dev diary #51 | Interface Updates: Depth Charts and Gameplans

[TuscanSota]

Hey everyone,

 

TuscanSota here. I would like to announce that the Interface has been updated with more features to prepare for the 2022 SimFBA College Football Season.

 

Here is a shortlist of all the changes made:

- Revamped the User Profile page to be more viewable and user-friendly

- Added coloring schemes based on the user's college football team for all CFB pages

- Added a Gameplan page where users can manage their teams' offensive, defensive, and special teams gameplan

- Revamped the depth chart page to allow the user to modify and view their depth chart by page.

 

Migrations

I want to thank everyone who helped with the migration process for the depth chart pages. Your help in contributing accelerated the development process for the depth chart page, and allowed a safe migration of all data involved the depth chart process. This will allow the administrative teams to run games more efficiently, and give users a more user-friendly experience with managing their depth chart.

 

Gameplan Page

The gameplan page is sorted by offensive options, defensive options, and special teams options. The user is able to reset their gameplan to its initial state, along with saving their gameplan for obvious reasons.

 

All user options which were available for the 2021 season are available for the gameplan page. When the user switches schemes, the formations related to the scheme will render as needed onto the page. The user is able to select the distributions for ratio, formations, running, and plays as they previously could with all previous checks in place. To modify any of the distribution options, please input the number into the space or use the arrow options that appear within the input. When switching offensive schemes, please keep in mind you will need to modify certain ratios immediately, or else the gameplan won't be able to save

 

There are a couple new options that the user has control over such as the Primary HB percentage ratio and special teams options. Primary HB is responsible for how much your 1st string back will get the ball, as opposed to the 2nd or third back. For special teams, the user can now set limits for the maximum range of which to make a 3pt field goal, and how often they want the user to go for it on 4th & Short, and 4th & Long.

 

 

 

Depth Chart

 

The user is now able to view their depth chart from the depth chart page. The default options at this time for position are set to QB, but the user is able to select any position they wish to view from the positions dropdown. When viewing a position, attributes related to the position will appear on the table, and the player ratings will be attributed to the position of which they're playing for. When a player is playing out of position, their original position will be displayed in parentheses as shown above.

 

 

To swap the order of players for a position, select the dropdown for the respective position level and a player already existing in the depth chart. The two players within the depth chart will swap their respective places. To swap in a player from your roster, but not yet on your depth chart, select the dropdown and select that player. The previous player at that position will not be in the depth chart, but can be selected again for any other position.

 

 

The user is also able to view the depth chart of other teams. This will activate read-only mode. In this mode, the user will not be able to save the depth chart or swap players for the viewed team. That would be cheating.

 

 

Additional changes

To make the interface more personal for the user, we've added styling options related to the user's team color on the following pages: Home page, team page, gameplan, and depth chart page. This is the first effort in styling and revamping the interface to be more stylish in the future. Expect more with further updates.

 

The previous user page was also broken, and was not previously fixed or accounted for in prior updates. The alignments and order of items on the user page has been fixed, and will have more changes in the following updates.

 

What's Next?

- I will be working on making the above pages mobile friendly so that users can utilize the gameplan and depth chart pages from their mobile devices. At this time, please use a desktop browser to make your changes.

- Any bugs or fixes needed for the gameplan and depth chart pages which appear will be resolved.

- I will be working with @alexfall682 on bringing recruiting to the interface. I do not expect the server work needed for recruiting to take as much time as it did the gameplan and depth chart pages, but there will be a beta phase for recruiting to test the recruiting features on the interface before the next cfb season. I cannot give a timeframe on which recruiting will be implemented, as it will be dependent on Alex's and my own schedule. There shouldn't be any migration work involved, since a lot of the work for recruiting on the server is already done. The pages and any new features are the only things needed to be implemented.

- I will work with @Rocketcan on potentially opening a pipeline for viewing stats and the user's season schedule from the interface. I cannot give a timeframe for this feature quite yet.

 

 

Thank you for your patience with the off-season. I promise you that the work done here will make the work needed for running seasons of SimFBA seamless and less intensive.

 

~Tuscan

[Kremit]

Poking my head in here since it's been a while. This is really exciting and impressive work by everyone. I know on my end since I have limited free time these days, having it all this sleek on the interface instead of the spreadsheets (not to diminish the huge amount of work that went into creating those) will be big for me to stay active gameplanning and recruiting.

[Bingo415]

Gameplan and Depth Chart updated for Colorado.

 

REALLY nice work on the Interface. Man, that's efficient and easy to use. Kudos to all involved!

 

I did have ONE issue: in working in the PRO style Offensive scheme, shifting RB usage percentages was not terribly easy, and indeed RB2 would not go above 20%. A handful of those sliders were a little funky, but also the auto-calculation to 100% across the board is really appreciated.

 

Overall, hell of a good job!!!