13 years of Top Eleven: from text matches to a 3D Football Engine!

Top Eleven celebrated its 13th anniversary this month. And the last years at Nordeus are especially exciting ones, because the football manager brought 3D characters to the field. This is due to the Football Engine, which only a few studios in the world have. Nordeus released four episodes in which various team members shared their experience building the engine. But we wanted to hear more! That’s why Srđa Štetic-Kozić (Principal Engineer) and Miloš Milošević (Director of Engineering, Football Engine, R&D and Core Systems) told us about the creation of the Football Engine.

SGA: Hello, Srđa and Miloš! Before we start dissecting you with questions, we have to admit that we are total dummies when it comes to soccer and soccer related video games, let alone soccer engines! Do you think it is possible to simplify this story for us somehow?

Miloš: Of course, we will do our best.

SGA: Srđa, in the series you say that this engine took years to make and a bunch of people with different expertise. What was your role in its creation and how did it differ from what you did at Nordeus before this complicated your life?

Srđa: At the beginning of the engine development, I was in charge of the general technical direction and architecture, with the greatest focus on the animation system (simulation of the football player’s body movements) and the graphic part (what the players see on the screen). I’ve done graphics before, so there were no surprises in that area, but animation systems require deep expertise to do well, and I had no previous experience in that field. I like to work and gain knowledge in a wide variety of domains, and this one is very challenging because of the need for excellent knowledge of mathematics, how people move, how animation formats work, and the like. When we talk about working on animation systems, in most cases it involves adapting an already existing system. Rarely does one get the opportunity to build a completely new system from scratch, as was the case at Nordeus.

SGA: Miloš, you are involved in the development of artificial intelligence, so how do you see your position developing further now that, as you say, you have done something really special by making a 11 vs. 11 football engine, what few people in the world have succeeded?

Miloš: Considering the current advances in the field of artificial intelligence, I am very excited about the development of artificial intelligence in the engine, but also the application of new technologies to other areas that are important to Nordeus.

My team and I are always looking at emerging innovations and trying to assess whether they can be used in the context of improving our current systems. My future at Nordeus is certainly related to the progress of the engine, but also to the application of advanced artificial intelligence.

SGA: We assume that the development of a soccer engine requires the cooperation of many teams and disciplines. Can you tell us what positions and teams were needed to get the Football Engine into Top Eleven?

Srdja: The project of integrating the Football Engine into Top Eleven was an extremely complex and important undertaking for the entire company, so practically people from all teams from all over Nordeus participated. Apart from the Top Eleven and Football Engine teams themselves, the Infrastructure, Art, Marketing and User Research teams were mostly involved, as well as QA engineers and producers. Also, it was necessary to include the most diverse specialties, such as frontend, backend, AI, animation and graphics engineers, data scientists, automation engineers and others. On the creative side, game designers, product managers, 3D artists, technical artists and other positions were actively involved, too.

SGA: Okay, we are ready to start our education! What is a football engine (FE) anyway, are there different ones (since even we know of FIFA and PES) and why did Nordeus need to make their own?

Srđa: According to our internal definition, a Football Engine is a system that simulates and displays football matches. This includes simulation of the behavior of football players on the field (AI), their body movements (animations), physics (balls and various other things) and other. Everything needed for the graphic display (rendering) of the elements necessary for a football match is part of it.

The engines that run FIFA and PES are the oldest and currently the most developed engines on the market. There are a few other soccer games, but their engines don’t stand out too much. None of them are publicly available, so we decided to develop our in-house soccer engine. We want to have a soccer engine that will allow us to make any 3D soccer game we can imagine, which runs smoothly on mobile devices, even older ones. Currently, 3D matches in Top Eleven can be experienced by our players on over 25,000 phone models, which is about 95% of all devices on which it is played.

SGA: In the series, one can hear that there is no “cookbook” with instructions for preparing the football engine. How did the process of creating the “recipe” go and what “ingredients” did you experiment with?

Miloš: The process of creating a football engine is complex and requires experimentation with different “ingredients” in order to achieve the desired result. I will list just a few key steps we took as a team to make this project a success:

• Defining goals: Before we started developing the engine, we defined goals, such as the level of realism we want to achieve and display, user experience, optimization for different platforms, and other goals.
• Research and planning: The team researched existing technologies, algorithms and methods to decide which “ingredients” to use in the engine. This step involves studying the competition and identifying technical challenges we may face during development.
• Prototype development: The team begins the development of the engine prototype, experimenting with different techniques and methods, such as physics, artificial intelligence, animations and mathematical models. In this phase, the team tests and adjusts different “ingredients” to find the right combination.
• Iteration and testing: The team is continuously improving and testing the engine, adjusting it according to feedback from our players, internal testing results and performance analysis. This step is crucial for optimizing the engine and ensuring a quality gaming experience.
• Integration with the game: Once the engine is developed and optimized, the team integrates it with the game, bringing together all the components, such as graphics, sound, interface and other elements.

In short, the process of creating a “recipe” for a football engine involves a combination of research, planning, development, testing and continuous improvement in order to achieve the optimal balance between realism, fun and performance.

SGA: Can you briefly give us the context in which FE was created? We remember that Top Eleven had text matches back when Farmville was played on Facebook, and now it has 3D!

Srđa: Back in 2010, matches in the Top Eleven game had only textual transmission, and in 2015 we added 2D matches as a natural sequence expected by all fans of the football manager genre. These matches were similar to the Football Manager series, where players are represented as circles moving around the pitch as seen from above. We wanted to provide players with a more realistic and immersive experience so that they could enjoy themselves as much as possible in the role of their football team’s manager.

For a long time we had the idea for ​​the next era of Top Eleven, and about three years ago we formed a team with the aim of developing the Football Engine, and the first product that uses FE is precisely Top Eleven in its 3D matches. For the first time, our players can see their football players on the field, as well as a reflection of their tactics and decisions through realistic football in 3D format.

SGA: From the very beginning, Top Eleven pioneered cross-platform gaming. Today, this means that people play it on over 25,000 devices. We’re sure it was both challenging and fun to solve that tangle.

Srđa: It is, and often these are my favorite problems to solve. Fortunately, we have the experience and technology to make sure our games work on mobile devices that are now over 10 years old.

Even so, the problem is further challenging because FE is at its core an extremely complex mathematical simulation with billions of operations per second that must be performed to watch quality football on mobile devices. Solving this required many, many hours of brainstorming, optimization, testing, and the like, until we arrived at the result you can now experience in Top Eleven.

SGA: At the end of the last episode it is mentioned that FE will be used in the development of Nordeus’ new game. How much can you tell us about it?

Srdja: Not at all, but I hope we can talk about that soon! 🙂

Miloš: We can’t give much away at the moment, except for the fact that we are very excited to present to the world our new project that the whole team is working hard on as soon as possible.

SGA: Thank you very much for the replies, we think we are no longer complete dummies in terms of our understanding of football engines!

Miloš: We’re glad we could help and clarify some things about our soccer engine!

Srdja: It was our pleasure!