Quote:
Originally Posted by landru22
No, I probably hold the record for this kind of insanity! Prior to the 1974-75 season, the games were played with a combination of a Nok-Hockey board and my own imagination. The 74-75 season (I was about 12) saw my first "Player Performance Cards" created. The game was played with a combination of dice and playing cards.
In the early 1980's (I'm not sure which year) I made my first foray into programming and wrote my first Hockey game using the Basic programming language. The game was very basic, but it worked! As time went on I programmed more difficult situations like power plays and line changes.
In the 90's I developed a new game using the C programming language and my game was much more sophisticated, but not professionally polished (or programmed).
For the 2000-01 season I started using the Faceoff Hockey program. This program did an excellent job of simulating a season of hockey (very realistic stats), but had no kind of player development (something of which was becoming more and more important to me). Changing player ratings was a tedious task year in and year out.
2007-08 brought in a new era, SimonT Hockey Simulator. This game had some very good ideas and was very simple for me to manage player development (all player ratings were in a csv file that could be easily manipulated), but it lacked any kind of AI roster management. I had grown weary of being the GM for all teams and trying to make trades that I believed were fair to both teams involved.
After learning of OOTP Baseball (yes, I have the same kind of league for Baseball, too! I've been playing this even earlier than my hockey league), I was ecstatic when I heard the company was coming out with a Hockey game. Franchise Hockey Manager 2014 was used for my past two seasons, and though there were some glitches, it brought my league new life!
Right now I have 24 teams (2 Conferences, 4 divisions of 6). Last years Morris Cup Champion Chicago Chargers have opened the 2015-16 season with consecutive losses. I can't wait to see how things turn out this season!
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Wow, that is insane. Much more ambitious than my project has been in that case. I just remember when I was 13, I was feeling bored one day, and came up with the thought of using some chalk out in my driveway to draw up a hockey rink and grabbed a couple of milk baskets to use as nets, and turned that into a game with two made up teams on the spot. I liked it enough that I came up with a 12-team league playing 16 games, and after the first year, made it more "official" with 20 teams playing two seasons a year with a weekly schedule (kind of like football).
After 3 years of that, in 2007 I changed it to be more like the old RHI's rules for roller hockey with 4 skaters and a goalie, with 36 games per season with all games on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. For the 2008 season I started writing up game summaries on a forum to keep track of player stats and really add some further depth to it. I eventually had to stop in 2012 because I never finished writing the schedule and I got too far behind on the stats and such to continue, and trying to use the old FHL Sim program didn't work out, and then I found FHM 2014. Then with the new game out, I've been able to recreate the league from where it ended in 2011, to build it back up from there (only now I started it with 22 teams, because of planned future expansion and wanting to have a longer season; in the future it should be up to 24 teams).
Over all that time I did go through the work of conducting trades, free agency, retirements, kept track of player's hometowns, birthdays, age, height, weight, who drafted them, how long they'd been in the league, and contracts. Most of it just slowly came into being, and was all part of my dream to make the league realistic. People in high school thought I was crazy for putting so much effort into it, even writing out the schedules and standings during classes. But I don't think I could've ever gone as far as you did with creating sim programs myself to run it, though one thing is for sure, we've both got some wild imaginations to keep our leagues alive this long.