Mana Games

manutoo wrote:victorbicudo1,
for the part of the animation after the hit, it's possible. Before, it's complicated because the user can decide at any time how to do his serve spin.

Have you though about changing that? I mean, make the player choose the tipe of serve before the toss (flat, spin, slice) and giving the libery only for the safeness level?

I have a kind of "complex" suggestion. I'll try to explain to the best of my english abilities. Sorry for any mispelling.

So, it has to do with reachable/unreachable balls. When the opponent strikes the ball, i think (correct me if i'm wrong) the game is able to "calculate", based on the ball struck and the actual time the human player started to go for it (along with the chosen player speed and other variables, such as surface), if that ball is going to be:

1) reachable and returnable;
2) reachable, but with need to do a stretch or slide movement at full speed;
3) reachable, but unreturnable (net, long, wide, ball that lands on your own court);
4) a winner from the opponent, by a close margin;
5) a winner with no chance of getting near the ball.

Depending on that result, the game can trigger different animations, such as sliding, streching and grindind for cases (2), (3) and (4) or standing still or giving up on the run in the middle of it on (5).

If the player reacts on time, (1, 2, 3 or 4) but fails to keep runing at full speed in the correct direction or just gives up, animation (5) would be triggered.

I thought of this because that's kinda what happens on court. When you have doubts about being able to reach the ball or not, you could go full on towards it or just give up.

Hope i could make myself clear and help you solve this important puzzle.

victorbicudo1 wrote:I have a kind of "complex" suggestion. I'll try to explain to the best of my english abilities. Sorry for any mispelling.

So, it has to do with reachable/unreachable balls. When the opponent strikes the ball, i think (correct me if i'm wrong) the game is able to "calculate", based on the ball struck and the actual time the human player started to go for it (along with the chosen player speed and other variables, such as surface), if that ball is going to be: [...]

I heavily second this.

Have you seen what f1 do with esport recently? yesterday there was a race with real pilots stream on youtube ther's already 1.2M views in 12 hours
It would be great to have events like that in TE4

- 1/16x replay.
For some reason, I can't ever get the exact moment the ball bounces in a frame at 1/8

victorbicudo1,
1) [Service] I'm not very keen to do such a change (because it's convenient as it is). If the different anims on serve was becoming a big thing, I could consider it, though.

2) [streching] it was likely suggested in every single page of this topic, and I said something like "it's planned" every time already...


bran,
it's unlikely to happen in a serious way for a tennis game, because it's very far from being a 1:1 simulation like a car racing game can nearly provide. (in other words, Federer would suck at Tennis Elbow without a proper & long training )


Algo,
oh my god, a ghost..! ...

1. Would you like to increase the opponent's reaction time and slow the running speed? I find Al is too clever to predict all of my shot's direction...
2. Please enhance the effective of lob and drop shot. Lob shot can bring some interest to game.
3. Defend style opponents are too strong... If only you would consider it to slow their running speed, weak their strength, power and precision.

Apologies if this has been addressed somewhere else. Would you consider putting in a "scripting" mode where a rally (or even an entire match) could be driven off of an external script, e.g. a script that provides timestamped player positions at every strike, hit angle, the coordinates and velocity vector of where the balls lands etc. etc. So basically using TE4 to drive simulations, not for actual gameplay.

I ask this because in our group, we're looking at deep learning techniques to predict player behavior and shotmaking by analyzing historical videos, and having some kind of a 'rendering engine' to see our results in realistic action would be amazing. I know there's other research groups doing similar work too. I can only imagine that this will make TE4 even more popular. And once the big 3 retire there will be a lot of interest in keeping them alive virtually.

Thanks for your amazing work. I'm a big fan of TE2013 and have spent many hours on it!

vineetb,
you may be able to achieve that using a .dmo file, but it might be a lot of work, plus it'll follow the rules of TE engine which may not be exactly what you want. This file allows you to specify the controls for the human players on each frame (eg: move right, prepare an acceleration strike, etc.).
I didn't publish its format though.
Check the Recordings menu to see its main purpose.

Here is a suggestion. I think it would be cool to have an option in the career mode to make general upgrades to all players' attributes as years pass by as tennis has evolved over the years. For example, a player ranked 200 in the world in the year 2020 would have better attributes than player ranked no.1 in 1990, because the level of the game over the years has gone up. It would also be cool to save a player from the world tour from a certain year to your list of players in exhibition mode. For example, it would be nice if you could save a version of Andre Agassi from 1990, but also from 2000 for example.

for the second one, you can, just copy and paste the player and change the start date

yiph2 wrote:for the second one, you can, just copy and paste the player and change the start date

Cool, tnx.

JaNeZoKu,
1) Yes, it's something that I thought to do (it's already handled in the code at 50%), but in term of gameplay, it's more complicated, because it may give a too hard or too easy start of career.
I especially like to do it to better simulate the tennis of the 90's and 80's (eg: less speed & less control with wooden rackets), so playing all over the years would feel even more like reliving tennis history. Maybe I'll get to that in a distant future.

2) You can start a career in 1990 and then another one in 2000, and export Agassi to the Training Club from both (from his Character Sheet).

manutoo wrote:1) Yes, it's something that I thought to do (it's already handled in the code at 50%), but in term of gameplay, it's more complicated, because it may give a too hard or too easy start of career.
I especially like to do it to better simulate the tennis of the 90's and 80's (eg: less speed & less control with wooden rackets), so playing all over the years would feel even more like reliving tennis history. Maybe I'll get to that in a distant future.

Awesome! Well, for the problem of an too easy or too hard start of the career, can't that be solved by reducing starting points of your player at the start of a new career if you choose to play in 1990, and proportionally increasing his/her starting points if you start in 2020 for example?

manutoo wrote:2) You can start a career in 1990 and then another one in 2000, and export Agassi to the Training Club from both (from his Character Sheet).

OK, tnx!

JaNeZoKu,
yes, this could be a part of the solution.