[Official News] BGS Unveils New CM5 Match Engine

[rpvankasteren]

Official News from www.championshipmanager.co.uk
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

 

[maleato]

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

 

[Áļéאָ]

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

 

[rpvankasteren]

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? (:/)

 

[Tom]

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.

 

[rpvankasteren]

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

 

[Tom]

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.

 

[rpvankasteren]

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?

 

[Tom]

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

TROD.

 

[champdave]

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

 

[Fernandez]

Ditto. The shape of the players look real bad.

 

[PSVFOREVER]

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

 

[celtic_bhoy]

omg, that is FUGLY

 

[Tom]

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

TROD.

 

[Drowning-Pool]

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?

 

[Tom]

oh how naive you are..

TROD.

 

[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.

 

[ngyc]

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

 

[rpvankasteren]

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.

 

[Tom]

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.