QuikSand
08-02-2007, 02:57 PM
Excel-Based QuikTest Template
For those who are inclined to do testing within FOF, I thought it might be useful to share a tool that I have developed for this purpose. At the very least, it reduces the amount of time necessary to pull essential team-wide data from a season’s worth of games run under a certain system.
GET THE EXCEL FILE HERE ( http://www.fof-ihof.com/upload/QuikSand/quiktest_template.xls)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here’s how to use it, forgive me for the amount of detail:
1. Sim a single player game to the end of the exhibition season, just before Week 1 of the regular season
2. Go to “Global Options” and set injuries to ZERO (it’s best to control everything you can, I believe)
3. Create or load the gameplans that you want to use for your testing
4. Ensure that the settings for other things (like the “miscellaneous” screen settings) are set to your liking
5. Ensure that your depth charts are set the way you want them
6. SAVE this game at this point (you may use the “Save As” option if you might want to come back to it, or if you just want to have a backup)
From here, you are ready to run the testing – it’s a pretty simple routine. And with the Excel tool, you’ll find it a fairly painless experience. I find that simming ten seasons for testing purposes requires maybe 15 minutes of time. It’s not that exhausting, really…
7. Click “Simulate Games” and choose to “Simulate Until Playoffs” – this will take a little while
8. When the regular season concludes, click “Exit” and then “Team Summary” from the (poorly-titled) Simulation Window.
9. From the Team Summary page, click “Print” and print the output as a text file. (Directions on how to set up a generic/text printer option can be found here (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16641))
10. From MS Word or some other program, open the newly created text document, use Ctrl-A to select its entire contents, Ctrl-C to copy it all -- and close the document.
11. In MS Excel, go to the appropriate vacant slot on Row 15 of one of the worksheets… Cell C15 if this is the first time you are doing this… and use Ctrl-V to paste the text data into that spot.
12. Re-open the FOF 2007 window, and LOAD the game that you had previously saved – DO NOT SAVE YOUR GAME FIRST.
13. Go back to step 7 to sim another regular season, or, if you are done simming – go on to Step 14.
Note: I actually find the quickest process here to actually change the order a bit:
SIM – PRINT – LOAD – SIM – COPY – PASTE – PRINT – LOAD – SIM – PRINT…
(This way, while the game is simming the next season, I am copy/pasting the past season’s text results)[/I]
If you are done simming for whatever gameplan you are trying to test, check to see that the appropriate key stats are being picked up in the summary section above the text you have pasted. (Worksheets are set up for a default of 10 seasons of QuikTesting… if you want fewer than 10, delete some of the summary data, if you want more, copy the summary data further across those rows)
At this point, you should have summary data in two nice compact spots. Your results for this particular gameplan (or whatever you were testing here) should be summarized in the areas from A2:B12 in the worksheet. The data should look something like this:
Wins 11.70
Rush/Gm 29.3
YPC 3.76
Pass/Gm 32.53
YPA 7.08
DYPC 3.93
DYPA 6.00
Pts/Gm 14.43
So… the worksheet will pluck out the data from your team summary text dumps, and come up with the average of those various stats. A quick summary of games won, running offense, passing offense, defensive points allowed, and defense against both the run and pass.
Give this worksheet a title that fairly describes your gameplan (or whatever you are testing) and place it into Cell A1 of the worksheet.
You will also see the same data above summarized in the first worksheet of the Excel workbook – very craftily labeled “Summary.” That will present the same data as above, but horizontally spread across one extended row – with room for up to six different pages of data (from up to six different tests). That ought to provide the simplest means to compare results across gameplans.
That’s it. At this point, you may be overwhelmed that there are so many steps – but really this is not technically difficult at all, I just chose to be tedioulsy exhaustive with explaining how to do things, to try to fend off as many operational questions as I can. Basically, it’s just simming seasons, and dumping the text team summary data into the right cell of Excel, and the worksheet does the rest. Indeed, that explanation would probably serve well enough to most people.
With that – feel free to download the spreadsheet. There’s no particular reason why to stop at the handful of stats that I chose, so someone who is feeling enterprising might be able to expand on that. All I ask is that if you make meaningful improvements using this spreadsheet as a starting point, that you share back with me and the rest of the community.
For those who are inclined to do testing within FOF, I thought it might be useful to share a tool that I have developed for this purpose. At the very least, it reduces the amount of time necessary to pull essential team-wide data from a season’s worth of games run under a certain system.
GET THE EXCEL FILE HERE ( http://www.fof-ihof.com/upload/QuikSand/quiktest_template.xls)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Here’s how to use it, forgive me for the amount of detail:
1. Sim a single player game to the end of the exhibition season, just before Week 1 of the regular season
2. Go to “Global Options” and set injuries to ZERO (it’s best to control everything you can, I believe)
3. Create or load the gameplans that you want to use for your testing
4. Ensure that the settings for other things (like the “miscellaneous” screen settings) are set to your liking
5. Ensure that your depth charts are set the way you want them
6. SAVE this game at this point (you may use the “Save As” option if you might want to come back to it, or if you just want to have a backup)
From here, you are ready to run the testing – it’s a pretty simple routine. And with the Excel tool, you’ll find it a fairly painless experience. I find that simming ten seasons for testing purposes requires maybe 15 minutes of time. It’s not that exhausting, really…
7. Click “Simulate Games” and choose to “Simulate Until Playoffs” – this will take a little while
8. When the regular season concludes, click “Exit” and then “Team Summary” from the (poorly-titled) Simulation Window.
9. From the Team Summary page, click “Print” and print the output as a text file. (Directions on how to set up a generic/text printer option can be found here (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16641))
10. From MS Word or some other program, open the newly created text document, use Ctrl-A to select its entire contents, Ctrl-C to copy it all -- and close the document.
11. In MS Excel, go to the appropriate vacant slot on Row 15 of one of the worksheets… Cell C15 if this is the first time you are doing this… and use Ctrl-V to paste the text data into that spot.
12. Re-open the FOF 2007 window, and LOAD the game that you had previously saved – DO NOT SAVE YOUR GAME FIRST.
13. Go back to step 7 to sim another regular season, or, if you are done simming – go on to Step 14.
Note: I actually find the quickest process here to actually change the order a bit:
SIM – PRINT – LOAD – SIM – COPY – PASTE – PRINT – LOAD – SIM – PRINT…
(This way, while the game is simming the next season, I am copy/pasting the past season’s text results)[/I]
If you are done simming for whatever gameplan you are trying to test, check to see that the appropriate key stats are being picked up in the summary section above the text you have pasted. (Worksheets are set up for a default of 10 seasons of QuikTesting… if you want fewer than 10, delete some of the summary data, if you want more, copy the summary data further across those rows)
At this point, you should have summary data in two nice compact spots. Your results for this particular gameplan (or whatever you were testing here) should be summarized in the areas from A2:B12 in the worksheet. The data should look something like this:
Wins 11.70
Rush/Gm 29.3
YPC 3.76
Pass/Gm 32.53
YPA 7.08
DYPC 3.93
DYPA 6.00
Pts/Gm 14.43
So… the worksheet will pluck out the data from your team summary text dumps, and come up with the average of those various stats. A quick summary of games won, running offense, passing offense, defensive points allowed, and defense against both the run and pass.
Give this worksheet a title that fairly describes your gameplan (or whatever you are testing) and place it into Cell A1 of the worksheet.
You will also see the same data above summarized in the first worksheet of the Excel workbook – very craftily labeled “Summary.” That will present the same data as above, but horizontally spread across one extended row – with room for up to six different pages of data (from up to six different tests). That ought to provide the simplest means to compare results across gameplans.
That’s it. At this point, you may be overwhelmed that there are so many steps – but really this is not technically difficult at all, I just chose to be tedioulsy exhaustive with explaining how to do things, to try to fend off as many operational questions as I can. Basically, it’s just simming seasons, and dumping the text team summary data into the right cell of Excel, and the worksheet does the rest. Indeed, that explanation would probably serve well enough to most people.
With that – feel free to download the spreadsheet. There’s no particular reason why to stop at the handful of stats that I chose, so someone who is feeling enterprising might be able to expand on that. All I ask is that if you make meaningful improvements using this spreadsheet as a starting point, that you share back with me and the rest of the community.