Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruwisc
Nice. It's so interesting to see how people do these, and thanks for trying to avoid the 'cookie-cutter' type of schedule. This probably doesn't affect anyone else, but it breaks the immersion for me when, for example, a whole 8-team division is always playing within the division or out of the division together. Creating a schedule should be just as much art as science. 
When I was doing the other 60-team schedule this is what the meat of my spreadsheet looked like. I do one series per cell rather than one game per cell so I can see the whole thing at once, then transfer it later.
You can see the matchups for each series in the first table - green are division games, yellow are interleague. The gray table is where I actually put the XML for each game a bit at a time. It has the last set of games in there right now, which are the Thursday games for each 4-game set. I set it up that way so that I can do as little typing as possible.
The blue and orange one is home versus away. Blue is home, orange is away - I decide these after I do the matchups so sometimes a team will get forced into a super long trip.
Last one, which you can only see a bit of, is length of series. This is what I actually do last. In the case of this schedule, the only 4-game series were against division opponents, so any cell in there that's blank is automatically a 3-game set.
I set this one up so that I could just double a 30-team schedule to produce the 60-team version. I'd never done that with interleague before - every new schedule is a new feat of engineering it seems. |
Like the way you did this. Pretty much what I did was to take my IL and ND tables and put them into a WordPad document and simply did a find and replace on all the team slot AA-LE, assigning the proper number to the groups, AA-AE would be 1-5 (or any other 5 team grouping) did this for all 60 teams. This gave each team a unique group of teams it plays outside of their division. I then placed all these games on the schedule first. I had issues with interleague so as you can see I simply made 4 weeks and had a "home division" for those 6 games, rotating the interleague division matchups. ex. div 1,2,3 would play div 1,2,3 in the other league I would simply rotate 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 in first series and the switch 1v2 2v3 3v1 etc.
The last thing I did was to determine which table each division used for the slotting of 3 or 4 game series. I created 12 text documents and then did the find and replace in each document to get the matchups. I purposely did 12/15 13/14 matchups to shift around the matchups a bit when placing them on the schedule. This made the 12 team home matchups with 0 4 games schedules, the 13 with 1 4game schedule, the 14 with 2 and the 15 with 3. I assigned each team with a schedule type with 3 types in the 6 divisions and shuffled them around. No 2 divisions were similar to the games layout. I used the work area to copy the schedule in the schedule creator sheet removing all color, and text other than the grid of games. I copied the column with the day and dow added the home team column, deleted all the rows with no away game and this gave me the home team schedule. I did the 60 teams in about 2 hours. After that all I had to do was to write the concatenate formula to create the lsdl text. I did not leave anything in the work area that would show you what I actually did because after I did a teams home games I deleted the column so that the next team would be in column to cut and paste. Overall I did the schedule 18 times and I was not happy. Once I determined the best course of action it took me 3 days to place the matchups in the grid and 2-3 hours to create the actual schedule. This was the first schedule I have done in7 years and the next ones will not take anywhere near this long.
Sorry about this being long. I like sharing ideas with people that are doing the same thing I am trying to do.
BTW, enjoyed your schedules from other requests. I placed them in my collection of 1500+ schedules. About 400 were the schedules I converted from OOTP 6.5 and with GMO schedules created the Schedule Pack. I have added all the schedules on the schedule list as well as a ton of that I simply renamed from minor league schedules. I was thinking about releasing this pack again - nothing fancy just a collection of what I found and what I created since 2008 for personal use.