Biggest blowout in Sim History

[Cueball899]

Posted by Admin in Beta football message board;

"And while I'm looking, the biggest blowout was a 115-7 game in the VLFL. That 115 points is the current score record in the sim. The sim at one time couldn't store a score higher than 127, so if a team reached 120 points, it would fumble on every possession. This has since been fixed."

Crazy

I also found this, which explains why it's hard to make simple changes like formations.It also goes to further show why I say the game needs a complete overhaul.

He is talking about overtime field goals.

"OK, this turns out to be the result of a design flaw. I can fix it for now with an ugly hack but it's the last straw telling me it's time to pull this thing apart and redesign it.

Here's the meat of it:

The game engine has a series of "flags" to account for various events: Whether a penalty has occurred, whether a touchdown has occurred, whether a turnover has occurred, etc. After the ball is dead, the game takes actions based on these flags: applying penalties, changing possession, changing the direction of the offense, etc.

The skeleton of the game was built very quickly, using a routine that just randomly moved the ball so I could hammer out the basics of advancing downs, changing possession, going through quarters, etc. The rest of the game is bolted onto that framework. But some good design principles fell by the wayside in the process.

For example, the kicking routine was the very first part of the game designed, and it is the best and most robust part of the game. It was flowcharted, researched, designed carefully, tested as an independent unit until it worked perfectly. The ball is tracked in 3D space from the kicker's foot to the goalposts. It took 6 months.

If I took 6 months designing each aspect of the game, it would never have gotten finished. So the rest of the game got added on in fits and spurts, and is a bit disorganized now. Which is why it is now so hard to add what sounds like a simple thing, like a new formation: There are so many workarounds and special cases, and Java has a limit to how big any one module can get.

So back to the point.

In that early skeleton, I started calling the change possession routine directly. Once I added penalties on, though, things needed to be reversible. So they were rebuilt to use the flag system. Except that bit of code that was the middle of the skeleton, the advanceDown routine, still does things directly on a 4th down turnover from scrimmage. It never sets the doTurnover flag, and overtime is depending on that to detect the end of possession. (I probably didn't bother because the defense will always decline a 4th down penalty, so it didn't need to be flagged for reversibility.) And of course the offense will never punt in that situation. But I can't just set doTurnover now because it will undo what advanceDown does, and I can't just set doTurnover from advanceDown now because I need to trace through all the bolted on parts to make sure it won't muck anything else up. It's just bad code, and it needs to be redesigned so every module is an independent black box like the kicking routine is.

Anyway, I've put in an ugly hack (a special flag just for that situation) that should fix it. But I need to get in there and rebuild it.

(On the plus side, while I was in there I may have found and fixed the fumble in the end zone bug.)"

Chris

[Cueball899]

Changes that are on my shortlist but for which the code is not yet written:

- Revamp the salary system. the salary system uses some complex math to try to force a salary curve similar to real life. However, depending on how the talent distribution falls, salaries can get really weird, and tend to get depressed to where the salary cap is meaningless. I think I ma going to change this to a simple lookup table based on real life salaries: the top QB gets a salary similar to the real life top QB, the second gets the second salary, etc. With modifications of course. This change will likely be unpopular as it will suddenly make the salary cap much more relevant.

- Position changes: I am not going to make this a big drawn out system. Basically the role you play a player in most becomes his position next season. Position drills will probably also be relevant here, and players will take an Execution hit in the change based on how unnatural the change is but Execution will recover so they will only be at a disadvantage for, say, a quarter or half season (and preseason play will count). Players previous position will become their secondary position (or if they almost but didn't quite get to a position change threshold they get a secondary position). I really don't want players to have a rating at every position like baseball, just a primary and a secondary. Their salary will be based on the HIGHER of their primary or secondary position (to reduce abuse).

- Live draft: I'd like to make the first 3 or 4 rounds of the amateur draft live. Basically when your time on the clock is up, whoever is at the top of your draft list is taken, but you can adjust your draft list and even trade draft picks during the draft. (Wondering if this can be abused.)

- Realign preview/modification. The Commish would be able to see what a realignment would do to the league, and would be able to rearrange the alignment. Some concerns have been raised that this could be problematic or abusive; I'm testing this (manually) with a league right now and if it causes issues I'll scrap it.

- Timeout changes: I need to get the new timeout settings into the game code.

- Cache injuries: Right now, all data from a quarter is cached in server memory except player injuries, which are written to the database immediately. Thus, if a quarter fails, the stats and play by play are rolled back but injuries are not. This needs to be fixed.

- Quarterback scrambling: I'd like good quarterbacks to be able to scramble out of sacks. Right now it's just assumed that some plays are scrambles, but I need to make it explicit. This depends on the next change....

- Unified ball carry code: Right now running plays, passing plays, and kick returns are completely separate sections of code. This is why, for example, there are no fumbles on passing plays and tackles aren't recorded properly. This is also why a scramble doesn't currently happen, because it requires a way for a passing play to turn into a running play. This will also add the possibility of option plays.

- Short yardage defense: The hooks are in the code but for weird technical reasons it also depends on the unified ball carry code.

- Player cards: I want to indicate some of the calculated attributes on player cards to make it more clear how players differ.

- Player height and weight: I originally didn't include this as I thought of it as "fluff" but it would give each player a body type, so you couldn't just take a 250 pound TE with good blocking skills and make him a guard, he'd get run over. (Still analyzing if this is worth the effort.)

There is a TON of other stuff I want to do (playbooks, more plays, more stats, free agency, scouting, etc) but this is the short list of things that are needed or already have code/hooks/research in place.

Chris

[montywop]

When did Chris post this?

[Cueball899]

July, in the Beta League.

I just found it so I thought I would put it up. Shows what he is trying to get done and why there are issues with simple things.