TOP L EAGUE and BUNDESLIGA MANAGER: New Generation Online Soccer Games Ubbo Visser Department of Computer Science University of Miami 1365 Memorial Drive Coral Gables, FL, 33146, USA visser@cs.miami.edu 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. Keywords: Robotic Entertainment, Teamwork and Heterogeneous Agents, Motion Capture, Facial Expressions, Soccer Simulation, Manager Games. 1 Introduction and Related Work A vast amount of games have been developed for the mass market over the past decade. Not only can we observe more than ten types of games (e.g. adventure games, ca- sual games, sports games [1,22]), we can also state that most of the games have been produced for specific hardware (e.g. consoles, game consoles, Wii consoles). Online games have also been developed in great numbers [10], however, web browser restric- tions prevented them from being as complex - especially in their graphical animation - as their console counterparts. One reason for this is the computer’s configuration (e.g. real-time rendering, older computers have limited rendering capabilities). Some hard- ware related features (e.g. vertex shaders) may not work on older machines. Another reason is security (applets for instance cannot change the users configuration without prior permission). Our research reveals that a significant number of users (approx. 10%) have not installed their graphic drivers properly. Nevertheless, online games have become more and more complex, especially in the last few years. We see a merge between the technologies, e.g. consoles have Internet J. Ruiz-del-Solar, E. Chown, and P.G. Ploeger (Eds.): RoboCup 2010, LNAI 6556, pp. 230–241, 2011. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011