Here’s another pic of “Gilda”. Cats are really helpful when you’re stressed from too much work like me now with USM2 🙂 today I’m trying the transfers, still some bugs to fix…
cat-time
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Yearly Archives: 2006
USM2 beta? yes is getting closer!
I don’t want to post any “official dates”, but today I’m working on player transfer, and next week I hope to have done the “end of season” adjustments (players retiring, new youth squad players appearing, possibility for the coach to change team, and so on).
I did a test run for the league – amazing, played 15 league weeks with instant match option, and took me about 1h, making everytime the formation adjustment. Each click takes about 2-3s of calculation time. I’m very proud of it, no more time wasted waiting for the CPU to calculate the match!! 😀
So what’s going on next? after I finish version 1.0, I plan to keep working on it – no pause at all. I’ll listen to player feedback to improve it with new features/additions, first of all the national cups and possibly the international ones. This undoubtly will be my most updated game ever 🙂
Sid Meier's Railroads
I’ve been playing (in my very little spare time while working on USM2!) the last game from Sid Meier’s, Railroads. At first my impression was very positive (well is still quite positive). But lately I found that the AI, which is in charge of moving the trains from one city to another, using the binaries you’ve placed, has some troubles 😀
I bet that from the programming point of view that part of the game must have been a real nightmare… figuring out what is the best path to take with algorithms must have been really hard to program for the (poor) coders of the game!
Apart for that the game rulez, as if Sid was a “quality guarantee”. Indeed of their latest games I’ve played (Pirates, Civilization IV) all of them are very good. Maybe a bit too much geared towards the “casual” market (like the annoying cutscenes of Pirates that I was skipping everytime after I saw them once!). Still, he is a real master of gameplay!
Yet another USM2 update…
Today I’ve been working on the load/save functions. For now I’ll just stick to .csv savefiles. That way I’ll be able to track bugs better than if I was using a normal binary save file. I thought the .csv format might be too slow, but actually, in debug mode (which is much slower than the final release mode) the game takes only 3-4 seconds to load/save a db with 25k players.
In any case I’ll let user change the size of database or which leagues to run in the game options. Also for now, as I already announced, no cups will be present in the initial v1.0 release. Of course as soon as v1.0 is on sale, I’ll start working on adding features in subsequent updates, which will be free for existing customers 🙂 This kind of games (sports managements) are really huge to make, so I guess I’ll never run out of new things to add!
In the meanwhile, take a look at my title screen!
USM2 match finished!
Yes I can proudly say that! The USM2 match engine (at least for version 1.0) is done! that means that still need some testing, but you can play a match and see:
- scoring actions with multiple choices and different results based on your active player skills
- events like penalties, free kicks
- injuries and yellow/red cards
- substitutions
- set your general team strategy: type of attack, counterattack, offside play, type of defensive marking, etc
- change speed of the match
- see in realtime the ratings of players and their fitness value (fatigue) to choose better which one to substitute
So now what’s left for the version 1.0 ? the player transfers and the end of season events – promotion, relegation and such. Also I need to make the possibility for the player to change team during his career. So yes, there’s still quite some work left to do… 😐