Formation progress

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Admin
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Formation progress

Post by Admin »

I know I've been talking about the new formation code for like over a year at this point without giving you anything, but therre is a reason. I ran into some show-stopping bugs and set it aside while I went to work on some baseball code. I've been back at the football code for a week now and the time away has let me see it with fresh eyes and I was able to finally find and kill the bugs. Part of the bug was in the validation code itself so the tests themselves were faulty.

After I fixed that code, the validator churned to a stop, or so I thought. Actually, once the bugs were fixed it found another 150,000 valid formations and it is still finding more. There are actually over 30 million valid combinations but it has only come up with 200,000 that have unique names. (Like if you move your tailback back a few yards it will let you use the formation but won't come up with a different name for it.) Only one version of each formation would show up in the master playbook, although you can have multiple variations in your own; if two variations with the same name play differently, I need to find a way to name them logically.

I was spot-checking some of the new formations and found this interesting one. I'm trying to think if there is a practical use for it Basically it put RB's where the tight ends should go. It classified the formation as a 1-0 because the RB's are on the line but really it should probably be considered a 1-2; I just never thought of using HBs this way.

Anyway, here's what the validator came up with:
Screenshot 2021-09-03 004257.png
Screenshot 2021-09-03 004257.png (24.46 KiB) Viewed 1206 times
It's called a Wishbone because it started with a wishbone backfield and shoved the RBs all the way up to the LOS; I need to detect this and pull Wishbone out of the name. Would you find a use for a formation like this, or do you think oddballs like this should be blocked even though they are perfectly legal?

Chris
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shbo2
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Re: Formation progress

Post by shbo2 »

If we can eventually draw up our own plays I can see a use for something like that. A combo of power runs, sweeps, screens, and short quick passes could work out of something like that.
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Re: Formation progress

Post by Admin »

Drawing up your own plays will come but it will come later. For that matter, the first update will use this formation engine but may not include the editor as it's no helpful to create custom formations without custom plays.

Being able to customize formations was actually never the intention, it was a side effect. You'll notice each formation has a 4 to 8 digit code; I developed this code so I wouldn't have to send all the formation data to Dynasty Vision for every game; it was really limiting how many formations the game could have. That 8-digit code can represent just about any formation for offense, defense, and special teams. To make it easier to create the codes I put together a form to assemble the parts of the formation and quickly realized how easy customizable formations would be.
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