SM Billiards, also known as Sphere Matchers Billiards, Bobik's Cue Sports, or EA Sports Billiards is a free-to-play cue sports simulation video game and a spin-off of Sphere Matchers, developed by Bobik Platz and published by EA Sports, under EA Originals label released in 1 April 2024 on Microsoft Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4 and PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
Gameplay[]
SM Billiards gameplay is mainly influenced by simplicity of Miniclip 8 Ball Pool controls (hold to shoot and drag to set force, by default) and realism of Shooterspool physics simulation. The default viewport is orthographic overhead view, but it can be changed to something else like first-person view.
There are four modes to choose from on most gamemodes; there is single-player, which some game modes supports it and usually involves scoring as high as possible, the Doppelganger mode, which is essentially local multiplayer mode, the Versus AI mode, which players challenges bots on this mode, and the Online mode, which is online multiplayer and this mode gains most XP.
Players can create what's known as "rooms", which contains custom physics properties and cosmetics that other players can feel like if they're playing a game of billiards on someone else's room. All non-cosmetic/gameplay-changing items and properties for use in rooms are unlocked at start and some cosmetic-only items are locked behind difficult challenges and sometimes paywalls.
Physics simulation[]
SM Billiards doesn't use Chaos physics engine from Unreal Engine 5 and instead uses a proprietary in-house physics engine called Marmurki[1] capable of accurately simulating cue sports of any sorts and properly accounts for conditions like chalk residues and dirt affecting cut-induced throws and causing clings, skids and kicks. The physics engine accurately models cushion compression, therefore allowing seemingly impossible shots as in real-life.
The physics engine, by design are completely deterministic, therefore playing the exact same shot as before will result in exact same outcome. This determinism only exists if the step size is constant (default is 120 ticks/sec), although it can be set to variable if the player wants completely random outcomes because variable step size means the inaccuracies accumulates differently at different time, tied to frame-rate (which is itself mostly random).
Physical properties[]
Physical properties for table's cloth, rails and even spheres themselves can be customized but the first two are influenced by selected environments at least the default setting and modifications are applied per-game.
Table's physical properties can affect the game in numerous ways; higher friction means curve takes place early and moving spheres slows down at faster pace and higher elasticity makes subsequent bounces on jump shots higher and decays slower and vice versa.
The physical properties for spheres also affects the game in many ways; increasing the friction causes more intense throws and decreasing the elasticity reduces the effectiveness of backspins and vice versa. In some games, the cue ball and object ball are treated differently by default (in blackball pool, the cue ball's size is slightly smaller than object balls).
Shooting mechanic[]
By default, the force applied is dependent how far dragging the cue stick by holding LMB and the method of applying force to the selected sphere is set force directly. Like most cue sports games, the spin can be applied to affect cue ball's trajectory and the player can change the cue angle (from 0 degrees to 90 degrees range) to perform jump shots and masse shots as well.
Unlike other billiard games, overspins are possible, which causes cue ball's trajectory to be altered more significantly than in real-life and overshoots are possible, striking the cue ball harder than that's possible in real-life. And on top of that, the player can set applying force mechanic to follow realism.
The game allows enabling or disabling the cue stick intersection, which limits backspins and lower cue angles if the cue stick happens to intersect with spheres and/or table's boundaries when cue stick intersection is disabled. Customization to shooting mechanics are applied per-game by default rather than per-player to ensure fairness.
Optionally, the way of applying force to the cue ball can be made "realistic"; employing a closed-form equation for ball-cue collisions for applying force rather than simply applying both linear and angular velocities naively.
Control schemes[]
SM Billiards allows customizing the control scheme, by default, the power is determined by how far dragging the cue away from the sphere that about to strike, which is Drag and shoot. There are options available for shooting control scheme and are applied per-game by default as usual and how it behaves is different according to the option Use touch-optimized controls (where it enabled by default on Nintendo Switch version):
- Drag and shoot: Power is determined by how far cue stick is dragged away from the sphere. Hold the alternate button to lock power and change spin or cue angle while taking shots.
- Back and fourth: Power is determined by the speed of cue stick's movement and the player drags the cue stick away and then towards the sphere. This is the most realistic control scheme as it mimics the stroking the cue stick in real-life. Note that if the player moves the cue stick fast enough, it can apply a force larger than the maximum power level (default: 20 meters/second).
- Swipe and shoot: Allows aiming while shooting and power is determined by the distance of the cursor from the sphere and are subtracted by the initial distance from sphere to cursor before shooting.
- Click: Clicking the LMB or pressing the fire button strikes the sphere and the force is determined by the set power level.
- Timing: Holding the fire button changes the power level back and forth until the player releases the fire button; time it right to get the desired power.
Note that some control schemes like "Back and forth" and "Timing" support reference power feature (in which aiming lines shows up and assumes that you shoot at desired power set by reference), which are only available if the Aiming difficulty is set to anything other than Hard (which displays no aiming line at all), while others like "Drag and shoot" and "Click" are not.
Aiming lines[]
By default, the aiming line are visible, both before and after the collision between two or more spheres. However, some players prefer to disable the aiming line by setting Aiming difficulty to Hard, however, it applies per-game as other gameplay-related settings goes.
There are seven settings to choose from:
- None: Infinitely long aiming like; displays the entire trajectory for every single sphere
- Very easy: Long aiming line, both before and after collision
- Easy: Shorter aiming line after collision and does not display other ball's trajectories besides the cue-object ball collision
- Intermediate 1: No trajectory display for cue ball after collision
- Intermediate 2: No aiming line for object balls
- Medium: No aiming line after collision, but still shows ball trajectory before that
- Hard: Displays no aiming line at all
Games[]
- Main article: Games (SM Billiards)
The main selling point of SM Billiards is having not only including all cue sports games in real-life like Russian pyramid, but also includes novelty games as well, making this game to have largest number of game modes to choose from in the entirety of billiard games and are divided by four categories: Pool, Snooker, Carom and Unusual. Some games support both single-player and multiplayer, while others only supports multiplayer and vice versa. Players can also create custom games using built-in game editor to test out custom/homemade pool games virtually and additionally share their own custom gamemodes online for other players.
There is a Puzzle mode where the player can complete predetermined challenges and practice trickshots and in this mode, there is a built-in level editor that allows the player to create and share their own levels, challenges and training drills and can also be shared online.
Scoring system[]
SM Billiards utilizes both scoring systems co-existing; the arcade-style scoring is used for calculating how much XP is earned through playing matches (only on online matches and versus bots mode and certain single-player games like speed pool) and difficult shots earns more points,[2] whereas actual game scoring depends on game modes are used to determine the winner and it doesn't account for playing difficult shots.
Soundtracks[]
While there is no music created specifically for this game (nor its trailers), there is an official playlist for this game's soundtrack that can be played during gameplay.[3]
Sounds[]
| Audio | Description |
|---|---|
| Trailer music |
Gameplay[]
| Audio | Description |
|---|---|
| When the chalk is used on a cue stick | |
| Player wins |
Fouls and bad shots[]
| Audio | Description |
|---|---|
| When any sphere(s) jumps off the table and also when the player either pots the wrong sphere (that lead to a foul) or the cue ball (in most modes besides Russian pyramid gametype) | |
| When a drop pocket becomes clogged or the player has snookered | |
| Any fouls besides pocketing the wrong sphere (or the cue ball in most game modes) committed | |
| When any of spheres emerges out of pocket (and also when the player tries to pot any spheres into any clogged pockets) |
Trivia[]
- SM Billiards is the only EA Sports title that doesn't release annually nor based off real-life organizations.
- It is the second sports game and the first EA Sports title to adopt a new live-service release strategy, where instead of making a new game every year, the developers can make major changes usually every year, the last one was a critically-panned eFootball.
- Like Sphere Matchers, Audiosurf 2, and unlike other pool simulation games, the game is fully moddable, allowing players to design their own cue sport games where a built-in editor is not enough.
- Speaking of gameplay, the balls doesn't disappear when pocketed unlike other games, therefore tables with drop pockets or rail pockets might have different gameplay as many spheres potted in one pocket can overflow and thus affecting gameplay and the ball return mechanism is entirely physics-based.
- The power level is measured in meters per second (m/s) rather than percentage, this is because the game have adjustable maximum power level (default max power setting is 20 m/s).
Notes[]
- ↑ The physics engine on SM Billiards is a hybrid of event-based (as a form of interpolation) and traditional numerical one (calculated using the very same trapezoidal rule integration that digital IIR state variable filters rely on used for audio signal processing) that correctly simulate physics even at lower ticks per second and are capable of simulating phenomenon in pool/billiard games that has no closed-form equations.
- ↑ Within arcade-style scoring system, any fouls would result in deduction in score (in-addition, losing any points you could earn during a shot before any fouls happen within a shot) and even send your score into negative numbers, which can deduce your earned XP at the end of the game.
- ↑ While the FLAC format (losslessly-compressed audio files) is used for this game's SFX, the audio codec used for the music/soundtracks are xHE-AAC/USAC (encoded using free Ecodis eXtended High-efficiency And Low-complexity Encoder (exhale) software) and/or Opus lossy codecs, reducing the filesize so more music can be added without "bloating" game size with little quality loss.