A question.......

Hi, I wanted to ask a question :

Say you play a match in "full time" mode, as you are watching the game, the match time bar at the bottom stays green while say your defenders are kicking the ball around the back line, the ball moves to your defensive midfielder, out to your winger, and back to your midfielder.

Now suddenly, the match bar at the bottom turns yellow (indicating an important highlight has just started), as your midfielder passes it out to a central defender, and the central defender passes it to a left back, who plays it to his central midfielder and 10 passes later it goes back to the left back who dribbles all the way to the byline and cross it to a striker who heads it just wide).

Now whats annoying me is, the game 10-15 passes before hand, already knew that a key chance was about to occur - which is why a yellow signal appears signalling a key chance is about to occur.

The reason i'm being so long winded about it is that, i now feel the game isn't unfolding in real time, or naturally flowing as you watch it, (which is how the game felt throughout my last 10 years of playing it). It now feels like the outcome is there before you are watching it.....which is annoyyyinggggg! Because you aren't playing it in real time anymore.

Its a bit like recording a real life important football match, say like Arsenal vs Manu, avoiding the scores on the news and radio and then trying to watch the full 90 minutes when you come home - its really hard to enjoy the passing around at the back and the midfield battles when you already know in the back of your head that the score is out. Its a similar sort of thing.......i wonder if anyone relates to what the hell im complaining about all this time

O i guess the question therefore was, does anyone get what i'm saying? Is what i'm saying true? Does the game operate in the way i've described, or do things get calculated as the game flows?

everything you see in the ME has already happened so to speak, all you are seeing is a graphical representation of what has happened, the game calculates what happens in the game before it happens, it changes this calculation with every change you make during the game but in you are right you are kind of watching a live time replay.

man thats exactly what i didn't want to hear lol. Doesn't that take your focus away from the excitement of watching it as it unfolds live?

It doesn't matter. Whether the game calculated it in real time, or calculates it ahead of time, the result is the same.

However, think of it from the other perspective: how would the game know to show a key highlight when you've selected that option, if the game doesn't know that there is a key highlight coming? Answer: it wouldn't work.

Furthermore, you need to have the match work this way, otherwise you wouldn't be able to save matches etc. (well you would, but the file would be enormous) - but if you just save the initial line up, the random seed, and any subsequent tactical changes, you can recalculate the same match again from just a minute bit of data. You might want to look up random seeds on the internet, as that is essentially what determines how the match pans out (with your tactical changes meaning that a recalculation takes place using the same seed, but different input variables).

As I said before, the result of the match is the same as it would be if you calculated it on the fly (because the same calculations would be made, just as they "happen" rather than beforehand), but doing it this way is much more sensible from a design point of view.

you can always think of it like it's more like the oracle from the matrix. she knows what you'll do before you do. it's real time to you but to her it's all just a bunch of eventualities.

Hi guys, thanks a lot for your input. In fact i'm almost convinced to play the game again lol. I will take up that thing about looking up "random seeds".

As to this "However, think of it from the other perspective: how would the game know to show a key highlight when you've selected that option, if the game doesn't know that there is a key highlight coming? Answer: it wouldn't work."

I understand it needs to be this way for viewing matches in "key highlight" mode. But whats bugging me is that when you watch it in "full match" mode, the yellow bar shows up (indicating something important is about to occur).

I guess the change i'd prefer would be - for the bar to carry on being green instead of changing to yellow, then we wouldn't know that a key highlight is in the process i.e to make these highlights invisible to us. The only advantage it has being visible as yellow blocks, is if we want to go to that moment while watching the match again. Does this make sense?

However mr.sjm, thanks a lot cos I'm almost convinced now that it doesn't make a difference lol

i never watch games on full so i havent seen that but perhaps what they could do is make it stay the same colour until after the highlight has happend then change the colour so you know where to go back to after, but then technically it is showing it after the event already, not sure if it would be possible or not.