just one game either, we have to play all the matches on a third round FA Cup Saturday and not take all day about it - and if you are playing a few other countries, the number of fixtures to resolve soon racks up.

Now if we had opted for different match engines to resolve at different levels of detail, we would have run into problems because the results from one match engine can look very different to those from another. Our philosophy has been to use a single match resolver for all matches and write it as tightly as possible to get matches completed very quickly indeed. To put this in context – and this is for code that has not yet been optimised – we are currently resolving complete 90 minute matches in about a second. Optimisation should drop this a little and we have a few tricks up our sleeve to shave a little more time off.

Of course you multiply up all those matches and it soon adds up, but that doesn’t mean progress bars and cups of tea - ChampMan 5 does not lock the front end as it processes and you can continue to access all screens as the matches resolve. So when Saturday comes, and the engine starts to plough through all of the days matches, you can go and tweak your training regimen or check out the scout reports on today’s coming fixture.

Match realism is pretty good already – we have all of the player behaviour in place, and most of the player stats are now having their affect – (I’m getting sick of seeing Man U spank Torquay!) There is a little more refinement of the player logic and then all that remains is engine tuning and optimisation.

And also some new screens :)
http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/images/58_2_L.jpg
http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/images/58_3_L.jpg
http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/images/img_34.jpg

Ugly skin, but that's a nice view of the pitch :)

doesnt look bad, but what matters is not the way it looks but the way it works

Indeed. CM 03/04 is doing matches at 1 sec per 90 minutes at the moment (on my 2.66GHz PIV), so where's the improvement? I'd think they might be using better spec machines than my 2.5 year old PC? (:/)

Originally posted by BGS
Of course you multiply up all those matches and it soon adds up, but that doesn’t mean progress bars and cups of tea - ChampMan 5 does not lock the front end as it processes and you can continue to access all screens as the matches resolve. So when Saturday comes, and the engine starts to plough through all of the days matches, you can go and tweak your training regimen or check out the scout reports on today’s coming fixture.

you already could

TROD.

I prefer a cup of tea... well... coffee.

you coul already make any changes while it was processing, Eidos/BGS have just done it differently and are trying to present it as something new.

TROD.

The front end is locked up, but you can stop the progress of match simulations, and tweak. Now you can do both at once, making the programme like 5000 times more unstable. Corrupt savegames, anyone?

lol, you see what i meant though? you could already do that, lol

TROD.

3D . . . 2D . . . . 2.5D? I think they should keep things two dimensional! What does it matter anyway, Im supporting SI and getting FM :D

Ditto. The shape of the players look real bad.

Damn, that looks very very ugly. And the skin, it looks very childish. Everything is so big, it's like Duplo:crazyboy:

omg, that is FUGLY:kader:

competly agree Cody, I expect SI are having a quiet laugh to themselves

TROD.

well if CM keeps their 2d engine and FM has its own 2d engine, both will be so identical, that would be a big fugg up?

oh how naive you are.. :p

TROD.

The SI 2d engine has always been 3d. The ball also moves along a z-axis. The new BGS one is also a 3d 2d-engine.

The 2 engines will not be identical, as both use different valuation and calculation methods.

the cursors look ugly as well and the player size are huge. imagine a keeper size that have already 1/3 of the goal mouth. surely is a nightmare for all strikers. but the pitch look nice ;)

The player size is meant to reflect the zone in which he can reach the ball by stretching one of his limbs. At least that was SI's thought behind it. BGS' players seem more elastic indeed.

Originally posted by rpvankasteren
The SI 2d engine has always been 3d. The ball also moves along a z-axis. The new BGS one is also a 3d 2d-engine.

The 2 engines will not be identical, as both use different valuation and calculation methods.

and also one has that all important attribute in the fact its had 2 games worth of testing already ;)

TROD.

I'll wait for the demo to "judge" this game

will the proper game be as badly antialiased? :crazyboy:

No, that's just Photoshop. PSP is way better in saving images to lower sizes. :)

Well in my opinion. It is good. I like very much the pitch as well as the ball and the players but it will be better if they were a bit smaller and even if the skin was the worst and hardest to use one i would get it because i am sure there will be a lot of skins out there. I hope there will be better gameplay. What about teams how many will be in? More than now?

Anyway i will sure buy FM and give cm a try on a demo or a friend

http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/community.php - go get your own... blog

i sneekly registered soccergaming@championshipmanager.co.uk

since for some strange reason TROD was taken

TROD.

A 2 week waiting period, dear lord. They are soooo ignorant. Life is fast these days. I want INSTANT fun, not have to wait 2 weeks.

What's this **** for anyway?


From now on all registered users can request their own URL at championshipmanager.co.uk, with their own personal blog. You can manage these pages and completely control their look and feel, making it the ideal tool to tell everyone about your CM addiction, real life football stories, or use it to report on your own five a side tournament. The choice will be yours. Everyone is welcome, so foreign fans feel free to write in your own language.

As soon as a sufficient number of members have started their blog, you will be able to browse their blogs, comment on them and look for the ones by people from your country or people that support your favourite team.

Riiiiiight....

hey, when is this coming out???

Final quarter this year both CM5 and FM 05 will be released. Nothing more specific known yet.

apart from dodgy release dates from play.com etc, but SI have definatly refuted any release dates and have said they will let everyone know in a few months

so probably around August time

TROD.

apparently 23 september 2004 for cm5 and december 3rd for football manager 2005

incorrect

TROD.

I will say the skin isn't as bad as the CM4 deafult skin. That wasn't ugly, just looked so cheap and like a photoshop newb had designed it using a marquee tool and pre-set styles.

The 3D engine looks impressive in my book.

Originally posted by BlademanX
apparently 23 september 2004 for cm5 and december 3rd for football manager 2005

Don't believe the dates (internet) shops give you. The dates will not be certain until after the summer.