EHM online? Is anybody out there?

[IwasHere]

Anyone care to share their EHM online experiences?

Is there an FOFC EHM league up and running somewhere?

Wanting some info. I'll read anything you have to post.

[sachmo71]

Not that I know of, and I have no idea why.

[condors]

I think a FOFC Hockey League would be awsome

[Travis]

I'd definitely be up for it once the North American version with the updated rules/etc is released.

Early dibs on the Oilers

[DeToxRox]

Originally Posted by Travis

I'd definitely be up for it once the North American version with the updated rules/etc is released.

Early dibs on the Oilers

Shotgun Red Wings mwhaha

[Joe Canadian]

I want the Leafs!!!

[Schmidty]

Originally Posted by DeToxRoxDVHStyle

Shotgun Red Wings mwhaha

Damn you.

I'd be in as the Blue Jackets.

[TurnerONU22]

Oh man, this would be so much fun, but how would it be done? I know it has the set up where you can "sync" into the game at the same time, but I don't know how that would work out.

Well, if we start one, I'd be the Blue Jack......oh crap, someone's taken them already, lol. Alrighty, I'll just have to take Sid the Kid and be the Penguins then!

[Booj]

I'll take the Habs!

[sachmo71]

errr. if this happens, Dallas is mine.

[WrongWay]

Probably should wait untill a Salary Cap patch is installed to bring some of the more talented teams down to earth.

I think I remember reading that Colorado would have enough money to field 7 of its players. That could of been an earlier offer though.

[condors]

I will take dibs on the Flyers

I could try to host it but i have kinda a crappy pc not sure how bad it would be. Maybe if we only have nhl and ahl running. Of course is someone else is interested i will not in any way shape or form mind someone else being the host.

I too want to wait for the patch.

But if anyone is interested in trying a test send me a pm and we can see how bad it is (tonight if your intersted)

[TurnerONU22]

Just wanted to bump this up and see if we still had any interest in doing this, especially since the patch is coming out in a couple weeks. I'd still love to do it, although I'm not sure how much I could help with on the simming end, but I'd do whatever is needed to get a nice FOFC EHM league running.

[riz]

We've played a lot of NHL EHM at the office over LAN and it works well. And the reports I hear from people who play it over the internet say that it works quite okay as well. Naturally it's not as fluid as when you only play on your own and you tend to get people going about searching for players and making offers too often to slow the pace of the game down a bit. But as long as you make certain rules and hurry people up, it should run fine.

Basically it works like this: One guy starts up a network game on his game computer and once its created, gives his IP to the other people who want to join in. The others start up their NHL EHM and click on "Join Network Game". Punch in the IP, connect and take over a team. The days progress forward as each player in the game hit Continue. Note that amongst human teams you can easily make trades instantly because there is no AI thinking period over the offer, but the news just pops up in your inbox and you can reply instantly over to the other person.

[Icy]

Riz, what would make the online leagues to be everywhere like with the free version were is to make possible again to run "commish mode" leagues, where the players export their files and the commish imports and sims. It's really hard to have enought players online to play at same time, that is why commish mode leagues are a big success for ootp, fof etc. I guess the problem is the huge save files from ehm inherited from the CM engine but most of ppl now use broadband/DSL so it should be less problematic now. I whish you could consider working on that for next EHM version. The free EHM was my first experience on online leagues, before i knew about OOTP or FOF, and it was one of my best experiences ever.

[riz]

Icy, a good idea but a bit more complicated in practice.

As an example, load up the new NHL EHM and start a new game. Once you've added your manager, start writing down on paper all the changes you do with your team. Make a note of each player you approach to sign, each player you set to a different status (dropping that Key player to a Regular and making someone Untouchable etc.), every scout you send out, every player you call up or sent down....you get the idea. Tracking all the actions of a player to be put into a config file would basically mean adding a bit of tracking code to every single part of the current game where it's possible for the user to interact with his team or players in some way. Then you would have to write a whole bunch of code that would read those same actions from that config file and apply them to the game the commish is running. Not to mention how the GM would determine who he wants to sign ? Should the html outputs be comprehensive enough to include full player profiles with scouting reports or would we instead have a separate tool to export the needed data for the GMs, which would then also need a separate tool to view that data. Or would the commish just put the saved game up on his website so people could download that and make their decisions based on what they look up in the save themselves ?

This way of running a league with a commish taking in orders is all fine and simple as long as you limit the GM actions to only a few generic things like offering a contract, trading, moving a player between teams in the system and setting up lines. Even when offering a contract, there are tons of options associated with the offer so you cannot just tell the commish to "offer Jeremy Cornish a two year deal at the league minimum", but you'll also have to define bonuses, clauses etc. Unless you want to leave those on default. Which some people might have a problem with because they would like to tweak it all. But technically there might be a way of doing something like a simplified config file that a "commish" could read into his game every day. However, I can make no promises since there is currently no time allocated for such a thing in the next dev cycle. And the config file that you can import doesn't solve the problem of how to provide all the information to the GM so he can make his decisions offline...

Even with the current game, you could still run a league as a "commish" in a way. It just requires some more time spent dealing with the teams. Basically the commish would add all the managers into his game and manually deal with every team as each day is simmed (or put the teams on holiday with the options to reject all trades and sign no players etc. turned on). Now, there is an option in the game to save/load lines from a file in the tactics screen. This means that if the commish provides a saved game for people to download, they can make their own lines and send text files for the commish to import into the game he is running along with a list of players they want to be on their roster and dressed. Then the commish could dress the wanted roster and import the wanted lines from a file. And leave the Head Coach to coach the games using the human selected roster and lines. Also the tactics can be imported as sent in by the GM's so teams could be made to use the human tactics as well. It would be a lot of work for the commish considering the depth of the game, but in theory you could still run it this way even now.

Also, in theory you could actually run the current game as a server that would be running the game all the time. And GM's could log in to make their daily tasks, hit Continue and log out (essentially leaving the team on vacation for the time offline). Once everyone has logged in during the day and completed their part and hit continue, the game would roll forward. I'm not sure if anyone has actually tried this approach though, to see how it would work in practice.