TopLeague and Bundesliga Manager: New generation online soccer games

Abstract

This paper describes a new generation online soccer manager. More than 210,000 users operate TopLeague and the Official Bundesliga Manager, complex real-time soccer simulators that are based on actual data of real professional soccer players. The underlying technology is a hierarchical three-tier multiagent system that consists of autonomous BDI agents and allows dynamic group structures (e.g. an emergent situation for a wing attack). The German Bundesliga, one of the most prestigious soccer leagues in the world, adopted this AI system for their official web site. The online games run seamlessly in a web browser with a state-of-the-art 3D visualization engine. Fundamental research within the domain of the RoboCup simulation league is the basis for this technology. We will describe the architecture of the multiagent system (MAS) in this paper, discuss motion capture techniques for graphical animation, and reveal details about user acceptance of the games. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.