When a sports video game is “simming” a game, what is the system actually processing? Is it actually playing out a hypothetical high speed virtual game?
In: Technology
Can you put an exemple ? If you’re talking about a random mobile game where you compose a team and then the match doesn’t show and you only get the result ; it’s probably not simulating anything. It just get some random adjusted with the stats. It’s just a better cost efficiency.
Anyway it depends about what games you are talking about and just consider that in computer science : if you don’t need to do something to get the result then you’ll probably don’t do it. Because more things = more bugs = more development time and probably more execution time
If we’re talking about, for example, football manager games, they’re processed a lot like turns in an RPG. Namely they calculate based on things:
* The stats of your team members
* The status of your team members (eg: fatigue)
* Weather effects and how they affect your team (if you’re team is playing in conditions they’re not accustomed to, they will perform worse)
* The experience of your team members in terms of lengths of career
* Other outside effects to add more random chance. Maybe a player is going through a divorce or some shit.
* Team morale
* Probably a bunch of other variables I couldn’t mention here due to the vagueness of the question.
They then calculate these alongside a bit of Random Number Generation (RNG), the exact formulas are not made public, and calculate outcomes based on it.
Depends on the game, but probably not. Most of the time it will use the statistics of the players to do a probabilistic version of the game. Basically, the digital equivalent of rolling dice to see what would have happened. Within this type of simulation there might be more/less detail. For example, a baseball game can simulate every single at-bat, with pitcher pitch choice (type, speed, location) and then based on those inputs the batter’s hit %, location, power, etc. or it could do a much simpler simulation with just very basic hitter % against pitcher stats. Since you don’t usually see the pitch order, pitch choice, or pitch speeds in the box-score the end-result will look the same, but sometimes it can make it more “realistic” to simulate each pitch as batters will take a different approach on an 0-2 count than a 3-0 count (for example).
If you’re talking about FIFA, Madden, et al. then there’s a lot going on. Caveat, it’s been sometime since I’ve worked on sports titles.
So on one hand you have the illusion of stats. Who should win? How well should players perform? Some of these are faked and some are simulated. Maybe some super star player is going to hit that 3 ptr 99% of the time. Could sim the throw with an accuracy simulation or you could just choose the end result and calculate the arc that would result in that result. A soccer throwin could be thrown generally in a direction and players could react or there could be a bit of logic that picks a player to throw to, a likely interception point with desired ball velocity, likely bounces to get there, and finally generating an arc from the thrower and then the throw.
Some players might have different move or turn speeds that could influence how well they can move around. Alternatively a “better” player could just win the ball from a worse player (throw the dice, better player wins 5/6 the time – then just choose the animation that reflects this).
Generally though there are “physical” things being simulated: the path of the ball, rebounds, the characters are moved under a physical simulation with all sorts of animation constraints.
There may even be some simulation of plays. Are there set plays or formations that are being followed? General tactical positioning?
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