Star Players

It's been a while since we last used this blog for real development update, but I think it's still a good channel to give some technical details of new features that are not yet in the game. Up next: star players.

As you may have seen from our latest announcements and screenshots the star player feature is well under way. Today I have completed the code to make sure the parameters involved in the star players calculations are configurable without code changes so that they can be easily modified in the future. I have also implemented the logic to assign stars to players during the season tick. Yes, that's when the magic is going to happen.

Next steps: parametrize and code the effects of star players. These will include increased estimated value, increased wage demands, match performance bonus, player hire influence and increased marketing income to start with. Each star player will provide one and only one benefit that will not be revealed...unless maybe with scouting, but that's not been fully agreed yet.

Stay tuned for more updates here or elsewhere in the days to come!

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.