Speedway Promoter Game?

[Humphrey Appleby 13,955]

There is some open source code available on the Internet that could be used as the basis for speedway management game. However, the market for speedway games is simply far too small for commercial developers to want to be involved, whilst I suspect prospective hobbyist programmers underestimate how much work it would be.

 

Then of course to make any such game interesting, you need to include current teams and riders, at which point the various 'commercial rights holders' will be sticking out their hands for licence fees from what is only ever going to be a labour of love.

[allthegearbutnaeidea 1,734]

There is some open source code available on the Internet that could be used as the basis for speedway management game. However, the market for speedway games is simply far too small for commercial developers to want to be involved, whilst I suspect prospective hobbyist programmers underestimate how much work it would be.

 

Then of course to make any such game interesting, you need to include current teams and riders, at which point the various 'commercial rights holders' will be sticking out their hands for licence fees from what is only ever going to be a labour of love.

surely just using the names such as Coventry and Newcastle instead of Coventry Bees and Newcastle Diamonds would fix that, the same as using King instead of Danny King

[PaulS 55]

Riding for the Tynecastle Sapphires...Anton Lindgren and Ludvig Rosen...

[PaulS 55]

...teenage sensation Rob Lamb...French prospect Louis Kêrr...

[PaulS 55]

On a more serious note, I have been mulling over what would be involved in such a project, when I'm walking my dog or waiting for the kettle to heat up or whatnot.

 

There are firstly 2 challenges of enormous difficulty; without addressing these, there seems little point in even looking at the remainder.

 

1. Mathematical formulae to simulate the outcome of a given heat. i.e. who gates (or jumps!); any overtaking? Any falls? Which fallers get up and resume the race, and what's their chance of anything other than 4^th place after that? What's the chance of a fallen rider being withdrawn from the meeting? If not, does the fall make him do less well than he otherwise would have, in the remainder of the meeting? What's the chance of a puncture? Engine failure? Which gates are favourable and which are scoring very few points that night? Is the track grippy or slick, and what riders prefer what sort of track? Home teams have a very big advantage in Speedway, but not every meeting is a home win. Strong number 1s have a tendency to wipe the floor with the opposition, but in reality don't score 15 points each and every meeting!

 

What factors influence a rider's ability? 'Natural talent'? Experience? What age are they? Improving fast, or over the hill? What's their equipment like? Are they suffering a confidence problem or off-track issues?

 

Some sort of mathematical model needs to be able to describe a heat similarly to what you might see on Proboards Speedway updates; and it's got to be realistic. If you get an average of 2 retirements per heat, or 'Crag Coot' only wins a hit once in a blue moon, players are going to say, this game is rubbish, it's just not realistic at all. There will be randomness in the maths; but heavily weighted to tend to reflect reality. So, if you ran the simulation of 2016 Newcastle Diamonds v (2016...or 2015...or…) Redcar Bears 20 times, you might see 61-29 a few times; but the 20^th time, the Bears might squeeze a win.

 

Exactly how to come up with such a mathematical model seems wildly difficult, and way beyond my own knowledge. I think there is a giant data mining exercise in there to analyse who scored what, at what tracks, riding against whom, in what vein of form, etc. For this crucial task, I believe the project would need a top-class mathematician/statistician (PhD standard or higher), probably assisted by a strong programmer to write the actual analysis code while being steered by the mathematician.

 

If this hugely challenging task could be accomplished, then at this point, you have a realistic Speedway simulation, which brings us to…

 

 

2. For a player to get involved in a game, they need to be able to influence the game at various points, and see the effect of their actions. For example, if I as a team manager deliberately made stupid substitutions and pissed off my riders, I might well expect to lose at home to a team weaker on paper. If I think everything through very carefully, I would hope to end the season in the playoffs. You need to be able to adjust the difficulty level as well. If players just couldn't buy an away win whatever they tried, they would lose interest unless you can offer them an 'easy' game mode. This part of the project would require an experienced game designer, taking an initial steer from the mathematician as to how the formulae work; then, coming up with ways to modify them based on the player's good or bad decisions.

 

We then need some AI to define when a computer opponent makes substitutions...who it will give the black and white helmet to...etc.

 

 

To my mind, the 80/20 principle applies to the above. 80% of the project's effort and its chances of success are based upon getting the above two massive challenges successfully met.

 

The remaining 20% of the project is a bit more straightforward:

 

3. The simulation can initially produce text output; but graphics and sound would bring it to life (actually seeing the overtakes, etc.). A graphic designer and game developer would be required to animate the heats. A 2-dimensional overhead view would not be overly challenging. Getting into 3D takes us into the realms of professional video games and could possibly prove a bridge too far for this project – indeed, this could be on a level of difficulty approaching 1 and 2 above.

4. The myriad rules of Speedway need to be defined, so the game knows when it can and cannot offer the player the option of substituting, who the substitutes can be, who can take the rider replacement, etc. Additionally, players may want to try different formats, like Swedish league, 6-man teams, etc...all the different permutations need to be defined in configuration files, with logic defined that can derive the rules just from parsing such files. Ideally, the logic is future proof: you think of all plausible ideas in the configuration file format you design, which is almost a Domain-Specific Language. Thus, when the BSPA change the rules each year, the game can simply be patched with a new configuration file. Of course, players can choose which rule set to play with anyway.

5. A legal expert and/or PR officer to look into issues like image rights. i.e. can real names be used, or does the game randomly generate names (British, Swedish, Danish…)?

6. Finally, to re-iterate, the project must be open source, so it does not get stuck on an obsolete platform, or have its efforts vanish without trace in the future. It should be written in a cross-platform, widely-used General Purpose Language like C – unless, of course, the mathematics involved are so complex that a language best for Maths needs to be used (like Fortran, etc.). Again, that sort of question is way over my head.

 

 

So, to deliver that open source project needs several top experts collaborating. Unless they fancy doing this niche game out of the goodness of their hearts, the project is going to need a benefactor to pay them for their time. My finger in the air estimate is around a million pounds for this project...

 

[waiheke1 4,295]

Flying shale is an excellent simulation game for pc already available. Would be great if this could simply be updated for android.

[Humphrey Appleby 13,955]

1. Mathematical formulae to simulate the outcome of a given heat. i.e. who gates (or jumps!); any overtaking? Any falls? Which fallers get up and resume the race, and what's their chance of anything other than 4^th place after that? What's the chance of a fallen rider being withdrawn from the meeting? If not, does the fall make him do less well than he otherwise would have, in the remainder of the meeting? What's the chance of a puncture? Engine failure? Which gates are favourable and which are scoring very few points that night? Is the track grippy or slick, and what riders prefer what sort of track? Home teams have a very big advantage in Speedway, but not every meeting is a home win. Strong number 1s have a tendency to wipe the floor with the opposition, but in reality don't score 15 points each and every meeting!

Coming up with a formula is not that hard. The outcome of a speedway race can be calculated according to the probability of various real-life happenings, whilst averages are a fairly accurate way of measuring rider ability. You can break down a speedway race into about five basic variables, and certainly ten or so will give quite accurate outcomes.

 

Speedway is also blessed with having race results printed in the Speedway Star, and if you analyse (say) a season worth of these, you'll get a fairly good idea of the probabilities of things like falls, exclusions, engine failures, two minute and tapes exclusions. Obviously lesser riders are more likely to fall than better ones, whereas engine failures are relatively more random (although top riders probably also have better equipment that's less likely to fail), so the formula needs to take that into account too, but that's more a judgement call that needs to be tweaked in response to the outcome of running simulations.

 

So the mathematical modelling is not particularly complex, and is basically within the capability of any competent programmer with a reasonable grasp of probability. I mocked something up on a ZX Spectrum back in 1988, so it'll certainly run on anything available today. More variables could be added, but then you run into the problem of how do you actually obtain qualitative data for these variables (e.g. who keeps record of punctures?) because if the inputted data is inherently garbage then it's not going to improve the simulation.

 

Exactly how to come up with such a mathematical model seems wildly difficult, and way beyond my own knowledge. I think there is a giant data mining exercise in there to analyse who scored what, at what tracks, riding against whom, in what vein of form, etc. For this crucial task, I believe the project would need a top-class mathematician/statistician (PhD standard or higher), probably assisted by a strong programmer to write the actual analysis code while being steered by the mathematician.

Well I certainly don't have a PhD, only got an O-Level Grade C in Maths, and am not a professional programmer.

 

2. For a player to get involved in a game, they need to be able to influence the game at various points, and see the effect of their actions. For example, if I as a team manager deliberately made stupid substitutions and pissed off my riders, I might well expect to lose at home to a team weaker on paper. If I think everything through very carefully, I would hope to end the season in the playoffs. You need to be able to adjust the difficulty level as well. If players just couldn't buy an away win whatever they tried, they would lose interest unless you can offer them an 'easy' game mode. This part of the project would require an experienced game designer, taking an initial steer from the mathematician as to how the formulae work; then, coming up with ways to modify them based on the player's good or bad decisions.

 

We then need some AI to define when a computer opponent makes substitutions...who it will give the black and white helmet to...etc.

Most of this has already been done.

 

3. The simulation can initially produce text output; but graphics and sound would bring it to life (actually seeing the overtakes, etc.). A graphic designer and game developer would be required to animate the heats. A 2-dimensional overhead view would not be overly challenging. Getting into 3D takes us into the realms of professional video games and could possibly prove a bridge too far for this project – indeed, this could be on a level of difficulty approaching 1 and 2 above.

This is the bit that's missing.

 

4. The myriad rules of Speedway need to be defined, so the game knows when it can and cannot offer the player the option of substituting, who the substitutes can be, who can take the rider replacement, etc. Additionally, players may want to try different formats, like Swedish league, 6-man teams, etc...all the different permutations need to be defined in configuration files, with logic defined that can derive the rules just from parsing such files. Ideally, the logic is future proof: you think of all plausible ideas in the configuration file format you design, which is almost a Domain-Specific Language. Thus, when the BSPA change the rules each year, the game can simply be patched with a new configuration file. Of course, players can choose which rule set to play with anyway.

Again, this has already been done. If you design the program to input user-definable scripts then it would be very easy to accommodate different formats and rule changes.

 

5. A legal expert and/or PR officer to look into issues like image rights. i.e. can real names be used, or does the game randomly generate names (British, Swedish, Danish…)?

It doesn't need a legal expert who would likely wipe out any potential profit anyway. Things like team and rider names are held by the teams or commercial rights holders, so you need to licence them or make-up your own. In the past, teams didn't bother to enforce their rights because there was no inherent value at the time, but there's much more awareness of this now.

 

It's not an insurmountable problem if you allow users to input their own names, but it does detract from the saleability of a game if there's a significant effort required on the part of the user to make the game realistic.

 

6. Finally, to re-iterate, the project must be open source, so it does not get stuck on an obsolete platform, or have its efforts vanish without trace in the future. It should be written in a cross-platform, widely-used General Purpose Language like C – unless, of course, the mathematics involved are so complex that a language best for Maths needs to be used (like Fortran, etc.). Again, that sort of question is way over my head.

Anything written for Windows, MacOS X, Android or iOS is not going to be obsolete for a long, long time. It's also very likely that it would need to be cross platform, especially if it's going to run on phones or tablets, but that's also much easier to do nowadays than in the past.

 

I'm not sure I'd be willing to release anything as open source if I was planning to even try to recoup my development costs. Open source is all very well if the software development was funded through sponsorship or for other reasons, or if there's value in customer customisation for the developer, but why else should anyone make their intellectual property available for free?

Edited June 23, 2016 by Humphrey Appleby

[PaulS 55]

I might be over-complicating things and trying to envisage a finished game that would score over 90% on reviews if released to the wider market. Just to have a reasonably realistic open source title available for multiple platforms would be a giant leap forward from the current situation. Whatever happens, this mooted project is not going to have Electronic Arts quaking in their boots and that's something I really need to drum into my thick head. I literally only ever game on PS3 titles that get very good reviews - these are made by teams of like 200 professionals and have budgets like $20 million and so on. An Open Source Speedway Manager game can't even attempt to be in the same league.

 

Firstly, Flying Shale: a product is available for download for £20 at the following page:

 

http://www.roogames.co.uk/productslist.htm

 

I e-mailed them to try and get an update on status for the project, but unfortunately got the following back:

 

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
enquiries@roogames.co.uk

 

 

So, it seems there is on old commercial product - but the vendor appears to be defunct? If so, I fear Speedway fans might be waiting a very long time for an Android port of Flying Shale.

 

Nonetheless, if Flying Shale could be done, and some formulae on a ZX Spectrum give a plausible simulation, making a 'decent' or 'good enough' open source game to give fans something during the long, long winter (or even tractor breaks/sun breaks) sounds not as difficult as I thought.

 

An open source game with even just text output would be a big step forward. Yes, a decent looking graphical representation of the racing, overtakes etc. is a miss, but an open source project that does the calculations and so on could be extended later on if a skilled game developer/graphic designer wanted to join the project. I myself do not have any game development experience - instead my own background is in business information systems (back-office systems, data warehousing, etc.) - but I might be interested in branching out into graphics in the foreseeable future, as I'm not getting any younger and it's important to keep learning new skills and technologies. As ever it's a matter of finding the time to do the study.

 

Yes, naturally people will want to keep their intellectual property they have worked on, especially when there is a gap in the market like the lack of Speedway games. The only thing that might tempt people to offer previous work as open source is if a project is under way that's credible, and potential collaborators are confident not only that the project will deliver, but also believe that they can make an important contribution to the final project. Until then, previous work retains potential future value. I don't think a 'Speedway Manager' Android game available for download at 99p will make someone a millionaire, but could certainly provide some welcome additional income. So there's an opportunity there for those who do have previous work stored somewhere, and learning how to deliver an Android app is no bad skill to have. I would certainly be a potential customer of such a product if someone has the time and desire to deliver it.

 

As to an open source project, I will give it some thought in the months ahead. It's possible I might get involved in one or even start one off if I can develop some credible simulations and put in the groundwork to learn game graphics. However, I don't want to make any promises I can't follow up on, so at the moment it's merely a bucket list entry for me - don't get your winter diaries all blocked out in eager anticipation of playing 'Open Source Speedway Manager 2016' as soon as the play-offs conclude...

[waiheke1 4,295]

Try roogames@Google mail.com

 

That was stil working a couple of years back even though the email on the website was not

[BWitcher 12,453]

As Humphrey says it's not that difficult at all to create formulae to simulate realistic race results.

 

As others no doubt did as a kid I'd invent simulations for all sorts of sports just involving a couple of dice, ranging from the very simple to quite complex. Computers simply open up far more scope for detail.

[martinmauger 584]

Even before I played the speedway game on my Amgia I had International Speedway on my C64, on cassette cost 2.99. Viewed from over head you controlled your rider against opposition such as 'Ivor Major, 'Olle Olson', 'Ronnie Briggs, 'Barry Moore', etc.

 

Bringing things up to date, one of my grilrfriend's mates has 'Super Speedway 2' (or Speedway 2) on her fone which she downloaded if not 'freemans' then very cheaply. Not surprisingly much better graphics and sound than the 2 above games, the look is very similar to the Speedway Grand Prix games on the PC. So someone, somewhere has already wrtten such a cheap, easily avalaible speedway game for the popular mobile fone platform....

Edited June 24, 2016 by Martin Mauger

[yahoho 30]

Just to clarify, we did not stop 5-1 due to not seeing a profit, we stopped because of potential legal proceedings being brought against us.

 

Im all up for open source, I actually have a printed version of the source code in a ring binder somewhere if someone wants to type it all back up Unfortunately the original source is lost now, but would be mostly useless now due to it being incompatible with modern windows.

 

Also a desktop game is now the completely incorrect market - its all about online. Yes there will be people that will download and install an application, but a web based version that can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection, with a companion mobile app or at least a mobile friendly web application that can be utilised on the go with 4G / WiFi? Thats where you want to be targetting.

 

App stores cost money, take development time, a real pain in the ass for any indi developer. Web based allows one source code to rule them all

[PaulS 55]

Even before I played the speedway game on my Amgia I had International Speedway on my C64, on cassette cost 2.99. Viewed from over head you controlled your rider against opposition such as 'Ivor Major, 'Olle Olson', 'Ronnie Briggs, 'Barry Moore', etc.

 

Bringing things up to date, one of my grilrfriend's mates has 'Super Speedway 2' (or Speedway 2) on her fone which she downloaded if not 'freemans' then very cheaply. Not surprisingly much better graphics and sound than the 2 above games, the look is very similar to the Speedway Grand Prix games on the PC. So someone, somewhere has already wrtten such a cheap, easily avalaible speedway game for the popular mobile fone platform....

 

Good to hear of yet more examples of Speedway games being done both historically and currently. At this time though, there continues to be the lack of a free open source program that a developer community of Speedway fans can steadily make better and better over the years, and that's a gap I would like to see filled.

 

Just to clarify, we did not stop 5-1 due to not seeing a profit, we stopped because of potential legal proceedings being brought against us.

 

Im all up for open source, I actually have a printed version of the source code in a ring binder somewhere if someone wants to type it all back up Unfortunately the original source is lost now, but would be mostly useless now due to it being incompatible with modern windows.

 

Also a desktop game is now the completely incorrect market - its all about online. Yes there will be people that will download and install an application, but a web based version that can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection, with a companion mobile app or at least a mobile friendly web application that can be utilised on the go with 4G / WiFi? Thats where you want to be targetting.

 

App stores cost money, take development time, a real pain in the ass for any indi developer. Web based allows one source code to rule them all

 

A couple of questions if I may:

1. What programming language and version was the source code written in?
2. I'm guessing the legal proceedings were due to intending to use real rider names and team names, rather than the very idea of selling a game that allowed players to pretend they were Speedway promoters...?

Transcribe the source code from a ring binder...? Well, you never know! I work full-time, have a wife and responsibilities at home, but contributing to an open-source Speedway project appeals to me if I'm confident I can deliver. Roughly how many sides of A4 is this printout?

 

Getting even a transcription of raw code in an old programming language version into a shared GitHub repository could be that key first step in getting a project under way - if you are formally willing to hand over your intellectual property to be, say, GNU General Public License and someone is willing to really do the transcription rather than just mull it over on a forum.

 

Yes you make a very good point about the advantages of a web application for the mooted project. The only question mark for me is around hosting. In my job in the IT department of a large company, if I need servers for a project, I just fill in a sizing form and infrastructure teams allocate the hardware; there's a monthly operational cost to run them but I'm a technical role that doesn't have to worry about such costs. In the wider world, there is the prospect of paying for hosting space, especially if the game becomes popular with several users.

 

You probably know more than me about web hosting in the wider world - is there a free platform offering that can handle maybe 50-100 (non-concurrent) users? I note for example the Free Heroku offering goes to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, and I'm guessing this game isn't going to be so amazing that people keep playing it all night to keep it awake. The Heroku Hobby offering looks about the right size for a niche application like this, but costs $7 per dyno per month.

 

Of course, the project could provide instructions to the user on how to run it on a local host. Thus the first release could be a web application from day 1; with the issue of external hosting to provide mobile access, human v human gameplay, player score charts etc., a consideration to address a little later.

[RobMcCaffery 2,752]

I prefer my software on the pc, bought with a single one-off payment rather than constantly being charged 'in-game' or monthly.

 

The current online with 'in-game' purchasing will be seen through eventually.

[PaulS 55]

I prefer my software on the pc, bought with a single one-off payment rather than constantly being charged 'in-game' or monthly.

 

The current online with 'in-game' purchasing will be seen through eventually.

What I'm hoping for is that you can play a decent game at NO COST - and that the game gets better over the years. Of course this will require an Open Source project team to commit to the large amount of hard work needed to make that a reality. As mentioned earlier in this thread, I am mulling over starting something off if I'm confident the project can deliver, although I've got a lot going on in my life right now so I may be 6 - 12 months away from putting my money (or unpaid effort!) where my mouth is.