Just a curiosity question - what is the relationship between the game animation and the actual engine? Clearly the results are the same! But how much info is in the animation? How does the engine model the play - is it actually by movement of players on routes, and their subsequent 'collison' spatially or is it just a representation of a more abstract result?

I am not a coder, but my guess is that they are one in the same. The little circles moving around is the simulation. Kind of like Madden does it for Xbox, but much simpler of course and we cannot control them during the game.

The animation is simply the representation of what the game engine spits out.

So for an example - a completed simple pass to a WR with a CB nearby, say within a few pixels - would the graphical position of the CB indicate if they were actually close to making a knock down or not? Or alternatively when a completion is calculated as being made by the engine - ie no knock down, the catch made, yards gained etc - the CB is shown in a generic position based on how the graphic engine renders the combination of formations and so is only an 'illustration' and therefore effectively unrelated to the play?

I'm not sure how accurate the representation is illustrated but I have read numerous times that the game is decided by the game engine and what we see is just a visualization of that.

If the question is does the play get its result and then a game engine representative is generated or does the game engine actually play out the play to get the result, the answer is the latter - the game engine plays the play out with each player acting as an autonomous user agent making its own decisions. Any difference between what the game engine does and what is displayed on the playback is only because of artifacts from reducing the data to make it manageable for storing and playback.

Thanks for the definitive answer! :-)

Thanks for taking the time.

Cheers

...the chicken
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