30 November 2010 Update

[dabo]

Hello, as promised here is the November update.

Forward: Unfortunately he has had real life problems to deal with which obviously have limited his efforts in the project; gladly it is resolved now and he is back programming. We all wish it got a happy ending and are excited to have him back. He is currently working on how to start new games and things related to that.

Jatahati: Because my laziness has reached an all-time high I will post jatahati's status update exactly as I received it:
- Testing on Eloquera db engine. Found a way to query directly inside child elements with help of Eloquera community.
- I have enhanced our Eloquera database handler. Still some method are missing and nearly all are still totally untested in lack of test data.
- Minor changes on pre-game db editor site.
- Converters and importers for some huge excel files some researchers have previously done. So that they don’t have to re-enter the same multi thousand row data.
- Schedule creator. Even schedule and Conferenced schedules will get created (without dates, just ordering still). I’ll do date “picking” next. Then divisioned schedule creation, since it’s more complicated.

dabo: I have completed the basics of the player creator; the skeleton is in place but needs more work before it is complete. It is possible to create players but no "real" data from the database is used yet since that part is not ready yet. While creating the player creator I discovered I needed to figure out the "player development mechanism" sooner rather than later; therefore I have currently switched my focus to that part.

The player development part I am trying to figure out atm consists of the following:
- Practice areas: fitness, shooting, defending etc.
- Practice -> attribute mapping: which attributes will be affected by each practice area.
- Practice: The practice system in the game; for example specifying how practice time is allocated to certain practice areas for different players.
- Current ability/potential ability: I am currently investigating a different approach than the one used in EHM.
- Late bloomers/early regressers (is that even a word?)
- Natural regression: loss of acceleration/speed when getting old etc.

It is very possible that I have forgotten something. This part can, and most definitely will, take a lot of time to get right; but that is ok if you ask me.

Me, jatahati and YZG have together changed the Languages part of the database slightly.

Lastly I anticipate we will decide whether to or not to use WPF pretty soon since Forward has expressed a desire to know in order to continue his work. If we had a WPF expert on the team this would be the easiest decision in the world.

Take care and see you next time right before Santa swings by in his Volvo.