Dev Diary #16 - Letting The Computer Run Games

Rocketcan · Sep 15, 2020

Hello Coaches!

Welcome to another Dev Diary for NewSim on SimFBA!

The last time I wrote a dev diary, NewSim was just a bunch of code that I had to run individually based on what plays were called, situation, etc. Now, I come to you where NewSim is actually a full program! The last two scrimmages that were posted were run entirely by the computer. All I had to do was type in the abbreviation for the teams and it runs!

Heck Northwestern

@subsequent seems to be making a lot of tackles in these debug messages...

That's it. The game has been run! And the best part: it only takes about a second to run (and most of that is just printing the messages to the screen!). The resulting output is four files:

Play-By-Play is the every single play of the game printed to a .csv file. This is what is copy-pasted into the spoiler in the game post.
Player Stats Posting is the file that is copy pasted into the game post. This contains the individual stats for passers, rushers, defense and kicking.
Player Stats has an entry for every player that played at least one snap in the game (snaps are tracked as well). This file includes ALL stat categories for every player. If you want to play your QB at DE? Go ahead, he might just get a sack (probably not, but if he does, he'll get credit for it).
Team Stats is the file that contains most of the team statistics like points, yards gained, yards allowed, etc.

So what does this mean? This means that games are much easier to run. If depth charts, gameplans, etc. are correct, it only takes a second to run the game and a few minutes to post the results by hand. Once we get the interface up and the depth chart and gameplan pages implemented properly, it will be even faster.

This seems great! How long until the season starts? Great question! The sim is not quite ready yet (looking at you FAU). So I will need to keep tweaking the code to try to get it to produce realistic results. Also, there are some things that still need to be added. The things I would like to be implemented before we start are:

Add 11 personnel on offense. Add Nickel on defense
Add rotation at positions like RB, WR, TE, DL, LB, DB. I would like this be based on stamina, but at minimum it can be forced.
Penalties
Hurry up gameplans (not something the user will set. It will just be an automatic gameplan)

These things should produce more realistic stats (no more 300 yard games for each Tom, Dick and Harry at WR) as well as more realistic outcomes for games overall. Once these things are in, the sim will be pretty much ready for a season. At that point it would just be dependent upon the rest of the infrastructure (interface, game posting, recruiting, etc.) to determine when to start.

Until next time,

Rocketcan