Continue to Improve Schedule Editor

[goroyals]

The series has done a good job improving scheduling, and to continue in that direction, I have a small suggestion that would be helpful to many users.

Allow the schedule editor to make schedules that break from daily play. I think there are two ways that this might be achieved:

1.) Allow the user to designate certain days of the week as off-limits for games.

OR

2.) Let the user designate a desired end date, much the same as they already designate Opening Day. If the game can't generate a schedule within the parameters, prompt the user to make an adjustment, or have a suggested alternative we could use.

"OOTP schedule generator cannot fit 86 games per team into the 4/1-6/1 window you defined. Would you like to shorten the season to 50 games, and have your league settings auto-corrected, and a schedule generated for use?"

Such a feature would be useful for old-time leagues, College and HS feeders, and anyone who wants to create a league that is for, whatever reason, a little different when it comes to how they play out their games.

[jpeters1734]

This would be awesome!

[The Game]

Some things i would like to see in an in-game editor would be:
1 set season length.
2. interleague on/off
3. if interleague is set to on designate which teams you would want to play or set to all or by division and have at least one rivalry series, edited to be 2-10 games
4. favor intra division or not, balanced, etc
5. set team to open season at home or on road, comes in handy if you are playing as Cincinnati Reds.
6. set amount of days off for ASG.
7. set when ASG is to be held.
8. set 1 team to all for day vs night games, handy if you have a Chicago Cubs like team pre 1988.
Wish i knew how to design programs, since Bigrod's program came out i have had these ideas.

[Bluenoser]

Not to dampen the request, would be gr8, but you are all aware that even irl, schedules are created manually? There is no fancy computer program that does the stuff you're requesting, and I really can't imagine the nightmare it would be to program something like that with all those variables.

Good options to have though.

[bigmonk]

"The MMQB reports: Four men using 40 computers spent 70 days sifting through a half-million possibilities before producing a 2014 NFL schedule that is full of quirks, including a very strange NFL first: the Bears and Cowboys each playing back-to-back Thursday games." If I play a computer sports game, and it can take an even number of teams and an even number of games to play, and it can make a workable schedule, I feel grateful.

[goroyals]

Originally Posted by Bluenoser

Not to dampen the request, would be gr8, but you are all aware that even irl, schedules are created manually? There is no fancy computer program that does the stuff you're requesting, and I really can't imagine the nightmare it would be to program something like that with all those variables.

Good options to have though.

Yes, IIRC each of the major US leagues pretty much have a "guru" that basically makes the schedule by hand, precisely because IRL there are so many variables. NBA and NHL is probably even harder since they share so many venues.

I am 99% percent satisfied with the schedule generator, it's come a long way already. That's why I really tried to limit what I was requesting to one very limited addition. It would be nice to just check a few boxes and have say an 80-game schedule stretched out from April-September (1800's), or a 60-game one from February to May (College).

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Bluenoser

Not to dampen the request, would be gr8, but you are all aware that even irl, schedules are created manually?

That's not quite true. The schedules used to be entirely, or nearly so, human-made. Now, however, the advancement of programming algorithms and computing power means computers are often used to do the bulk of the work. Human input is used at the beginning to set the parameters the schedule needs to meet, and is used to pick the best result from among the computer-generated output.

From the book Pro Football Schedules by Ivan Urena:

To meet the rigorous scheduling demands with thousands of different variables and constraints, the NFL turned to Rick Stone, a Canadian manufacturing engineer. Stone, president of Optimal Planning Solutions, developed a specialized optimization software that provides scheduling solutions for professional sports leagues.

When the 2009 schedule was created, for example, Stone's software generated roughly 1.3 million schedules which were narrowed down to 3,500. "Of the 3.500 schedules we actually finished, we probably took 50 of them and read them all the way through," [Howard] Katz [in charge of scheduling for the NFL with Michael North] said. "What I mean by that is, once we get what we think is a playable schedule, we'll post that and say, 'Here's our leader. This is a schedule we're prepared to play.'"

"We won't look at another schedule until we think it's better," he went on. "This year [2009], we went through probably another 50 finished schedules. So, once we got a finished schedule, we probably improved it roughly 50 times, where we said, 'OK, this one is better.'"

In 2010, out of an estimated 500,000 schedules that were generated, Katz and his team reviewed "5,000" playable schedules. According to Katz, "Then we keep generating more and more schedules, trying to find something that's better than the one we've got. We probably went through 50 finished, completed schedules that we wanted to see if they were better than the schedule that we had. It's almost like a bake-off."

In making the 2012 schedule, the computer program, which has been in use since 2004, provided "400,000 complete or partial schedules," and "generated 14,000 playable schedules, which we reduced to 150 with an eyeball test."

"The beauty of the software is that we can go into every single game, every single week, every single team, every single place where we could be playing a game and we put some parameters around it," North said. "You can say to the software: Mix and match these any way you want to, just know that each games comes with a certain set of parameters. I don't want to play this game any earlier than week three or this game any later than week 14. That game should fall in sweeps week, somewhere between 9 and 12. That game should be in Pittsburgh instead of Cleveland. That games needs to be on a Thursday night, which means that both teams need to be playing a home game the week prior. The software," he adds, "can do what we were only dreaming of doing 10 years ago."

According to Katz, "The whole scheduling process is far more sophisticated than it's ever been, and it's a combination of manual input and allowing the software to solve the rest of the puzzle... It was successful because it helped us ensure there weren't any really bad television windows anywhere. Even our weakest weeks were better than our prior years had been."

[RchW]

So after all that they still had to be vetted manually.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by RchW

So after all that they still had to be vetted manually.

Yes, humans picked picked the best of the bunch. But the computer program was the one generating the schedule (after humans had input the necessary restrictions the schedule had to contain).

[Fullarmor]

Yes, please.