PaulS

I recognise those concerns. It's not going to simply be a matter of securing a new major sponsor then all will be well...

£20K is not a great deal of money. If we assume all 10 teams could survive on a similar cash injection - then a 3-season deal would cost £600K. Small change to a big PLC. SGB Carabao Championship anyone? Instead of being forced to rely on Limited companies to subsidise each season's loss, the sport needs a big PLC with big £££££££££ to steady things and start to move away from constant worries of closure and towards building for the future - more British riders, who can ride knowing if they get good enough Speedway will pay them considerably more money than they could hope to earn in other jobs....making it a more attractive career choice...meaning more British riders...etc. Failing that Mike Ashley should pull out some loose change from his deep pockets and then we have the Newcastle Sports Direct Diamonds - after all he will be looking for a new club soon and it's the least he could do after 2 relegations...?

I would be concerned about any plans to field a weaker team as I think a lot of fans have probably got used to top-class heat leaders and a team that can usually be expected to win at home. A team that gets tonked on their own patch over and over again would probably hit attendances (mind you the Bears kept going before this season...). So George's problem would seem to be being forced to put together a competitive team even though such a team makes the promoters a loss... So I think the following 2 are both essential: Stadium owners to be more realistic in what they charge. Another major sponsor to be found to replace Alan/Sapphire Engineering. Failing that the EuroMillions is £58m tomorrow, once I have finished making all my family millionaires, I wonder does that leave enough left to buy out the stadium?

If you call our track a council tip, are we allowed to call your patch a grim industrial town in North Yorkshire? 😂

I agree the rules need very detailed scrutiny. However, any revisions should fall on the side of what happened tonight. i.e don't short change the paying punters by denying a facility, because without the paying punters, there is no CL Speedway. I don't think the Bears can complain about the Rain Replacement as they were fighting for victory until heat 15 and even then picked up a useful and deserved away point

Checked my program and we managed a very decent 9/12 for our 'Rain Replacement' at #1. Robert would probably have got a smidgen higher...where we struggled tonight was at reserve, however well done to our reserves for getting those crucial points. Heroic performances from Stevie and Lightning were the decisive factor in beating off a ferocious challenge from our local rivals.

IMO Lindgren, who has had a disappointing season, was riding like his old self this evening for the first time in a while. Not sure I agree with the comment that he is a second string now, I think he has the ability, resources and experience to be at least the 3rd heat leader, and possibly the 2nd if the team building requires it.

Will it be 'kids go free' again in the summer holidays?

Even without Steve we should have had enough to scrape the win, but when 3 riders in a 6-man lineup are not doing their job properly then we are there for the taking on our own shale. Big and immediate improvements needed from Lindgren, Rose and Hopwood.

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...).

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.

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...?!

Thanks for the response. A key reason behind my interest in seeing if an open source project could be started up, is in capturing efforts made in the past in a non-proprietary format that can be kept readily usable. It sounds like you have put a lot of work into the calculations (a year's worth of Speedway Stars!), so it is great that you are making the work available rather than keeping hold of it as intellectual property. I understand your comments about old-school HTML, which was simply awful. Nowadays, in addition to nice clean HTML5, there are excellent open source libraries available to help with screen design for tablets or smartphones - JQuery Mobile springs to mind as one very good option. As to programming language: don't get me wrong, C is still a rock-solid choice and had someone already converted the project to C for us, we would be further forward in that the code base wouldn't be in a proprietary format that the vendor (i.e. Microsoft) decided to effectively cut adrift with the advent of VB.Net. My previous employer (a well-known airline) faced the challenge of converting its VB6 projects to VB.Net to keep up; and there had to be an entire porfolio project reference to cover this, as the conversion is far from straightforward. However, a web interface is inevitable, which is why the likes of Java or Ruby spring to my mind as preferable choices for the mooted project. I hope to have a look at this as a pet project in the weeks/months ahead, albeit life has a habit of getting in the way. If I do get my teeth into this and get stuck or don't understand anything, thanks for the offer to PM you which I will certainly do if I need to.

A. Not necessarily 'reading this post', but: there is a project called 'Speedway Meeting' which was published some years ago. Based upon a very quick glance, we're looking at VB5 or VB6. Now, taking this and 'converting' it to a leading open source technology like Java or Ruby is not gonna be simple - even before you get into considerations like spending any of your hard-earned cash on proprietary software that claims it helps you convert old VB code, and charges you the likes of £10 per 10,000 lines of code converted and whatnot. But, I think the key point is that the author of the project has obviously put a lot of work and a lot of thought into what they've done (even if they put somewhat less work into inline code commenting - and I'm not having a pop, author, if you're reading this - I'm grateful for your contribution - I'm simply making an observation about the understanding I have about the 'Speedway Meeting' code base as of now), and thus, my own concerns about what mathematical formulae to use are alleviated, because someone has had a crack at this before me, and made their work available. I suggested a 'Speedway Manager' project should start by standing on the shoulders of giants - well, we have a set of formulae/logic, and comments from the author openly stating that someone converting 'Speedway Meeting' to a non-proprietary language like C would be a welcome contribution. For me, either Java or Ruby is the way to go for this particular project, with no disrespect to the mighty C intended. I will take a look in the days ahead and see whether I can feasibly reverse-engineer what has been done so far into Java and/or Ruby. If I can set up and open-source a bunch of Java/Ruby classes containing that logic, it might get the ball rolling on a project where other contributors can do us in an ideal world some nice graphics, or at least some nice clean HTML5/JQueryUI etc. front-ends. As always, I can't promise this will happen anytime soon as life tends to get in the way. I just thought it was worth a post given that this thread has been silent for a while, and that we do have some openly-volunteered formulae to give a starting point. The author of the Visual Basic project 'Speedway Meeting' is very welcome to comment here and/or PM me.

We should have had Sheffield beaten before heat 15. Not sure we should assess the merits of a rider on coming 4th in a vital heat 15...? Overall a very decent season and a strong rider around Brough Park. My vote: +1

Great performance at home yet again, none of our top 5 (out of 6) could be faulted. Robert back to form, Ashley clearly a fine signing (regardless of whether he can or cannot replace the irreplaceable Lewis Rose), Rene was 'Bach', Ludvig and Matej both giving solid home heat leader performances. Pavlova has done a super job in replacing the irreplaceable Tero Aarnio, so it was a great performance to win without Victor. Danny got on the scoreboard with a hard overtake; at times he fell back after challenging riders who then locked up in front of him. I agree with Ludvig's post-match interview comments; Danny is losing out at the gates. If he could gate reasonably well, he's already looking at a substantial improvement...

I think Newcastle are stronger than Somerset over 2 legs. We have often not had a full team on the road but that won't be the case in the playoffs.

Maybe Lambert is knackered from all the travelling and doing so many meetings? - he's missed heat 15s at Brough Park before when scoring well. Anyhow it's great to see him continuing his return to form.

Wait and see what the team change(s) are first. 1-5 still strong regardless.

'Turnip Triplets' then? 😁

Pity for teams who get a star reserve injured on 28th August... 😡

Looks like Anton is 0.02 points too high? No wriggle room in the rules for that? We could ask for it to be allowed because 'Rose' and 'Rosen' are nearly the same? 😉

Lewis Rose is a big loss. The crash looked like at least a collar-bone. Do the rules/averages allow us to bring in Tero for Lewis? From what I heard, Bewley had no breaks, 'just' concussion. So he will hopefully be back on a bike in 10 days or so? He is definitely a talent. His scorecard was great but what struck me most is that he looked very fast.

Unlucky with Lambert's bike in 6...

Apart from Lejonen, yes