Kevin Meynell

It would not be difficult to formulate some key attributes, although the relative weighting might take a bit of thought. The limitation is that many of these attributes other than averages are going to be subjective, and of course there's no ready source for these. Averages are easily obtained and (at least until recently in the Elite League) a fairly accurate measure of rider ability. Of course, you might also want to have track attributes as well, which would have an impact on results.

Useful to know. There was an issue in earlier versions (pre-Windows) whereby the results seemed to be too predictable, so I tweaked the algorithm to improve the unpredictability although I may have overdone it. My observation though was actually the opposite to you though - I still thought the top riders won slightly too much, and the 3-pointers lost slightly too much. I also thought the number of maximums seemed about right, but I can't say I did any empirical analysis on that factor. You probably have more practical real-life experience of running the programme though, so I certainly don't dispute your observations. My suspicion though, is the average is the limiting factor, and however you tweak things you're going to see a drift towards the median. The fact the algorithm works on probability means that over the long-term it's never going to be possible for a rider achieve a 12-point average, and by definition that will mean the average of other riders will drift up. I guess other metrics need to be introduced to improve this aspect, but I didn't have 20-odd years of data when I first wrote the program.

It's sort of been on my mind to develop a library with an API that does the result generation part. That way others could use the work in their own projects. The bottom line though, is that anything to do with speedway is going to have be a labour of love. The market simply isn't there to recoup what will be a substantial investment in time, especially as speedway is a something of a unique sport and many of the components of any modern game or simulation will need to be developed from scratch.

Well that to some extent is speedway in real life! Speedway Meeting introduces some degree of randomness in terms of engine failures, falls, injuries etc.., and that randomness adjusts depending on whether a rider is good, bad or indifferent. There's other seeded randomness for gate positions and some other things. To keep things simple I only used averages as the determining factor because they're readily available, but you can also introduce other metrics as well. For a season-by-season speedway promoter type of game, you'd probably also want to introduce a 'potential' or 'improvement' metric, but whilst you might initially be able to base that on real life, if you're running a long-term simulation then effectively that's going to need to be a random thing too.

Well I wrote Speedway Meeting which was originally written on a ZX Spectrum and eventually ported to VB6, so the code base is quite old now. VB was chosen because of the legacy code and that it was easier to build a Windows UI that way. The basic result generating algorithm is quite simple though, and it should be fairly easy to port to something else. Most of the effort went into calculating the various probabilities of particular events happening (which required going through a year's worth of Speedway Stars), and then tuning the algorithm to ensure realistic results. Even the tactical, R/R and reserve substitution 'intelligence' is inherently straightforward, and I can explain it if you want to PM me. Most of the programming work actually went into the scripting language and parser, as well as making the user interface configurable for every type of meeting. I realised early on that the speedway changes its meeting formats almost every season, so there needed to be a way to easily create new meetings. If I was starting from scratch, I'd do some things differently as really everything needs to be linked to a database so entire seasons can easily be run and league table and averages compiled. However, that wasn't the original design criteria and I was somewhat more limited by things like available memory at the time. Equally though today, applications are moving to smartphone and tablets, and whilst I've given it some thought, I'm not really sure how the UI could be transposed to them. One problem I encountered early on is because so many text input fields needed to be fitted into one screen, I needed to use a system that displayed widgets in the most compact way possible, which just wasn't possible with HTML at the time. As to language choice, well of course things have moved on over the past 10 years so some C derivative may no longer be the best choice. Other languages and frameworks come-and-go whilst C is usually portable over the ages, but most of the effort is in the UI anyway so it's probably not a huge amount of work to transpose the underlying algorithms to whatever's the current flavour in programming.

I think I still have the installation files somewhere. If the author has disappeared and is no longer selling it, I could make it available for download somewhere. Another speedway game is Speedway Meeting, although it's a bit old now.

To be honest, that isn't much of a selling-point these days. To return to what's being discussed on another thread, practically everyone involved in the European tourist industry speaks English to some extent these days.

Yes, I've been on one of his trips. It was well organised, although it was more him doing it at cost-price for his mates rather than an officially-organised thing wasn't it?

They're the only ones in the business these days, aren't they?

They put together the package for you, presumably take responsibility to sort you out if one or more things go pear-shaped, and I guess provide some sort of guarantee against hotels/airlines/coach companies going-out of business. In the olden days, it was a bit of pain to have to sort everything out yourself (particularly in Eastern Europe) and you probably couldn't really do it a lot cheaper. In addition, whilst there were other companies doing cheaper speedway tours, those had the annoying tendency to disappear at short notice leaving fans high-and-dry (Tee Mills comes to mind). This said, in these days of the Internet it's dead easy to organise everything yourself, so long as you're prepared for something to go wrong on the odd occasion, then you can do it a bit cheaper now. I'd be a bit surprised though if you're really doing a GP weekend for GBP 200 - when you take into account flights, hotels, getting to/from the airport, parking at the airport, transfer from the airport, GP tickets and so forth... I must agree though, half-the-fun about travelling is organising things myself, although these days I just want to stay at home when I've got time off.

And the profits from the average BCL track would be how much?

Unfortunately, differences in ability are hugely magnified in speedway compared with football. The nature of football also makes shocks much more likely compared with many other sports, which makes for an interesting inter-league competition. An inter-league speedway competition is not really compable to Blue Square Premier side playing an FA Premiership side, because even the BSP still represents quite a high-level of football. A BCL side taking on Coventry would be more comparable to a local park side taking on Chelsea, which would be an horrendous mis-match. The main issue in speedway though, would be the costs of staging such a competition where the home team pays the points money and travel expenses of the away team. Maybe it would be possible to stage some sort of competition between the BEL and BPL, but then I'd make the Fours into an interleague competition as a) it would probably make it easier for the BPL teams to compete, and even if there were mismatches, there would still be some competition between the (probably) 3 BPL sides in each meeting.

Because the UEM secretariat is largely useless.

Ironic when motorsport is banned in Switzerland.

Have a look at http://www.meynell.com/meeting-formats/ Various historical formats are listed there.