And the Innovative Title of the Year award goes to...
And the Innovative Title of the Year award goes to...
[1] http://company.zynga.com/about/leadership-team/zynga-leaders...
Any given play generally takes 10-20 seconds, and you're going to be running, bare minimum, 2 plays per 8 points(1 for touchdown, 1 for 2 point conversion). So that's about 25 seconds per score.
If the teams are remotely well matched(i.e. aren't a Breaking Madden team), they'll take at least 2-3 minutes per possession, since you're most likely going to have 4 downs, which have a play clock of 40 seconds(most teams use around 30/play), so the "average" shortest possession is something like 2 minutes.
The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that you'd have to specifically code for.
Rather than coding special exemptions or rules, it seems that using 8 bit storage would have to be a deliberate choice on any modern platform.
The real question is, what the hell does a Madden developer do for the rest of the time that dealing with data type changes is not worth it?
Who wouldn't just use "int" for all of this logic? It's so simple that you could do it on autopilot. You'd have to specifically try to limit to 8-bits.
OK...
While it was annoying at times to be so worried about bits and cycles, it was also a very rewarding type of puzzle, figuring out how to squeeze just a little more performance out of the limited system we had to work with.
The answer from EA's point of view is that people buy it every year, so of course they'll make a new one.
The explanation from the user's point of view is that much of the magic of the game comes from it reflecting the teams, players, and plays of the actual NFL. When some quarterback gets traded to another team, you want to get next year's Madden so he's on the right team in the game too.
This is one of the really cool things about the game. There are millions of people who have detailed knowledge of different teams and players and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Madden lets you take that otherwise pointless barroom trivia and use it to actually be better at the game.