Hey everyone, time for another quick update!
Work in the past few weeks has been focussed on improving player movement and decision-making, and how the tactical instructions affect the decisions the players make. We have particularly focused on ensuring that each and every tactical instruction setting has a visually noticeable impact to the on-pitch action.
We’ve been improving the attacking AI of teams, improving the individual player interactions with team instructions like philosophy, mentality, tempo and attacking width. Trying to ensure that players maintain suitable spacing between each other so that when a player receives the ball he has more chance of having more passing opportunities available to him.
We’ve also been improving the defensive AI of teams, improving individual player interactions with team instructions like defensive line, defensive width, line of engagement and closing down. As well as improving teams behaviour with regards to how players interact with and hold their team’s defensive line and in particular improving centre back decision-making in crisis scenarios as it’s really, really obvious when they make mistakes (and they tend to be quite costly when they do)!
For the AI the next focus will be on improving the passing behaviour including various tactical instructions impacting this. We will also be working further on improving dribbling behaviour and individual player tackling, and how team instructions will affect player aggression and decision-making in this area.
As detailed on the below link, the process to upgrade the rest of the game to the new 3rd party code libraries required for the new match engine has unfortunately taken considerably longer than we had originally planned for it to take. It was always going to be an unknown quantity until it happened. It’s possible that only a few hours of work might have been required if luck was on our side. We had reasonably planned for this process to take us a week. In the end we were quite unfortunate with the knock-on effects that the various 3rd party library upgrades caused and it took us closer to a month to sort out (with a few minor issues still unresolved).
https://steamcommunity.com/app/468070/discussions/1/1638661595046117805/
The above issues have caused the timeline to slip, so this will result in a delay in the opening of the testing gameworld unfortunately. We were aiming for late July, but it looks as though this will now be pushed into August. However, this is the first significant setback we have had in the process, and we are still really pleased with how the work is progressing.
We also anticipate that during July we’ll hopefully get the visualisations and UI elements pieces of work along enough to be able to show some stuff from the new match leading up to the user testing starting in August.
That's it for now! We’re excited to be getting closer and closer to having this new ME in the game!