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.