DBC 14 batting, my favourite stuff

[T.J.Hooker]

I've been videoing career knocks recently to try and capture my favourite bits of DBC batting, partially to volunteer some feedback, partially just as a hat tip to the Big Ants for hours and hours of fun batting in DBC.

All these videos are from fc games or tests in career / legend, and it's all Pro Cam / aerial marker off, as for me that's the camera mode that feels like real batting.

Just to start out with some dead simple stuff, one of the great pleasures in DBC for me is just getting shots away that I'd be happy with in real life, particularly when I've been waiting for an opportunity to play it. The illusion is sufficiently convincing in Pro Cam that it gives me quasi-flashbacks from games I played sometimes, and that's just terrifically satisfying.

Not sure how long I'm going to go about this stuff for - I've got a ton of not-yet-uploaded clips and I'm the most awful cricket bore so it might drag it on for a while, though - and this is in no particular order.

Pulling medium pacers for six :

The satisfying thing about this shot for me is that you have to wait on the right delivery. If it's too full you play a lofted pick up shot, and there's often a man out at square or behind so it's a mistake that can cost you so it feels like there's a real risk involved.

In this clip I'm on 92, and have been waiting for this delivery for ages, and hadn't yet hit a ball in the air.

The magic thing for me here is that moment when you recognise that the delivery is short enough, hit the left bumper just in time and then see the ball disappear out of sight. It's exactly the shot I'd attempt off this delivery in real cricket, and that moment of spotting the length and reacting feels really similar, very satisfying. There's a really nice sense of release of the tension you've built up waiting for the bowler to make that particular mistake.

The lofted shots are quite spammable in DBC and I generally avoid them for the sake of realism, esp in fc innings, but just getting one or two red lines on a chart that has everything else on the floor feels like a nice challenge, especially where it's a shot that depends on you picking the length and reacting correctly.

I don't want to spend much time on critical stuff in this thread but I would like to make the point that this is exactly why I've been going on about the absence of proper short deliveries from spinners since the later builds of the pre-release net practice. Spotting that moment when you've finally got a short enough delivery from a decent spinner and then unleashing your fiercest pull shot is just a classic batting experience, and I miss it in DBC.

Pulling pace bowling :

I love the feel of all the pull shots in pro cam, but there's a real sense of satisfaction in getting a proper back foot pull away against a pace bowler, and feeling you really played the ball on merit.

There's always a sense of physical danger to this shot in a proper game of cricket, and that's part of what makes it exhilarating to play. That's always going to be tricky to bring out in a video game, but I think the framework is already there in DBC and I hope they build on it in the next edition.

This next clip is an example of a nasty hit from a bouncer, and in Pro Cam this kind of thing does trigger a faint fear response, does just jog some uncomfortable memories of being clonked on the head by bouncers. It just feels authentic somehow, and with some well designed in-game consequences I hope moments like this could be a proper counterbalance to those moments when you spank the quicks to the fence in front of square like you're Ricky Ponting.

Midwicket flick :

If you're taking a realistic guard and looking to play offside then this shot is a bit more difficult to get away, and it's just a lovely moment when you pick it out.

 

[blockerdave]

Mid wicket clip is a very nice example of not the easiest shot in this game.

Tell me, you're one for realism so doesn't the enormous blind spot in pro cam bother you?

 

[T.J.Hooker]

Well as a general thing, the blind spot is a real life issue - one of the reasons that fast yorkers are so deadly is that both bounce and interception points are right in the blind spot in your initial stance position and you have to adjust your head / eye position the furthest distance of any delivery to track the ball and work it all out. A long hop, otoh, is easily visible for the entire path of the delivery without having to move your head to track the bounce or work out the interception point.

Equally, human reaction time tops out around 0.15, so the bits of the delivery that you fixate on visually in real life are the release point, and then the bounce point and the part of the delivery leading up to 0.15 / 0.2 prior to the interception point, rather than the interception point itself. You might perceive yourself continuously watching the ball right on to the bat, but that's often not exactly what happens, and it's definitely not what happens at pro speeds. Apart from the fact that at the moment of contact your bat or body is sometimes in the way of actually seeing the ball, especially on full deliveries, your sense of proprioception and your predictive awareness of the location of the ball are doing the job that after the fact you may perceive as having been done by literally and continuously visually monitoring the ball from release until contact.

In DBC it's even less of an issue in terms of reacting to the ball, because you make the shot decision at an earlier stage than you do in real life, so you no longer have any chance to react considerably before the ball reaches the batsman, and at no stage do you actually have to work out the interception point or coordinate the movement of the bat to reach it. That part of the batting experience, which is actually the important bit in real life, isn't simulated at all.

Having said all that, maybe Pro Cam is missing the little flick down batsmen tend to make with their eyes right at the end of full deliveries because it's modelled on a helmet cam and may not factor eye movement, and there are definitely some shots - the sweep is one, I think - where the moment of contact feels more noticeably off for some deliveries.

Overall though, Pro Cam just feels more like real batting for me than any of the other cameras, particularly with regard to the perception of speed. The bowling feels quite a bit slower on the other cameras and that sucks a lot of the fun out of it for me, and while Pro Cam perhaps recreates the experience of seeing via helmet cam more than seeing as a real batsman sees, it's close enough for me to suspend my disbelief, so to speak, and just get into it.

An additional bonus is that I think the mo cap looks much more convincing from Pro Cam, particularly for the batting shots. There's less of the uncanny valley about the shot animations when viewed from a first person perspective for me.

Am I characterising your objections correctly?

 

[chaman82]

Gr8...at last I can see another pro cam fan out there..its so much fun this way.

 

[grkrama]

Having said all that, maybe Pro Cam is missing the little flick down batsmen tend to make with their eyes right at the end of full deliveries because it's modelled on a helmet cam and may not factor eye movement, and there are definitely some shots - the sweep is one, I think - where the moment of contact feels more noticeably off for some deliveries.

^this

cam certainly needs a slight downward flick on fuller deliveries not even to the point of pitch but just a slight angling down!

Also If DBC can break foot movement and bat swing apart i think it will just solve a lot of these stuff!
To me the early shot section is the main prob than not being able to judge the ball!



Still Procam when it plays well, and you dont get disoriented wit the fixed running cam, is real closest to virtual sim of real life cricket!

 

[Gamer Pradosh]

I have tried pro cam in the game but have found it to be a pretty meditating mode as am not able to play the ball to its merit with is something that makes me avoid it..Playing without any HUD is something I have enjoyed since the game has released and playing to its merit has definitely made me time the ball bit late as the game asks to pre meditate more than play the ball accordingly.. That is also one of the main reason why I don't prefer versus matches online as that is also a place which totally demands premeditation and its a contest on who's the better slogger..

 

[blockerdave]

Well when I have played with pro can I agree there is a sense of reality in terms of speed and immersion, but it's killed by a blind spot of almost anything in the final third of the pitch that doesn't exist in real life.

It's not Yorkers, but anything on the full side of a good length the ball just dips and disappears.

You see much more of the ball and your shot, because your eyes move extremely quickly and without head movement and you have peripheral vision: you get none of that in pro cam sadly and it's always killed it for me

 

[T.J.Hooker]

I can't quite work out exactly what you mean, here.

Here's a Pro Cam straight drive :

If I bust out a couple of frames from just before contact - and this is a screen video not a direct feed and a bit of the bottom of the screen is actually missing (edit ... whoops, no I'm thinking of my other videos. The problem with this one is the angle distorts the bottom of the screen) - you get this :



That is fairly close to real batting for me, and there's no way I would characterise that as the ball disappearing into a blind spot in the last 1/3 of the pitch. I can almost see it right on to the bat.

 

[T.J.Hooker]

Also I'm not actually sure how much eye movement factors into real life batting, because the thing about moving your eyes is that your visual perception actually shuts down while the eyeball is moving to prevent weird disorientation effects, iirc.

If you could take a direct feed from the human eye, head movement would generate continuous visual data, whereas eyeball movement would only have the frames just before and after the eye movement. The actual frames where the eye movement happens would be blank, which is possibly problematic in terms of ball tracking.

eta and I'm getting off the point now but in terms of peripheral vision, you have a wider field of view with the human eye, but the depth of field is much, much narrower, so the perception of having a wide, clear field of vision is illusory. We can only clearly see the very central stuff we're fixating on because the eyeball can only do one fairly narrow focal length at any one time, and the perception of being able to clearly see a load of different focal lengths simultaneously is created in the brain after the fact.

A feed from the human eye, wider field of view notwithstanding, would look more like this :



edit, nah, that's a bit too blurry, isn't it? Well anyway, you get what I mean.

 

[MattW]

Just to take advantage of the chance - so how would everyone improve the pro camera?

Just to throw a few ideas out there:

- not having the head movement as you're running
- having a projection of the line of the stumps down the pitch
- adding some black bars to the top/bottom of the screen so that a wider field of vision could be simulated

Those said, that's just going off some of what I've read here, I haven't really used it myself extensively, so I'd be interested to hear the directions people would take it.

 

[T.J.Hooker]

Just to take advantage of the chance - so how would everyone improve the pro camera?

Just to throw a few ideas out there:

- not having the head movement as you're running

Could we have the option of a sort of steadicam slider, so you could select how much head bob / head angle variation you get? I would guess tastes may vary quite a lot. I don't really mind it how it is but for some players it's a huge dealbreaker.

- having a projection of the line of the stumps down the pitch

Yeah an option for something to tell you where your off stump is would be appreciated. I literally taped a thread to my screen to mark my off stump when I first got the game to get the hang of it.

- adding some black bars to the top/bottom of the screen so that a wider field of vision could be simulated

Might be a nice solution on a really big screen. Similar thing - I'd love to try out some different FOV options - one of the other issues is that with a helmet cam type FOV the bowler's release point does seem a bit distant and small on a screen, although that's obv the opposite problem to wanting a wider field of view.

One thing I would deffo like is more head control, and not the sort you have as the non striker which is quite slow and only on one plane. If you go into Pro Cam and bat normally, you get (iirc) a few seconds right at the end of the delivery before the cut to the next delivery happens where you have a free look with the left stick, and that feels lovely, would really like to have that as non striker and while running.

Having your exact head position locked all that time is a bit uncomfortable.

On a related note, a button to quickly look over your shoulder to the ball location would really help running on some shots. If you hit the ball down the ground and run two, for instance, there's no way of checking before taking a third run.

 

[blockerdave]

I can't quite work out exactly what you mean, here.

Here's a Pro Cam straight drive :

If I bust out a couple of frames from just before contact - and this is a screen video not a direct feed and a bit of the bottom of the screen is actually missing (edit ... whoops, no I'm thinking of my other videos. The problem with this one is the angle distorts the bottom of the screen) - you get this :

View attachment 159864 View attachment 159863

That is fairly close to real batting for me, and there's no way I would characterise that as the ball disappearing into a blind spot in the last 1/3 of the pitch. I can almost see it right on to the bat.

you're right... that view was pretty good.

i've not played it a while, and to be fair i played it mostly at the beginning when i wasn't very good full stop, so may have projected more problems onto it than were there as i wasn't any good...

 

[T.J.Hooker]

Well I wonder if it might depend on the batting mo cap, to an extent? So if you don't play the right shot with good timing then the head movement doesn't happen at the right time and the camera doesn't follow the ball as well? I've got some more videos to post, might be something in one of those that's nearer to how you remember things.

This next clip is a passage of fc career play vs spin at both ends, which is a situation I really enjoy in DBC, and I'm going to break this down ball by ball to try and nail down what I like about it. It's a sort of context thing, where having to plan and work a bit really increases my enjoyment of the boundary shots. This is much, much more fun for me than just battering spinners for six all the time.

The shot I'm looking for initially is a sweep for 6, purely because it's difficult to do in DBC so very satisfying when you manage it. The timing is a bit fiddly for the lofted sweep, so I'm starting off sweeping on the deck to try and really get the feel of the timing before attempting to go over the top. There's no one out at midwicket so I'm trying to hit the early part of the timing window and get the ball into that gap. If I go too early with a lofted sweep it'll pop up a high catch in the midwicket / mid on area, which is a near certain dismissal. If I time it later I'm quite likely to hole out at deep backward even if I make good contact.

I'm sweeping a bit more often than is realistic at first here, but there's enough of a challenge in trying to nail the timing and sweep one over the fence that I'm ok with that for an over or two.

1 : sweep to backward square - rubbish delivery, should probably have driven it instead but never mind.

OVER

4 : sweep to forward midwicket - more or less ideal. I'm now looking to repeat this shot plus the left bumper and get it out of the park.

2 : sweep to deep backward - too full, too offside for a lofted shot so I'm settling for a paddle for 2. Again, probably better driven but I want to stay with the sweep to keep the feel of the timing in my head.

dot ball : missed sweep outside off - crap shot, deffo a drive ball, but I'm only really fixating on remembering the timing of the sweep shot.

4 : lofted sweep to forward midwicket - nearly got it but not quite. Deep midwicket will go in now so that's the end of my plan to sweep one out of the park for the moment. Can't take the shot on with a man out there. Deep backward has gone though so that's the new target, looking for something on my legs to get the ball away there.

4 : leg glance to deep backward - thanks very much, that'll do nicely.

OVER

Deep backward is swapped for deep midwicket again so the sweep for 6 is back on the cards, but I've overplayed the sweep and had one go at hitting a swept 6 already so I'm also looking to drive if bowler goes full and offside. I don't want to feel like I'm just spamming sweep shots at everything. The thing about the sweep is that the timing is quite early, so you can prepare to sweep as plan A but you've still got time to change your mind and drive if the bowler tosses it up.

1 : drive to cover point - this shot is satisfying in that it feels like real cricket. I've played the drive on merit, and knocking the ball just wide of the fielder and taking a cheeky single just feels right. Spinners hate leaking those sorts of singles.

OVER

dot ball : another missed sweep to a drive ball. I've had enough of that now, so I'm putting the idea of sweeping for 6 away and looking to hit boundaries with other shots. My go to plan in real life would be to use my feet and try to put the spinner off his length, so that's the new strategy. Against spin in DBC you get to have a little look at the delivery before you trigger an advance drive, so it's not a premeditated shot as it is for medium and pace.

dot ball : advance straight drive, didn't quite time it but I know what adjustment to make.

dot ball : advance drive to mid off. Nearly right, felt quite nice. I like the feeling of having to work a bit to beat the field with drives so I really enjoy this sort of stuff.

1 : advance drive to deep cover. Enjoyed it, felt like good cricket. Feels like I'm working my way up to a boundary.

OVER

A quick look round the field tells me there's a boundary on at squarish cover, and a single down the ground to mid on and maybe 2 behind square legside, so the plan is to take the single down the ground if he bowls straight and maybe persuade the captain to move mid on back up, flick it round the corner if he drifts outside leg, and get a squareish cover drive away if he gives me some width.

1 : drive to deep mid on.

4 : drive to cover point. Lovely, feels like I earned it. The delivery is probably a bit straight to play that shot in real life but never mind. DBC let's you get away with playing a bit more inside out.

dot ball, missed leg glance, appeal, given not out : mixed feelings about this delivery. On the one hand, it always feels nice to get away with a mistake, but on the other hand I feel the delivery is too short and I should have a scoring opportunity legside. This is where in real life I would feel I pushed the bowler into dropping short with some good footwork and drives, and I should now be able to take advantage with a pull shot, but the ball never gets up enough in DBC for the pull shot to be possible.

Quick look around the field tells me mid on is now up, and I'm thinking about trying to get one down the ground for four.

dot ball : drive to mid on. It is quite tough to get one for four along the deck, though. Last ball of the over coming up. I'm thinking if he bowls me a similar delivery to the previous ball I'm going to bang him over his head instead.

4 : lofted straight drive. Absolutely loved this. After the lbw scare and the dot to mid on, this feels like a really satisfying release shot. This is a real favourite sort of DBC moment for me. A shot I really enjoy in the context of a passage of play where I feel like I'm comfortably on top, but I still have to work a bit to score and the risk of a dismissal for a poor shot is still on the cards.

OVER

dot ball : drive to cover point, didn't quite time it

dot ball : missed clip to midwicket, too far outside off. Not as bad a shot as it looks, as that's very nearly the right line for the midwicket clip against spin. I was playing for a bit of drift back in but it didn't happen. Love the keeper's reaction here. It really feels like exactly the sort of thing a keeper would say, trying to support a bowler who has been hit a little bit and make the batsman think about his mistake.

1 : sweep to backward square. This time the drift does happen, and I'm back to my normal use of the sweep as a way of picking up ones and twos rather than looking for boundaries.

 

[cooks1st100]

Just to take advantage of the chance - so how would everyone improve the pro camera?

The option to take guard and then for your batsman to stay in that position at the start of each delivery.

 

[grkrama]

Just to take advantage of the chance - so how would everyone improve the pro camera?

Just to throw a few ideas out there:

- not having the head movement as you're running
- having a projection of the line of the stumps down the pitch
- adding some black bars to the top/bottom of the screen so that a wider field of vision could be simulated

Those said, that's just going off some of what I've read here, I haven't really used it myself extensively, so I'd be interested to hear the directions people would take it.

1.Not having head movement while running certainly yes atleast as an option!

2. I would like the projection to just appear when i move around the stumps in PRO cam and fade off in a sec!
If it has to be done in a NO hud way it should probably be added as a batsman head looking down as he taps the bat before straightening were you can see the mark you make for taking guard!

3.Black bars would be an total immersion breaker!

4. A quick tap button to glance at the ball direction now that we will have bobble free steady cam while running !

5. Another thing i noticed is dont know if its intentional or a glitch when you play in first person sometimes after you finish running the batsman glances the in stadium scoreboard for a sec it nicely zooms in and out , though its too quick now, if there can be a button press to do that would be awesome and give real in stadium sense! Just loking at the score board as i chase down a target would make it stuff of legends!

6. This is in general to batting but affects PRO cam the most is to have the ideal timing window for a shot a bit late or separate batting footwork from batswing

7.totally cosmetic may be a little effect in gameplay but would like to see stamina and environment affect field of view in first person, especially perspiration on a hot day! Right now in DBC one is not able to feel the environment like wind, heat, etc if something cosmetic can be done to give that feel factor would be nice and it wont be limited to firsperson view!

8.VR support with head tracking if possible

9.Vertical head movement

10. first person walk into the ground while batting esp for career!