Reseting our dimensions

We should be back real soon.

cheers!

Diamond formation

I see a lot of people wanting to use a 4-4-2 diamond formation. Due to our mentality feature, it is not possible to put the defensive and offensive midfielders in the central midfield zone. That's why I'm posting this screenshot as an alternate diamond formation, putting the defensive midfielder as an offensive central defender.



Another option would be put the offensive midfielder as a defensive attacker. I think you got it. Let me know if this works for you guys ;-)

It is alive!!!!!

Breath. Now click here and enjoy. Don´t forget to send us your feedback, by email or forum. You can also post here :).

Today RS story begins. Let us have a lot of fun and make a lot of friends! Our first tick will be today, 2:00 PM (GMT -3). We decided to implement 6 ticks per day for our first dimension. Thank you for your vote on our poll!

ps: please note that we decided to go online despite the few icons that are missing :). We will update those asap.

Screen Help

Our Wiki has been updated with some screen help. It doesn't have screenshots yet but once the game goes online it will be easy to identify in the screens the elements described in the Wiki help. We've already started the final revision before the beta and some adjustments are being taken care of.

[DANILO] ps: wiki logo added too!

Players Evolution

Players evolution is done, which means we only have to add a few icons and review the whole thing before unleashing Ruby Soccer. As I told you, the end of August target is still possible, unless we hold it until monday due to our potential unavailability on weekends to take care of unexpected issues.

Ruby Soccer Wiki

The weekend wasn't completely lost, I was able to write some basic game concepts explanations and put it on our Wiki.

http://www.rubysoccer.com/mediawiki/index.php/Ruby_Soccer

I have also written some screen specific explanations, they will be available later today or tomorrow. Danilo hasn't read the whole text, so he may have something to add to what I wrote.

The purpose of the Wiki is to work as a game help. Check it out when you have some time and let us know what your impressions are.

Cheers.

Ruby Soccer and ManagerSim

While answering to Patrick's comment on this post about having ManagerSim's star system on Ruby Soccer, I realized that my answer deserved a new post.

ManagerSim was our start point, as it was the best free online soccer management game we've ever played. That's why our first version will be similar to MS in many aspects, and of course the best ones will be kept or improved over time, but we'll also add new features and change or remove some others.

That said, the answer to your question, Patrick, is no, we don't have plans for that, but it doesn't mean we'll never have the star system in the game. Keep in mind that we'll consider all user suggestions we receive and implement the more popular ones and those we think will make our game better. The game won't be that great if we don't have a great community!

As you guys can imagine we already have a long future tasks list and this list is likely to grow faster when we have our game up and running along with its forum. We only need to finish the players evolution system and do some cleaning tasks. Stay tuned, the big announcement will happen someday in the next week!

Cheers.

More on Players evolution

Today we had more coding on players evolution. That is the reason why there will be no screenshot.

We already have an evolution criteria system working and I hope we can finish everything around this subject asap.

After we put this behind, an online BETA will be REALLY close! After UI adjustments and a couple minor stuff, the game will be on.

Friendlies

It is now possible to invite other teams to friendly matches.





The turn you select must be at least the current turn + 1 and at most the last season turn. You can't schedule friendlies for the next season, at least on our first version. You can have more than one invitation for the same turn, but when the first invitation is accepted, the others are automatically cancelled/rejected. Invitations not answered until the turn when the match was supposed to happen are automatically cancelled. National cup matches cause friendlies and invitations scheduled to the same turn to be cancelled. AI teams can be invited to friendlies, but may reject the invitation.

Manager Settings Screen / Donator Flag

The post title is really straightforward. On the manager settings screen, for now, you can only choose if you want to receive dimension messages as emails.

The donator flag is a way to say thanks for those who are helping us to maintain the server. Just like managersim did :).

Match Attendance Improvements

Now we have the final version of the attendance calculation for the first Ruby Soccer version. The team division is now taken into consideration, along with team players quality and match importance, and also the way each element influences the final attendance changed. Results are now more realistic, as teams in the bottom of the table don't get full stadiums all the time.

Players evolution on the way

Already coloring the screen. Of course that this means that we have a whole database structure ready.

Match Attendance

Match Attendance is no more randomly generated, it is now based on team players quality (excluding youths) and match importance. The home team weight on the total attendance is much greater than the visitor team's.

Match importance is different from competition to competition. The importance of a league match is related to the team performance in the league, while the importance of a national cup match is related to the round being played (final, semi finals, quarter finals and so on).

p.s.: the server is ready to receive the game, including tick logic, we just need a little more coding before making Ruby Soccer available!

Players Unavailability

I guess that you guys, based on our history, were not expecting new features on the weekend. But hey, we wanted to surprise our readers! And also say: gee, we are really hard working on this game, you can count on us ;) !

RubySoccer is now able to show/deal-with the "suspensions status" of your team players. One can think: but how is that? Elementary, my dear Watson.

Here are the rules that we have decided to apply:

1. Cards have single competition effects. Which means that if your player receives a card in one competition, that will only affect that particular competition;
2. Two yellow cards received in the same or in different matches will suspend your player for that competition next fixture. The yellow card icon is just a warning: "hey, if this guy receives another card, he will be out of next game!";
3. A single red card will also have the above effect;
4. Injured players can´t play any matches at all (DUH!);
5. You can still drag and drop players in any status into any formation. A warning message will be displayed if any of your next fixture selected formation players are not going to make it for the game;
6. Formation field players that have no game conditions (suspensions/injuries) will be automatically replaced by the best fit (for his position) team mate, before a match starts.



ps: the screenshot shows another interesting aspect of rubysoccer. note one of the formation names.

Opera Browser

Ruby Soccer was finally tested on Opera and unfortunately the elements alignment looks the same as on IE. The drag and drop in the formations screen works slowly, not smooth as it does on Firefox, but still better than IE. Therefore, our recommendations is still the same, use Firefox.

Internet Explorer News

We tested our game on IE7. The newsflash is that it doesn't work on it either. Bad news for our microsoft lovers. And one more reason to re-consider mozilla.

Tick frequency

My friends, time has come to decide the tick frequency of our first dimension. Please make your choice in the poll located in the right bar. Keep in mind that a fast tick pace will probably make it easier for you to tell us the fixes and improvements the game needs, but the most important thing is to choose the option that allows you to have more fun.

The substitute

The code to replace players is done. For now, it is only applied to replace a player that was injured.



ps: the event phrase is not the one in the screenshot anymore. Now it is "XXX replaces YYY".

Computer teams negotiations

Computer teams are now able to buy and sell players. The logic is not very complex as our intention is to focus on managed teams and make computer teams just do the basic stuff. That doesn't mean they won't try to improve their squad over time, of course.

A computer team trasfer lists players when it considers it has more players than it needs for a specific position. On the other hand, it will try to buy players to improve the squad when its economic situation is good enough and it finds a player whose price won't put the team's economy at risk.

Beta countries added

After reading your answers for our last poll we've agreed to have Brazil, England, Spain and Italy in our first version. Yesterday the data we have was updated with the teams currently on the 2 first divisions of these countries, totalizing 168 teams, which should be good enough at this point.

Don't be sad if your favorite country is not listed, it will certainly be added in the future. Thank you all for your votes.

Yellow card!

Yellow and red cards are now applied during the match. On this screenshot, you can see an example of it. Also, we are working to improve the match "short" report. Enjoy!



ps: fatigue is also on the way!

Beta Countries

With the beta release approaching we would like to ask you guys which countries would you like to see in Ruby Soccer's first version. We have all European and South American countries ready but just a few will be available for now. If you want to choose more than one country (no more than three, please) list them in order of preference.

Cheers.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship plays an important role in the teams economy and it is finally implemented in our game. Instead of an yearly value as in real life sponsors in the game will pay you a smaller value each 3 turns, making it easier to evaluate how balanced is your team economy.

The sponsorship value is based on the non youth players quality only. The team recent performance will influence another source of money yet to implemented, merchandising. We still have to work on other economy-related stuff before deciding how good our sponsorship calculation is, but we'll have a better ideia when the game goes online.

We have a server!

This is a mark on RubySoccer history. Soon we will have our BETA there. Or maybe our forum/wiki first.

http://www.rubysoccer.com/

Enjoy :)

Match Report

This is the Match Report screen. There you can see the match result, overall statistics and the players who have played the match along with the positions in which they played and their ratings. The link "Match Full Replay" displays our current static version of the replay, not that one we announced is being developed. A few improvements will be done before the beta, like listing who scored the goals and when, and displaying cards and injuries.

The screenshot also shows the new icons disposition at the top. We've changed it in order to make room for more icons. The tree icons that look the same are, in fact, the same, but they don't link you to the same screen, we just don't have all the icons needed yet.

Donations and Donators

Our game will be free. But, of course, to maintain a server is not free. That is one of the reasons for our "Donations" section on this blog (and we will also have it on our game site).
We will start a server account very soon, and all donations are welcome.

ps: we are still thinking about treats we can offer donators within RubySoccer community. But make no mistake: donators will not have any kind of gameplay advantages, or RubySoccer would not be completely free. The only game advantage that we may consider is to add the "donator status" as one criteria in a manager job application (so donators would have an advantage point in disputes to manage the team they want).

Skills, strategies and match

All these areas have been improved recently.

Skills: aggressiveness was included as a player attribute. Its value is decided regardless any other factors and will probably not change over the years.

Strategies: two new strategies are available - shooting distance (short, medium, long) and tackling (easy, normal, hard)

Match: offsides are implemented including most of its peculiarities (players on their side of the field or behind the ball line are never offside). Fouls are now commited, even though yellow and red cards are never given.

Game Forum - Integrated!

Very good news for our enthusiasts: an open source forum is now part of our game. Woohoo!

BETA login screen

We already have it, guys. Check it out:

Strategies

It is now possible to configure basic passing strategy to use in a match: passing frequency (rare, normal, often) and passing style (short, medium, long). These strategies are associated with a specific formation, so by setting up a formation for a match already sets the strategy for that match.

The way these settings affect the match still needs to be improved, of course, but we'll wait until we have enough configurable strategies so we can improve them as a whole. We already can see different behaviours during the match with only these two, though.

Real Mail system

We wrote some code for our email system / email templates. And some of it is already used at the user registration page. When you register at RubySoccer, you will receive an email like the one below.



UPDATE! : The manager can now also receive his game emails on his real email box. That will be configurable on the manager setup screen. (An user can have a manager in each of the dimensions and control, for each one of them, the "wants to receive email" option).

Match Replays

We're working on a way to view match replays, Football Manager like. For those of you who have never played Football Manager, the match view is top-down in a 2D field. Players are represented by circles with their names below and the ball is a smaller circle.

We plan to make the match speed configurable and also allow it to be paused and rewinded. Obviously you can take no strategical action during the replay, as the match already happened. Talking about strategies we still have to decide what will be configurable, so feel free to give any suggestions.

Contract Clauses

I've been asked by changrodriguez (to whom I was not able to reply by email) if Ruby Soccer will have player contract clauses, like Big Club and Free on Relegation. The answer is yes, but not in the beta. Right now, the only negotiable parameters are wage and contract length (from 1 to 3 seasons). In the future we'll add contract clauses, maybe more sofisticated than the 2 examples above. Start thinking on suggestions, cause we'll certainly ask you when the time comes :-)

Transfer, Loan and Contract icons

New icons to indicate players transfer listed, loan listed and those whose contract are coming to an end. Icons are now placed after player name in order to keep left alignment.

New icons and spacing on players list

There are some new icons in the players list screen. In the screenshot above you can see the ones for yellow card, red card and injury. There will be others for contract expiring, transfer listed and loan listed.

We've also applied some of alexandre's and leehamo's suggestions. There is a little more space between Ctr and Wage and between Wage and Value and the tables are a little larger. Goalkeepers had their shooting and tackle adjusted, but their wages and values are not well balanced yet, so just ignore it for now.

Security and Match

We've been working on some security issues and improving the match simulation, that's why it took a little longer for us to post something here.

The security part is related to allowing managers to perform actions only on their own teams and making sure dimensions are invisible to each other. For those of you who played SoccerSim/ManagerSim, dimensions are equivalent to Game Worlds. If you have never played ManagerSim, a dimension is a self contained world with all its teams, players, managers, leagues and so on. That will be explained in detail when we have our guide/help system.

The most recent improvement to the match simulation is that a player can now intercept a pass or a shot. Whether a player will control the ball or simply change its direction depends on his control skill. Besides that, the dribble skill is now used for something and we've changed the way we decide if an action is successful or not.

We still have a considerable amount of work on the match simulation. More updates soon.

Players list sorting

It is now possible to sort the players list by any column, one at a time. Main squad and youths are sorted separately. Below are some screenshots of main squad sorting.




Sorted by position. (default)




Sorted by player age.




Sorted by shooting.


Notice that age is sorted in ascending order, but shooting (as well as all skills, value and wage) is sorted in descending order. And if you are a good observer you'll have noticed that we've already added Control as a player skill.

Youth Contracts

It is now possible to offer the youths a contract when their "youth contract" is ending, although you won't know in advance when that will be. Managers receive a message informing about the youth contract end and the player will become available for hiring or releasing.

Hiring a youth works similarly to a contract renewal: you offer a wage and a period of contract and he decides if it is good or not; if not, he makes a counter proposal, and so on. Releasing a youth happens instantly, after manager confirmation. In both cases, a new youth player becomes available for the team. If you take no action or can't agree a contract, the player leaves the club after some turns.

Formation Screen and Icon

Made a few suggested changes to the formation screen. Danilo is working on the double player bug which seems to be just a graphical glitch because of the script's asynchronous communication.

Also made a favicon for the game:

Formation Screen

This screenshot shows the new formation screen and layout:

• textured field
• shorter header with all new icons
• watermarked logo on the right to save some space

Still some work to do, but I hope you all like it. Cheers ^^

Pool - Bold resource

Dear Gamers,

We need your opinion again. As you all know, to bold a text is a very useful resource when you want to give emphasis to a particular piece of information. Assuming that this is true, we want to know what you, as an user, would find a better use of this resource on our game screens.

Possibility (1)
To bold the team from which you are viewing the respective information.

In the example below, assume you DO NOT manage São Paulo. But you are viewing São Paulo´s matches, so we bold all São Paulo occurrences in the screen.



Possibility (2)
To always bold, no matter the screen you are viewing, the team you manage.

In the example below, assume you DO MANAGE São Paulo, and you are viewing Internacional´s matches. Using this second idea, instead of bolding Internacional we bold São Paulo, which is the team you manage.



We were discussing these 2 ideas among our group, and we think both solutions make sense. The first possibility would make it easier for you to identify the team from which you are viewing the actual information, but on the other hand it would confuse you if you wanted to find your team among the lines. The second one would make it easier for you to always identify your team while you browse the game screens, but on the other hand would not make your life easier if you wanted to easily identify the team for which you are looking info.

Make your choices! What do you think we should go for: (1) or (2)?

Pool

Dear gamers, we need your opinion. Do you prefer the screen that we have been posting so far or this new template:




The key difference here is the background color.

National Cup matches, as promised

This screen shows the national cup matches per round. The two legs results are displayed side-by-side. As the country used to test had only 20 teams, the first round had fewer matches and not all teams played on it.

National Cups under way

Today we started the National Cups matches generation. These competitions will last from the beginning of the season to the middle of the season or less, for smaller countries. If the number of teams is not a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128...) the first round will have fewer teams, and those will be from lower divisions.

Each round is played in 2 legs, and the total winner advances to the next round. If the sum of the results is a draw, the team with most away goals scored wins. If the draw persists, penalty shootout will take place.

I think this is the traditional format for this kind of competition, so most of you are already familiar with it. The National Cup generation may be done by tomorrow night. We'll keep you posted.

Player Info

This is our initial version for the player info screen. There you can see all the existing player attributes, contract information, current and previous club. It is also possible to take actions such as fire the player, transfer or loan list him and renew the contract when near contract end. When teams are negotiating with the player their names are displayed below the action links.

Seasons and Turns

The game doesn't follow the calendar, in other words, there are no dates, even though the game time can be mapped to dates as you'll see. Seasons are numbered starting from 1 and each season has 144 turns. Why 144? Well, it works as if the season happened during an year with 12 months of 12 turns each. These months can also be divided into 4 weeks with 3 turns each. But this date comparison won't be used in the game, you'll only see things such as "Season 2, Turn 103".

As we don't have dates, players get older at the end of a season. Player wages are 3-turn based and so are the financial periods, meaning you can see your earnings and expenses consolidated in 3 turns periods. We'll probably add other ways to look at your financial progress, like consolidated for the whole season or in a 12 turn base.

Divisional matches are played from around the beginning of the second quarter of the season until around the end of the third quarter. This can change according to the number of teams in the division, more teams mean more games and consequently an early start and late end, while few teams mean the opposite. National cup and continental matches will probably be played in the end and in the beginning of the season respectively in order to minimize the competitions intersection and have non-friendly matches happening during the whole season , but that is yet to be defined.

Custom ticket prices

This ideia was suggested by Ricardo Costa in the comments for the post Browser support. Managers can now define the current ticket price, including $0 or even negative values if they want a crowded stadium for poor matches, as the number of people in the stadium will slightly improve home team performance. We have some future ideias about stadium depredation possibility when ticket prices are too low, but that's another discussion.

Player List screen

This is our current version of the player list screen, displayng the name, age, position, side, attributes, wage and value. The lower table displays youth players. As you can see, the players are highlighted as you pass the mouse over them.

Browser support

I´ve been analyzing the hits on this blog and I´ve a bad new for some of our visitors: IE (Internet Explorer) 6 sucks. Badly.
Such a fact leaded us to decide to not support IE 6 on RubySoccer. In practice, this means that we don´t have a clue on how IE would behave on many of our screens. So for those among you that are not yet in contact with the wonderful world of mozilla, here is a link that may be scary, but I suggest you click on it for your own sake:

FireFox official page

Division Table

First and second brazilian divisions. Relegation spots marked in red, promotion spots marked in blue. Icosn identify whether a team is already controlled by a human manager or not.

Squad Assign screen - new version

This new version of the screen makes it easier to drag players to their positions, as they're closer to the field. Players already in the field are now marked with a different color in the list. Meaningful messages displayed below the field.

You're not able to add more than 11 players to your squad. Everyone who is not selected will be available as a substitute during the match. You can have up to 5 different formations, one of them will be the default. It will be possible to associate a formation with each match, if none is associated, the default will be used.

Transfers and contracts

The basic transfer system is done. It's possible to put/remove players from the transfer list, fire players, buy players (transfer listed or free only). Contracts negotiation is also working, both for transfers and renewals.

Loans will be available soon.

Features so far

While the game is not online I think it would be good to describe what we have until now, so everybody can have an ideia of how long it will take for us to have a playable game.

Message system: automatic in-game messages are sent to managers with match results, contracts ending, agreed and rejected contracts and negotiations cancelled. It is also possible to send messages to other managers.

Players: player generation is done but needs a few adjustments. Players do not change their status over time yet. Youths are there but never become available for contract signing. Players retire between 36 and 40 years.

Squad selection: a few improvements were done to the first screenshot posted here to make it easier to drag and drop players. Still missing the ability to delete/rename formations, select the default one and associate a formation with a match.

Economy: players wages is paid every 12 turns and for now the only income source is ticket sales.

Match: simulation is very poor. Waiting for implementation of user defined strategies in order to be improved.

Competitions: only divisional competitions (with promotion/relegation) implemented. National cups and continental competitions being planned.

Countries: they'll have dynamic base skills, making possible to a small country become an important soccer country over the years, if its teams perform well in continental competitions. Ticket prices will probably be the same all over the world.

Data collection: for test purposes we're using 2 brazilian divisions and 1 from Argentina. Thanks to Peter Strand we already have enough data to include all 50 european countries with all teams used in the biggest ManagerSim gameworld. South American data collection is under way.

I may have forgotten a few things, but the main ideias are here. More updates soon.

Gabriel Cesário

Squad Assign screen

This is the squad assign screen. To select your squad just drag and drop the players.