Rolling Thunder Forums

I am starting development of our own web-based program to store post-match statistics and other things to do with our Blood Bowl league.

I started last night & will keep you up to date with things. I will post more detailed information by the end of the weekend.

id3 has said he would like to be involved - any other volunteers would be appreciated. I will be doing the messy (or fun, if you're me) database stuff. The front end I produce will be fairly basic - id3 could perhaps make it prettier? Testers would be nice too, and interpreting the events table is a very useful thing people can do early on, it's a matter of looking at lots of numbers and seeing how they relate to in-game actions. So all that's needed is some time & application. Eg you could set up a simple game, do a very limited number of actions (eg just picking up & running whilst the other team stands still), upload it, and then you should be able to see how your actions are reflected in the game log.

Also, suggestions would be good though unlikely to be acted on any time soon!

I'm happy to help in any way that I can - testing mostly but if you need pretty pictures and logos I can do that.

At the very least, it would be wise to use some kind on version control system to aid development, collaboration and prevent data loss. The OWFL guy who was writing their "new" team builder lost a couple of years work because he only had a copy on his hard drive. github is pretty good, but I don't mind what you use as long as I can access it.

I have recently been looking into the team files you can export from single player as I understand you can use these to play direct IP matches. BB has a team editor (I think - I've not actually used it) but I wanted to write my own to learn some new web development stuff. My plan is to write a tool that lets you build teams, and then additionally add skills/stat increases, that can be used in BB. Once I get that out of the way I'd like to play around with building totally custom teams that work in BB too, and that would allow us to experiment with Slann/Chaos Pact teams in leagues if we get that far.

I was planning on writing it as a Chrome App, because then I don't have to worry about hosting (and it provides file system access so that I can write the team files directly to the BB save location). I was planning to use AngularJS as the framework to provide a MVC pattern to my app, and will probably be using JSON to store resources like team/player stats.

With regards to your stats database, there's no reason I couldn't access that as a "feature" of my app, or write another app/website for accessing the data. My only request is that there is some kind of sensible API for accessing the data, I'd be happy to contribute to that as well.


I guess the culmination of our efforts could result in a league managed totally separate to Cycanide's BB servers, giving us some kind of fall back in the event they shut them down once BB2 is released.

I am terrible at using source control but I shall make an effort! At the very least it will be on my PC and the web server anyway.

Thanks for sharing your plans. Hmmm I think I would prefer to carry on developing proper web apps rather than Chrome Apps. Though I can see the benefits of being able to write to file system.

I will make sure to write an API of some sort. It's not something I've done before but is useful and shouldn't be too hard. These things combine make it a good/appealing thing to do. I will aim to do export in JSON format. In case you haven't noticed I love the behind-the-scenes stuff more than the front end stuff. I will be personally satisfied with only doing an API (as long as the users have some sort of interface to access it).

I'm thinking of areas we might overlap. How about standing data? ie, fixed information about the players & races. I expect that's data we'll both need.

Shall we share this forum for our efforts then? If so I will rename it to something more generic, like "RT BB Web Tools" ?

I can't work without version control, mainly because I like to be able to try stuff and then go back if it didn't work, or see what I've changed.

If you want to rename the forum, feel free - but it won't stop me posting here if you don't

I've put together a little test file for the Humans, but I think it would be better to have a whole races.json file with each team in. I was also planning to do a skills.json file with the skill names, types and the description from the LRB.

I've not had a chance to develop a proper client-server API before, but I have another project that will need some kind of REST API. I'm not sure how suitable that would be for Big(-ish) data like whole seasons of match statistics. But I'm certainly happy to add some kind of statistics browsing functionality to whatever I write.

I don’t know how it is done, but this would be a nice feature.

In the ukbbl, some divisions run a series of side competitions e.g. Elfiest and Violentist teams.

Every match day, the amount of (for Elfiest) successful dodges, GFIs, TDs, Passes, etc is added up (with scores). Or for Violentist, the amount of KOs, injuries, deaths etc, with scores assigned.

Regardless of the side competitions, being able to compile and export this data would be nice (rather than trawling through all the BBM reports).

I'm sure I can build something like that... the benefit of having the data ourselves is that we can do anything with it. ANYTHING!!! I will start off a thread around an approach to statistics and what people want closer to the time.