Updated Draft Utility

[Getch]

I've updated my draft utility with some requested features:

- Draft Timer (including "off-times" at night)
- Admin Auto-draft using GM's Draft List
- Option to choose the amount of players displayed on the page
- Log in as any user as Admin
- Fixed the View button

Get the latest version at:

http://www.ootpmodsquad.com/mods/onl...ftUtil2007.zip

However, DON'T upgrade in the middle of the draft. Wait until it's over to get the new goods.

As always, let me know if you have any issues or features you'd like to see.

[robster1225]

Awesome, Getch. I can't wait to try this out.

Quick question, does the "Draft Timer" auto pick at the end of the time, or does the Commish still have to make the pick?

[Getch]

Still gotta make the pick. Sorry, didn't see any easy way of doing that.

[robster1225]

Hey, no problem. At least it's a nice little visual reminder that the GM needs to make the pick, and it helps the commish keep track of the time limits. Good work Getch!

[Kaitiaki]

Thanks for adding these features, Getch. We're much obliged.

- Kai

[Kaitiaki]

Getch,

Does the draft timer support times greater than 24 hours? If so, how? I get impossible things when I try to do it - such as "Pick due by Wednesday at 73:37 PM".

Also, a feature request for any future versions, if you're thinking of doing any more: could we get a few extra ratings added to the player display? I'd really like some of the personality ratings - Work Ethic, Loyalty and Greed, primarily - as well as GB% for pitchers. I imagine everyone has their own "pet ratings" that are important to them, however, so I could understand why you might not want to open the floodgates to requests to have every single rating displayed/sortable in the utility, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. Personally, those four ratings would make the sorting features of the utility much more useful to me. Without them, I still use OOTP/Excel to rank my draftees, and then just use the utility to manage the resulting draft list.

- Kai

[Getch]

Er, not sure how you are getting 73:37 pm. What's your settings in setup.txt for the 3 timer options? If one of those is bad, that could screw up the utility.

Adding new sorts is not too hard... just a matter of finding the fields in the .csv file.

[Kaitiaki]

Originally Posted by Getch

Er, not sure how you are getting 73:37 pm. What's your settings in setup.txt for the 3 timer options? If one of those is bad, that could screw up the utility.

PICK_TIME:72
PICK_MORNING:0
PICK_NIGHT:0

I want people to have three days (72 hours) from the time of the last pick to make their selection, with no daytime/nighttime interruptions to the timer.

However, with a pick having been made earlier this morning (Friday), the utility is currently displaying "Pick due by Friday at 68:31 pm" for the next person. I'm not sure precisely when the previous pick was made, but I would guess that the utility is counting hours correctly, but not rolling over to the next day properly?

Perhaps I'm not inputting the time in the correct format? Or do I need to put something in for PICK_NIGHT (from the readme, I assumed it worked the same way as PICK_MORNING, and should be left at 0 for a continuous clock)?

Adding new sorts is not too hard... just a matter of finding the fields in the .csv file.

Cool. No pressure on that - unlike my previous concern, which was a "I need this or else", this is more of a "it would nice" request.

If it helps, though, the personality ratings are columns AB to AG in players.csv, with AB, AC, and AE being the three that I'm most interested in. Groundball Percentage is AP in players_pitching.csv.

EDIT> Also, while I'm harrassing you about this thing, what does the "Defense" sort for batters even do? Telling the utility to sort by Defense produces the exact same output as the basic, pre-sort alphabetical listing. It doesn't seem to have any effect. And how does it presumably come up with a single "Defense" value when the game uses such a multitude of fielding ratings - is it just the player's positional rating at his currently-assigned position?

- Kai

[Getch]

I never thought someone would want over 24 hours to make a pick, so the code never handled that. That's why you're seeing strange hours.

As for Defense, beats the hell out of me. Probably left over from 2006. Amazing that I never noticed it until you pointed it out.

[Kaitiaki]

Originally Posted by Getch

I never thought someone would want over 24 hours to make a pick, so the code never handled that. That's why you're seeing strange hours.

Ah, that explains that then. No worries; I'll just leave that little feature off for the time being. It's not hard to keep the pace moving without an explicit timer in the utility. If you ever coded it so that an autopick was made as soon as the timer ran out, I might get more excited about using the feature and thus nag to get it changed, but as it is now it's not a big deal.

As for Defense, beats the hell out of me. Probably left over from 2006. Amazing that I never noticed it until you pointed it out.

Heh. If you're thinking of altering that, you might want to split Defense into its component ratings for ranking purposes. A lot of amateur draftees have less than complete Experience at their position before being drafted, so the positional ratings are a poor guide to how good a player will be in the field.

At the very least, I would think Defense should be changed to Def Range (with the utility automatically selecting to display either Infield Range for 1B/2B/3B/SS or Outfield Range for LF/CF/RF). And if you're feeling comprehensive, add separate sorts for the Arm/Error ratings, though I think most people consider those to be "secondary" defensive ratings.

- Kai

[Getch]

I'll keep it in mind. The main reason I don't have all these options is in real estate... not enough room on the page for the columns. I guess I would have to change the columns to reflect what you are sorting by, or have an option to chose the columns to be displayed.

Next version, maybe .

[mikev]

Getch,

Our online league uses scouting. Does the utility show SISA ratings or will it show scout ratings for whichever team logs in?

[Getch]

The .csv dumps do not have any scouting ratings in them, not even SISA, so there's no way I can incorporate them into the utility. What other leagues have done is set the talent/rating scale to 1, so that all player's ratings show up as a 1. This means the GM's have to look in OOTP to figure out who they want to draft, but at least you get all the other functionality of the utility (although auto-drafting for a GM would be like picking a random person, since everyone is set to the same ratings).

Nothing I can do about it until OOTP dumps the scouted ratings to .csv... which would probably make a massive file. Maybe in 2008?

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by Getch

The .csv dumps do not have any scouting ratings in them, not even SISA, so there's no way I can incorporate them into the utility. What other leagues have done is set the talent/rating scale to 1, so that all player's ratings show up as a 1. This means the GM's have to look in OOTP to figure out who they want to draft, but at least you get all the other functionality of the utility (although auto-drafting for a GM would be like picking a random person, since everyone is set to the same ratings).

Nothing I can do about it until OOTP dumps the scouted ratings to .csv... which would probably make a massive file. Maybe in 2008?

I can split the scouting.dat file into scouts reports on players, but I haven't managed to work out which fields correspond to which fields on the scouting report. If I could work that out, I could create a scouting.csv in my program.

[Getch]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

I can split the scouting.dat file into scouts reports on players, but I haven't managed to work out which fields correspond to which fields on the scouting report. If I could work that out, I could create a scouting.csv in my program.

Very interesting. The other fear that I have is that the .csv would be so large that it would make it real slow to parse the csv each time the page is accessed (Perl is powerful... each time you access the page the utility is parsing the .csv files and is still subsecond, but I think it will reach its limit when a scouting.csv is involved). I'd have to do some "slight of hand" work to speed it up.

Let me know if you pin a scouting.csv down, and I can maybe incorporate it into the utility.

[kleric]

At what point does the draft.pl page show the amateurs?
We have our league set to display the pool on Apr. 15th, with feeder leagues (so the players are still playing), and a draft date of June 15th. It's Apr 24th in the league now and I don't see anything displaying on the draft.pl page, is it because they're still playing in the feeder league you think?

[Getch]

Nope, it's because it doesn't support feeder leagues. Something I plan on for the next release (coming soon).

For some odd reason, players in feeder leagues that are draft eligible don't have that flag set, which is the issue. I have to get the pool by looking at age limits of the league compared to the age of the player. I am curious, though... is it the age of the player on Jan 1st, or when the draft pool is released, or what?

Could you PM me your .csv files for your league? Maybe I can whip something up quickly for you. Please also give me a few names of players who are draft eligible but are not showing up, and the URL of the league (so I can look at the HTML reports). Thanks.

[Another Mike D]

Hey Getch, is there a way to have the utility display the number of players in a GM's list? Something like...

Atlanta (0)
Detroit (5)
Boston (3)

Not sure how difficult it would be since they are all in separate text files, just an idea so that way I can see who isn't going to be ready when their turn is up.

Thanks.

[kleric]

Originally Posted by Getch

Nope, it's because it doesn't support feeder leagues. Something I plan on for the next release (coming soon).

For some odd reason, players in feeder leagues that are draft eligible don't have that flag set, which is the issue. I have to get the pool by looking at age limits of the league compared to the age of the player. I am curious, though... is it the age of the player on Jan 1st, or when the draft pool is released, or what?

Could you PM me your .csv files for your league? Maybe I can whip something up quickly for you. Please also give me a few names of players who are draft eligible but are not showing up, and the URL of the league (so I can look at the HTML reports). Thanks.

I actually got it working by copying files over to a test league, then advancing the date to actual draft day. Then took that players.csv and used it for the tool. It'll work as a work-around for now.

[fhomess]

I ran into a problem with my online league while working on the draft utility setup. The utility has some nifty little features that the commish can use via an Admin link to reset passwords, edit picks, and trade picks. Unfortunately, if you're the commish for the league but not a GM, you can't login.

If you open up passwords.html and login.html in a text editor like Wordpad, you can fix this with the following modification.

Search for the following line of code:

open (IN, "$info{CSV}/human_managers.csv");

Just below it will be an if statement that checks which managers to inlcude on the login screen. As released, only active managers are included. To also include the commish, you simply need a slight modification to the if statement.

Change it from:

	if ($5 > 0) {

to:

	if ($2 >0 || ($5 > 0)) {

and you should be good to go.