Speedway Promoter Game?

[yahoho 30]

www.simspeedway.com

 

...

We therefore ask each manager to help us cover these costs by paying a donation fee to enter the game, the current fee to enter is £35 per team per season for one team,

if any manager takes on a second team this is charged at the reduced rate of £25 per team. If we do have any money left over at the end of the season,

then it will be invested back into the game by way of reduced admission. We do not seek to make a profit from Sim Speedway at all.

 

 

 

Im sorry what? £35 Per Team, Per Season? 4 Leagues with up to 40 slots per league? Wow. If your costs for:

 

There is a cost to us for providing this game, we have to pay for things like webspace for the Sim site, our e-mail addresses, and other general running costs.

 

 

Are running over £5,500 Per Annum (Lets assume 1 season a year) - you are doing something drastically wrong...

 

Aside from the above (I couldn't not comment on that - when seen, it cannot be unseen), I would be more than happy to contribute to an open source project.

 

I have said a few times now that I still want to develop 5-1 but time is clearly an issue for everyone here, as it will clearly never be a full time job for anyone, so who knows when / if that will ever come to fruition. In terms of the algorithms and associated systems / engines, its all incredible simple to get the results you would expect. I used a Moral system which worked in a similar way to the "Meeting Form" mentioned by SCB above. Although this was the one factor that was used alongside their average to help calculate heat results, this Moral was affected by a long list of variables from previous meeting results, EF's, recent falls, even weather conditions. It worked very well.

 

The one thing I did not get into was the AI tactics, I had AI that would run through the meeting nicely and do R/R's if a rider fell and was injured etc, but thats as far as I went as the rules kept changing too often and I got fed up of it - so focused my attention on other aspects such as transfers and stadium management, track preparation etc etc.

[Kevin Meynell 2]

If the outcome of races are decided on averages then largely the good riders will win (and get progressively better) and lower riders will lose.

 

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.

[Danny Connor 351]

Does anybody have a copy of speedway promoter 2002 going spare. The gdw game. Just had a windows 98 spec retro computer made but my floppy isn't working in age . . . Message me!

[AndyJ 95]

The solution to AI is multiplayer!

This makes it a bit more of a role playing game, as fixtures have to be scheduled, but to me this is the way forward.

Perhaps something akin to how xperteleven.com handle scheduling and pre-determined tactics would work in a speedway context. E.g. Choose line up in advance, configure a sequence of replacement criteria (heat number, meeting score criteria and preferred replacement) then have the meetings auto-calculate on a pre-set schedule.

 

For an example a league could be created with Tue/Sat @ 7pm as meeting time or maybe flexible like the real speedway fixture list with varied race nights to facilitating guests. Prior to this each manager can tweak the line up and tactics. At the meeting time a processing engine (e.g CRON job) calculates the results and maybe allows a 'replay' that iterates through each heat?

 

Such a concept could be created from PHP/MySQL or ASP/SQL and thus be accessible from PC, tablet, mobile phone to maximise potential players.

Edited January 14, 2017 by Tkdandy

[HagueyUK 76]

I may be off the mark here, but a lot of people seem to still have an attachment to the 2002 speedway promoter game on XP, myself included. So would it not be possible to track down a copy, possibly find the game copyright holder and see if there is something can be done to work from that? Start by using that with updated riders and leagues etc, and then make that game accessible FOR FREE in one place, and work as a community on improving it as an ongoing project? Like I said I am no games programmer, but I always champion working together as a community within the sport. So rather than work for months on a release that charges users, use whats already out there and make it a continuous project to constantly improve?

[Danny Connor 351]

I'd love to have a compatable speedway promoter 2002 even. Thats how low the expectations have to be! anything better than that is a bonus!

 

If anybody has that 2002 game please message me!

[PaulS 55]

www.simspeedway.com

 

Congratulations on the work, but paying £30 up-front per season is a lot in the context of the wider market. If an established games company were to make a commercial speedway game, I'd expect to be able to buy the game 'forever' for that sort of money - with its downloadable content - and play it for months on my PS3 and still only have a third of the trophies unlocked after 6 months...as well as getting online multiplayer features which are almost an expectation when paying £30 out for a game.

 

As we all know, Speedway is a bit niche for the likes of Electronic Arts to take a punt at, which is why this thread exists.

 

Nonetheless, it seems that SimSpeedway has been going since 2004, so there are enough people prepared to fork out that sort of money, and even keep coming back for more...?!

[PaulS 55]

Paul, at some point over the next few weeks I'll try and dig out as many of my started and parked up/failed projects as possible for you. Most are in C#/VB.net but if you're only looking for algorithms for determining heat results, tape touching, falls etc then the language simply doesn't matter. When I do get the code up over to you, be prepared, it's of a shockingly bad for someone who is paid to write code for a living

 

Thanks for the offer! How would you feel about putting the work into a shared GitHub repository rather than passing directly to me?

 

The fact that the work is in C#/VB.Net is a very good thing, as there isn't the same tie-in to a vendor (Microsoft) and platform (Windows) that has impacted the immediate usability of the Speedway Meeting code base. Microsoft started the .NET languages off, but there have been open source cross-platform implementations for a while (i.e MonoDevelop). It was very naughty of Microsoft to cut VB6 adrift the way they did - they failed to provide an easy upgrade path, and now refuse to open source VB6; from what I have read, there would certainly be a community available to make open-source VB6 a reality. The net result of Microsoft's unwillingness to budge on this issue is that it's not possible for me to open Speedway Meeting in an IDE, as, unsurprisingly, I do not have any installation CDs for Ye Olde VB6. It's not a complete blocker - all of the code can be viewed in a text editor so algorithms are available, and common sense could be used to derive a supporting GUI - but it's annoying all the same.

 

Anyway, it's great that there is willingness from more than one person to make previous work available, and there are also prospective developers on this thread, which is great. There is still a long, long way to go before a good open-source Speedway game is more than a pipedream - but I think someone putting some work on GitHub would be a significant milestone.

[MattK 3,447]

Perhaps something akin to how xperteleven.com handle scheduling and pre-determined tactics would work in a speedway context. E.g. Choose line up in advance, configure a sequence of replacement criteria (heat number, meeting score criteria and preferred replacement) then have the meetings auto-calculate on a pre-set schedule.

 

For an example a league could be created with Tue/Sat @ 7pm as meeting time or maybe flexible like the real speedway fixture list with varied race nights to facilitating guests. Prior to this each manager can tweak the line up and tactics. At the meeting time a processing engine (e.g CRON job) calculates the results and maybe allows a 'replay' that iterates through each heat?

 

Such a concept could be created from PHP/MySQL or ASP/SQL and thus be accessible from PC, tablet, mobile phone to maximise potential players.

 

This is exactly how I would do it. I would avoid guests by allowing squads and managers have to pick their seven and set tactics ahead of the scheduled meeting time.

 

Then as you say, have a process which calculates results and displays then in an "updates" style.

 

Only downside is that it does take away some of the real-time elements.

[Kevin Meynell 2]

Anyway, it's great that there is willingness from more than one person to make previous work available, and there are also prospective developers on this thread, which is great. There is still a long, long way to go before a good open-source Speedway game is more than a pipedream - but I think someone putting some work on GitHub would be a significant milestone.

 

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.

[steve roberts 9,242]

 

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.

Blimey! Kevin Meynell...not a name I've seen on here for a long time!

[PaulS 55]

 

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.

 

 

Yes, the way forward is for someone to get a first set of open-sourced components published to a shared repository...really whoever can find the time to get something substantial developed in an open-source language that is unlike to be cut adrift in the way that Microsoft washed their hands of VB6.

 

Then perhaps a web developer will follow up with a front-end...

 

Then a graphics designer can contribute an exciting graphical play-through of the race result pre-determined by the API (okay, I am getting greedy now...).

[Guest compost]

Back in the late 1990's through to the early 2000's I ran a free email based Speedway manager game (it was called the ISL or Internet Speedway League and I think at least 2 of the posters here were Team managers).

It used Kevin's simulator to run the meetings along with a squad system for managers to select for their team for each round. The reason for mentioning this was that I ran it for between 3 & 5 seasons (I forget which and when I handed it on I didn't keep a copy) and found an irritating problem with the simulation. What it was was that as riders started each season with their finishing average from the previous season (various factors not withstanding such as a minimum number of rides/matches and so on) I found that a riders average tended to drop or rise towards an average of 6. A rider with a season start average of 10 usually lost between 1.5 and 2.5 points off that average by the end of the season whilst a rider on a start of say 3 would end up on 1 to 2 up. The game even had riders with a start of average of 12 but who never recorded a maximum despite riding in most of their teams meetings (in fact any form of maximum was a rare thing, I should mention that the game generally used the 13 heat format from the 70's and 80's). The upshot was that I, and several of the team managers in the game, felt that the simulator was unrealistic with too many 'fluke' results and not enough 'predictability'. I mention this because you may want to review the way the heat results are calculated in Kevin's simulator - sorry Kevin this is not a critism and I never mentioned it at the time (we did have some correspondence in that I sent you the team line-ups for the '65 and '66 BL seasons) as I only realised this issue towards the end of my time running the game and thought my recollection might be of use to Paul.

[Kevin Meynell 2]

The reason for mentioning this was that I ran it for between 3 & 5 seasons (I forget which and when I handed it on I didn't keep a copy) and found an irritating problem with the simulation. What it was was that as riders started each season with their finishing average from the previous season (various factors not withstanding such as a minimum number of rides/matches and so on) I found that a riders average tended to drop or rise towards an average of 6. A rider with a season start average of 10 usually lost between 1.5 and 2.5 points off that average by the end of the season whilst a rider on a start of say 3 would end up on 1 to 2 up. The game even had riders with a start of average of 12 but who never recorded a maximum despite riding in most of their teams meetings (in fact any form of maximum was a rare thing, I should mention that the game generally used the 13 heat format from the 70's and 80's).

 

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.

[The Doctor... 1,478]

Blimey! Kevin Meynell...not a name I've seen on here for a long time!

 

I was thinking the same! Surely Humphrey Appleby hasn't been banned has he ?