This is a developer backup copy of World of Football, a computer game that was never released. It was designed by Dennis Hansen and developed Jad Nohra between the years 2006 and 2008. The game was not a commercial project.

The idea of the game was to bring back the gameplay of old soccer game classics, based on skill using the controller, and away from canned special moves, but using relatively modern (at the time) 3D graphics. Manually creating special moves was possible using the novel concept of circle-of-control invented by Dennis, in combiation with skill-based ball shooting. A basic example of the concept in action can be seen here.

Directory Structure

A a bit of information to help navigating the backup:

The game engine was built from scratch with almost no usage of third party code or libraries, it was called Witch Engine found in WitchEngine3/src/WE3. On top, an editor was built called Evil Eye found in WitchEngine3/src/EE. Based on both, the game itself World of Football. Aside from the source code folder WOF2/src, of interest are the assets found in WOF2/deploy/assets, including the AI scripts found in WOF2/deploy/assets/script.

Technically

• The engine used DirectX9's fixed-function pipeline
• Hardware accelerated instancing and skeletal animation
• Mutliple spatial acceleration structures
• A micro-collision based physics engine, including air-drag and approximate soft-body ball physics
• High-level game logic, as well as player AI was built on top of a scripting language with bindings into the game
• Player AI used a predictive model to estimate ball trajectories, adapting itself to the physics parameters
• Assets were expressed in xml
• A generic input device framework was used, abstracting away the actual controller from the input logic and allowing easy remapping without changing source code
• Custom collision detection, math and container libraries
• Imagemagick was used to procedurally generate billboards
• Multiplayer gameplay over the internet was supported

Media

Videos and screenshots of features, developments, and silly stuff, are in the directory Media. Here is a partial gallery: