Rolling Thunder Forums

What?

I set up a database/website to hold our fixtures and results.

What about BBM? / Doesn't this sound like the OLBBM tool?

It will be very stipped down compared to those tools. It won't store any more information than fixtures, results, and needed information related to that - such as team, manager, season.

So what's the benefit?


- Upcoming fixtures stored in an easy-to-manipulative format. Want to see what your next 3 matches are? No problem. The google spreadsheet solution works but is inflexible.
- Can set up email reminders for upcoming fixtures. Along with the above, it will reduce incidences of people missing matches.
- Easy viewing of the results of any team. BBM is a bit slow, has been known to break, and is sub-optimal if you are looking up a team (sometimes you're on the left hand side, sometimes on the right).
- Easily bring up old match stats (see below).
- With some more work, it could store our predictions too.

What more work would we, the users, need to do?
After submitting a match to BBM, go to the website, enter the scoreline & a link to the BBM image, type "palmtree" into the password box and hit enter. Job done.

How much work would this be?
Something simple & ugly could be done in a day or two. Maybe over the bank holiday.

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So.... opinions? Is it worth it?

Sounds good to me so long as it's easy to set up a new season when the time comes.

Also the password should be Palmtree. I like capital letters.

Would it be possible to use the same data to set up a Gandalfgames game for match predictions (also, Rugby world cup?)?

Raveen wrote:Sounds good to me so long as it's easy to set up a new season when the time comes.

Creating an "administrator" front end to do this is a lot of work... my preferred solution is for me to input them in the back end when the fixtures are created by the league administrator. It's 20-30 seconds a fixture that way so I can do a whole season in < 30 minutes. Maybe it's worth setting up the ability for anyone (or perhaps anyone with a special password?) to change fixture dates/times in the front end though. That shouldn't be too hard.

Would it be possible to use the same data to set up a Gandalfgames game for match predictions (also, Rugby world cup?)?

RWC is TCO.

I mentioned the possibility of predictions above. I could just use the same database infrastructure I already have for real sports, which would make predictions really easy. It's relatively flexible like that. One objection I thought of though is that perhaps people would rather post their predictions, reasoning & banter on the forums than do it on a separate website.

Allow predicitons to be inputted and then exported in forum friendly formatting? By formatting I mean including Bold tags and anything else that makes sense.

More opinions please? Especially from the new commissioner?

Hmm - I would consider what the Direct IP stuff used by OFL does, if that's at all doable at some point.

Because if BB servers are turned off to make us play BB2 ever, then BB played via Direct IP with something to manage rosters like OFL seems to have would be nice.

I don't know enough about the features and required work to say much more about either this or the original proposal though.


I think at the moment you are basically proposing a more robust version of the features we want from BBM? In which case that sounds good.

Although what do we do if BBM is down and we can't upload and therefore can't upload to this?

Percy says:

I don' t think it's broken enough to warrant trying to fix it

BBM manager works; the spreadsheet works.

Yes, BBM broke once, but once in the three? four? Season's Percy has been about; it wasn't down for long and was easy to upload later on.

I don't think an email from a fixture site will be much different from an email from the forum. I'd say if you want to really get in touch with people we need to send text messages. Or carrier pigeons.

I don't want to have ANOTHER thing that I have to remember to upload to later either.

What would be good though, and I reckon a better use of programming time (and I sadly can't help in any way as I am useless, apart from if you need an idiot to test for bugs...) would be our very own version of BBM that had a less questionable dice analysis and wasn't half French.

Also, we're all going to have to apporach that 'Are we playing BB2?' question soon, and that might have a feature to help with this anyway?

I'm assuming that we're sticking with BB1 for the short term at least.

Until we know what BB2 actually looks like it's impossible to make the call, and that's before we think about forcing people to pay for the new game. How many teams will be DLC? What will they cost?

Saying that, if I'm lucky I'll get a copy for my birthday which will give me the option at least

Oh I'm not going to be able to get it for a while, really won't be able to justify it.

I'm only playing BB1 because La bought it for me !!

I don't want to have ANOTHER thing that I have to remember to upload to later either.

Well the proposal as I made it would mean you typing in the score & pasting a link to the match stats image in. You could do this when posting on the forums... hardly any extra work really.

What would be good though, and I reckon a better use of programming time (and I sadly can't help in any way as I am useless, apart from if you need an idiot to test for bugs...) would be our very own version of BBM that had a less questionable dice analysis and wasn't half French.

Also, we're all going to have to apporach that 'Are we playing BB2?' question soon, and that might have a feature to help with this anyway?

This would be a lot of work... not something I am willing to commit to. However I do have OBBLM installed which may be able do all that. I installed it on my website when BBM was down. Apparently there's a module which lets you upload from cyanide too. It may be BB2-proof also.

I could maybe use OBBLM for the cup, show it off you you afterwards and then see what we think about using that going forwards? However I don't know if we would want to use BBM and OBBLM in parallel. I'm guessing one of the primary reasons we went for BBM was that it didn't require setup on Rav's part. Also it would be sad to lose our accumulated BBM stats.

edit: the other benefit of OBBLM is that all the data will be in a database that I have access to so I could display/manipulate the data in any which way we wanted.

DaigaroOgami wrote:What would be good though, and I reckon a better use of programming time (and I sadly can't help in any way as I am useless, apart from if you need an idiot to test for bugs...) would be our very own version of BBM that had a less questionable dice analysis and wasn't half French.

Had a 20 minute look into this.

In your folder Documents\BloodBowlLegendary\Saves\Replays there are a load of .db files. These are little databases (stored in SQLite format) full of information about the match. You can open up the files using this program.

Most of the data in there is fairly intelligible... races of teams, players, skills and so on... the sort of stuff you can see in BBM under a match report. However, there is one table called Replay_NetCommands which has thousands of lines in there, and most of the data is random numbers. I believe (as per the table name) that that contains everything that happened in a match (the Log screen in BBM.... plus more).

If we could work out what those numbers meant, I could write a web app to take in all the data and store it in a big database, whereupon we could do anything we wanted with that data. So if anyone is really bored, that's something that almost anyone could try and do.

Also, I also don't see a reason why you can't load older games, only the later ones. I'm sure there is one, otherwise BBM wouldn't have the limitation...

PS - re: OLBBM, the cyanide uploader is iffy and may not work at all, even if it does work it may not have the full stats.

Gandalf, Daigaro is my benchmark for how easy something is to use. At work I ask myself "Could Daigaro use this? Would Daigaro get enough benefit from this to make it worth him learning how to use it?" If it doesn't pass those tests, I ask "if it's not going to be easy enough for Daigaro to use, or useful enough to learn how to do it, do I care enough about this feature to write him instructions?"

As for our own stats/scheduling system - I'm interested. I don't really have time to think about it too much right now as I have a gazillion work e-mails to catch up on after my holiday but: I'd like to be involved. What technologies were you thinking of using?

I like your thinking about using Daigaro as your point of reference, but we are on the whole a fairly technically minded group...? However there doesn't seem to be enough enthusiasm around my original idea so I think it's best it got shelved.

PHP / MySQL is what my web-based coding experience is in so I imagine it would be those. I don't know where your expertise is... mine is in the database side of things rather than fancy front-ends. Not sure I'll have much time between whenever the new baby is born & turn of the year though for actual development. I'll see if I can get a simple upload tool done in the coming weeks though, that will put at least some of the information from the DB files into a MySQL database, but do nothing with it.

I don't think you should ever neglect ease of use just because your users might be "technically minded".

I've not actually done any web development for a very long time, but I have experience with Javascript from the descktop and mobile apps I write at work. I'm interested to see how that is applied to web development. I also have some database experience, but quite enjoy fancy front end work I've never used PHP. Do you use any CMS/VCS? I'd be interested to see the code of what ever you try.

I'm tempted to do some messing around myself, I'm especially curious about what is in the .db files, and if there is something similar for teams.

id3nt1ty wrote:Gandalf, Daigaro is my benchmark for how easy something is to use. At work I ask myself "Could Daigaro use this? Would Daigaro get enough benefit from this to make it worth him learning how to use it?" If it doesn't pass those tests, I ask "if it's not going to be easy enough for Daigaro to use, or useful enough to learn how to do it, do I care enough about this feature to write him instructions?"

Er... I think this is a compliment... Basically I'm not a computer nerd, so I don't play with computers because it's fun to do, they are a tool. A tool is there to make doing a job easier. If learning how to use a new tool is more effort/time/less benefit than what I would've done previously then it's difficult justifying spending time with it.