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Old 03-29-2011, 04:29 PM   #21
The_Cobra
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@ Bob - Cheers for that post, some good suggestions in there and it definitely provides me with some food for thought. As far as the financial angle goes, I will try to build some basic financial functions in there to begin with, but it will only be pretty standard stuff to start off with. I'm talking about stuff like paying for the venue, getting money back from the fight, etc. Just basically the most obvious stuff to start off with. Not sure if things like training costs will be in there straight away but all that type of stuff, training costs, staff costs, purse bids (and more) will eventually find its way in there. Just not in the early versions. All your suggestions are spot on though.

@ Javier - sorry bud, I meant to get at you sooner than this about testing and I clean forgot. A little birdy told me a few days ago that you have some good testing experience behind you, so it's been my intention to shoot you a message asking if you'd like to be in on the testing for this project. Should have asked you a few days back when it was on my mind but better late than never. There's a spot there for you if you want it, my friend.

@ Syd - sounds very promising mate. My only concern is that your programming level is obviously way ahead of where I'm at (took me weeks just to wrap my head around basic stuff like arrays and whatnot). Another concern for me is that I've decided to stick with VB6 for the time being. I played around with VB10 and tried to convert what I've done already but get this, you cant directly convert a vb6 app to work in vb10, you have to convert it in vb8 first and THEN you convert again in vb10. I did actually do all that (and that in itself was a pain in the rear end) but there were too many syntax problems and its a case of taking longer to convert and migrate over than it would to just carry on coding in vb6. It's my fault, I should have started this off in VB10 to begin with but its going to take too much effort and time to migrate it over and get comfortable with VB10 functions and I'd rather invest that time into finishing what I've started.

The plan at the moment is to put out a basic version of this app with vb6 first, and then once I've got something done for people, THEN switch over when there's less pressure on to crank something out.

If there's a way to bolt your work onto mine in this first vb6 stage then I welcome your work with open arms, but if not, we probably wont be at that promontary point until I migrate to vb10, which like I say, wont be until after I've put at least some basic version down on here.

I'd be really happy to see what you've done so far though....if your at the point where your ready to let someone else have a dekko at it, I'm here with a catchers mitt on!
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Old 03-29-2011, 06:09 PM   #22
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It's been so, so long since I've looked at VB in learning-to-program terms... does VB allow you to use collections rather than arrays? I'm just saying that in the end, allowing people to only have even 1,024 boxers or whatever in their uni is soooo old-skool C++ (and kind of memory-wasteful if you set the limits really high, but I guess that's not as big of a deal today as it used to be)... anyway, I might send something out once I actually make it do stuff that people might want it to do (like scheduling).
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Old 03-30-2011, 09:45 AM   #23
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does VB allow you to use collections rather than arrays?
Yep, its the one thing I've been trying to read up on over the last couple/few days.

Explore the various benefits of the Collection object in VB6 | TechRepublic

^ That link does'nt go into deep detail, but it does show that vb6 handles collections. The biggest challenge I'm facing is knowing how to put a collection together and using them in the context of this mod. Most of the examples I've seen of using collections dont come close to using them how I'm going to need to use them, so learning about them (in the context that I need to) is slow going. I'm fine when I have examples to work with of a similar context because then I can adapt code to do what I need it to do, but I have'nt even got a starting point with this stuff. At the moment I'm working with string and integer variables and thats all the boxers are at the moment, just a bunch of variables in a table.
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Old 03-30-2011, 04:22 PM   #24
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I'm working on a scheduling thing, for example, which iterates over an entire List of fighters using the foreach iterator. Really, anything you could already do in a closed for loop, you can do in a foreach loop, and the great thing about foreach loops is that they automatically terminate at the end of your list - no accidentally setting them up to be endless. I also have an object called an AreaNode which represents a particular area a boxer might fight out of (for example, Bob's Gym or Philadelphia or The World), which includes in its class a List object of neighboring areas (Philadelphia for instance might neighbor New York City and Pittsbugh) and another List object of sub-areas (the Northeast might include all of Philadelphia, NYC, and Pittsburgh as well as other communities). That's essentially another collection itself, called a Tree, which may or may not be in VB.

If you really want to make your head spin, do a search on recursive programming. Or pointers (although you might want to then throw a little party for yourself that you haven't learned C++ if you do that).
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Old 04-01-2011, 02:34 AM   #25
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Very excited to see you guys are giving this a shot. Some more food for thought...

Break up your tasks into very small, simple problems. Don't think scheduler or financial system yet... think very small to start. Try to think of all the little problems that you will encounter first. Some suggestions:

- Learn basic xml parsing: Import fight result xml and display various metadata on screen(like who won the fight and how)
- Create an application domain: Fighters have many Fights, Fights belong to Fighters. Build fighter and fight models based on these associations.
- Export several fight xml's from TBCB and consume in your app
- Save your model data to some sort of datastore (sqlite?)
- Do some basic manipulations on the data you have captured
- etc.

Have you guys considered doing this as a web app? I think it might be substantially easier to pull off. Lots of potential either way you go. I'm not a VB developer (or even a windows user), but I can give you guys some guidance if you'd like.
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Old 04-01-2011, 08:41 AM   #26
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See post #424. Nothing like a bit of free publicity.
Ever fancied being a promoter? - Page 29 - East Side Boxing Forum
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Old 04-01-2011, 12:39 PM   #27
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Very excited to see you guys are giving this a shot. Some more food for thought...

Break up your tasks into very small, simple problems. Don't think scheduler or financial system yet... think very small to start. Try to think of all the little problems that you will encounter first.
As far as advice goes, that resonates with me particularly. Couldnt really agree more and to be fair, thats kind of how I've gone about it on my end. I'm actually finding its a bit intimdating to think about the thing as a whole and how it will fit together in detail and how entire sections will work, and how they will interact with other sections, but to actually get to work on the parts of that whole without stressing about the project is enjoyable - especially when small breakthroughs are made (which seem to come every few days for me).

To illustrate that point, most of the coding I'm doing at the moment is in the form of small experiments, experiments which then turn into little breakthroughs in finding a method to do a particular task, which then forms the basis of how to move forward with the main coding. In other words, right now I'm trying to take baby steps.

As for making it an online thing, to be honest I've noticed a fair few online boxing games crop up recently, and dont really want to be part of that scene just yet because it will add-in competition onto what is already a hard enough task to begin with. When I look at the project as a whole though, there is a natural progression to want to turn it into an online thing a couple years down the line, but by that time the app will have to have shed its dependancy on TBCB. No point in having an online boxing management game that relies on an offline software package to run.

It raises an interesting point actually, and one thats been on my mind recently. Is it an intelligent decision to be developing a mod on an ageing piece of software or should I just be starting something from scratch, something that can operate on its own. I've been wrestling with that one in my head for weeks, and the only reason I decided to kick things off like this is because sometimes you can spend time planning things that never actually happen (because your too busy constantly planning them). I'm one of those people who if I dont get off my backside and actually get to the doing part, I'd be quite happy to sit around doing the planning part indefinitely.
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Old 04-01-2011, 12:48 PM   #28
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P.S Rob, I'm not registered at Eastside so I cant see whats linked in that post but I assume thats a link back to this thread? If so, nice work!
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Old 04-01-2011, 01:33 PM   #29
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Cobra, I highly recommend that you don't try to build the sim part now. Just building a basic management system will be challenging enough. As you learn more, you will make many decisions that you will regret later on. As a result, you should keep things simple and focused to start.

With that said, I had the same consideration as you... should I create a management utility around TBCB and just throw out my spreadsheets, or should I build the fight simulator from the ground up? The first huge issue is that TBCB doesn't seem to have many features to integrate well with external utilities with the exception of the xml export capabilities.

There's no way, that I know of, to initiate a fight from the command line which produces xml results. If you had that feature you would be golden. The only alternative is to do it manually- just use the one-off sim feature to simulate fights. This creates a massive amount of micro-management as the TBCB scheduler has been obsoleted. One way to mitigate this micro-management is to have the management app automate scanning of the project directory and parse all fight xml docs that exist.

I don't have TBCB installed at the moment (horrific drm is blocking me now), but I'll check and see if it has the ability to import fight schedules when I get the install sorted out. If it can, then you could just follow the TBCB DTD and generate a fight schedule xml in the management app and import in TBCB. Again, I have to get it installed to see for sure.

I also wanted to throw something else out there... This type of app really should follow idiomatic object oriented design. That would allow you to adopt the TBCB simulator in the beginning and then phase it out later on. I would strongly recommend separating the simulation data from the rest of app so the data models aren't intertwined.

I don't want to get too deep into advanced topics, but the reality is to expect the first attempt at this to a throwaway version. Just try and get something out there that is useful and then try and build something more sustainable once that's under your belt.

In the next few weeks I'll try and throw a web app up on github with some of the concepts I talked about here. I just need to get some xml fight exports to process.

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Old 04-01-2011, 04:25 PM   #30
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Finally got TBCB installed and did a bit of investigating.

Bad News:
Looks like the only xml exports are for fighter data. The process of exporting fighter is really tedious so I don't know how useful this would be.

You can save Schedules and Fight Cards, but it's to a custom TBSS and TBSF format. I don't think it would be easy or even possible to generate these files outside of TBCB.

This means scheduling will not be easy to handle in the management app. Schedules generated by the management app would have to be manually entered in TBCB.

Good News:
All fights are saved to the "History" directory in HTML files. These files are very easy to parse. You could easily match fighters from both systems by name.

Fight history files can serve a few purposes- parsed to build fighter records and stats, parsed to store a database of fights and finally as a way to reference fight data without going into TBCB.

..

My only concern now is mitigating tons of labor intensive data entry to get the fight schedules from one system to the other.
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Old 04-01-2011, 04:29 PM   #31
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Even better:

You can export the fighter files into .csv in your universe options, which is easiest of all to parse - really, it's not even parsing, just using the Split() method in C#'s TextReader object (I'm sure there's something similar in VB and I know there is in the C++ string object as well). That's what I'm working with for now.
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Old 04-01-2011, 05:31 PM   #32
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Totally forgot about those export options- that does make it a bit easier to import fighters and fight data. So were you planning to have the scheduling and ranking done in TBCB?

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Even better:

You can export the fighter files into .csv in your universe options, which is easiest of all to parse - really, it's not even parsing, just using the Split() method in C#'s TextReader object (I'm sure there's something similar in VB and I know there is in the C++ string object as well). That's what I'm working with for now.
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Old 04-01-2011, 07:02 PM   #33
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P.S Rob, I'm not registered at Eastside so I cant see whats linked in that post but I assume thats a link back to this thread? If so, nice work!
It was although I don't think many (if any) have took any notice. I haven't read all 30+ pages of the Eastside thread but I found 2 things interesting about it. One is there is a whole load of people playing a simple kind of manager mode using TBCB as their engine and the second is a post from one person who said he tried the demo of TBCB but preferred WCBM which is saying something which had a much poorer fight engine. Shows (to me at least) the potential interest in a manager mode.
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Old 04-01-2011, 11:37 PM   #34
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I was planning on letting TBCB do some of the ranking - in fact, I kind of like the idea of having separate bodies go about ranking stuff. That being said, one of the things I have planned is to create BoxRec ratings for each fighter based on their bout history and use that rating to help determine who people ought to fight (one rating I have semi- in there right now is Desirability, which is re-calced every time a boxer wishes to choose an opponent and part of what will be included in it is a negative modifier for the absolute value of the difference between BoxRec ratings... I could just as easily do this via the TBCB rating, but for now that's my idea).

My idea here is that an early draft, just to get to a place I can test, is that I'm going to start with manual entry of the fight results. I can always add the functionality for HTML parsing later. The same goes with using Silverlight or AJAX or whatever; there's nothing preventing me from starting with regular old plain Jane Windows forms and hopping into web-based stuff once I'm sure the program itself is on good, solid footing.
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Old 04-02-2011, 01:09 AM   #35
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Very nice. Looks like the 3 of us are kind of going our own paths. Excited to see how we all progress. I know I would just love to see this added functionality to TBCB.

I've recently started a web based management app... The management aspect is being written in ruby and will allow for anyone to create an account and generate a universe. I have not begun the actual simulation, but that will be handled on the front-end via javascript and canvas. That engine will be completely decoupled so anyone could use it. I've done some POCs so I know the direction I want to take it. I will also be open sourcing the whole project when it's mature enough. It will not be dependent on TBCB.

Conceptually, what I'm putting together is going to be completely different than what TBCB is. You will be essentially walking into an organic, self sustainable universe and either act as God or just watch things evolve... So it gives you complete flexibility on how you want to play it... you can take over an individual sim's decision making (like a trainer or promoter) and make a game out of it, or just have fun tweaking things (like adding/manipulating game events) and see what happens. The sim will not have any constraints except for a fog-of-war similar to Championship Manager. My goal is to have a nature vs nurture concept- you can have two identical sims that have drastically different careers based on their experiences.

Initial Engines:
- Sim Generator (fighter/manager/trainer) - no promoter
- Scheduler/Management Engine - the two will be tightly coupled
- Fight Simulation Engine - handles the AI, in fight events, machine learning, etc.
- Canvas Based Graphic Engine (similar to TBCB side view but also with a top down view showing fighter coordinates- a la TV Sports Boxing)
- Simple Stat Engine
- Events System - backbone of the whole app, acts as the glue to bring all of the components together.

Future Enhancements:
- Scouting abilities
- Financial System - don't want to focus on this right away
- Advanced Sim Generator
- Reporting Engine (think newspaper reports)
- Advanced Stat Engine
- much later, but some sort of social component to merge universe's, create tournaments, etc.

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Old 04-02-2011, 10:08 AM   #36
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I am pleasantly surprised that there are three people working on various and seperate projects to enhance our enjoyment of TBCB. Just goes to show what a talented and committed bunch we have down here. Thanks guys!
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Old 04-05-2011, 05:08 PM   #37
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I think that at the rate anything new gets done for TBCB, we may all be left to our our devices. Hacking, reverse engineering, and who knows what else. We might have to go back to the board game versions!

BTW, has anyone had problems with the csv files? I have tried to import them to a spreadsheet, but my columns headings get screwed up. I am at a loss.

Thanks.

-JP
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Old 04-05-2011, 08:18 PM   #38
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CSV files I generated from the default universe are fine. I wrote a script to parse them last week and had no issues.

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I think that at the rate anything new gets done for TBCB, we may all be left to our our devices. Hacking, reverse engineering, and who knows what else. We might have to go back to the board game versions!

BTW, has anyone had problems with the csv files? I have tried to import them to a spreadsheet, but my columns headings get screwed up. I am at a loss.

Thanks.

-JP
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Old 04-11-2011, 10:45 PM   #39
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to be honest I've noticed a fair few online boxing games crop up recently, and dont really want to be part of that scene just yet because it will add-in competition onto what is already a hard enough task to begin with. .
What might those be?
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Old 05-23-2011, 05:46 AM   #40
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This is exciting stuff! It's been a while since we've heard anything, so out of curiosity, how's the progress on the 3 projects going?...
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