Gameplan tweaking

[jdavidbakr]

Ok, the two most annoying screens in FOF to me are the defensive gamelpan and defensive personnel screens. So, I've made a little web app that allows you to make adjustments to these areas in a bit more intuitive way. Personally, this is how I think the screens should run anyway.

Now, don't get too excited, it's very plain and nothing as sharp as Conscriptor or the database I did for vNFL House and AUFL. I'm not taking requests nor am I officially supporting it ;) but I uploaded it to my server and wanted to make it available for anyone who wants to use it. I may make more screens, and I may not.

Basically you just export your gameplan and upload the files, go into the two pages and adjust the sliders, then save your gameplan and import it back into FOF. I thought maybe it would be more trouble than it's worth, but the Defensive Gameplan screen alone took me less time to do all the required steps to export, upload, download, and import than it normally takes me just to go through the screen. Be sure to upload your gameplan before working on it, and verify that your gameplan didn't get hosed when you re-import it.

I also am using Firefox. It may not work in IE. If you use IE and it doesn't work then I'm sorry, you'll have to get Firefox. I didn't design this to be distributed, so it's only going to get into it what I feel is useful.

Here is the link to the page:

http://gameplan.jdavidbaker.com/

[Yoda]

It doesn't work in ie7, I haven't tried it in ie8.

[Yoda]

Interesting, but what is the point of uploading the offensive gp, or is that for future use?

[jdavidbakr]

It doesn't work in ie7, I haven't tried it in ie8.

Heh.

As a web programmer/designer, I hate IE. I hate anything that has anything to do with Microsoft. I have a Windows PC in my office for two reasons: 1) to check my web designs in IE (which costs my clients a good 25% more in labor than it would if IE obeyed the web standards like all the other browsers) and 2) to play FOF :-) Everything else I do on my Mac and Linux boxes. Since I don't use IE, and I'm not officially making this for anyone but myself, there will be no IE support. :D

[jdavidbakr]

Interesting, but what is the point of uploading the offensive gp, or is that for future use?

There are two things you can do with the offensive gameplan:

1) You can upload it.

2) You can download it.

:D

I started just making sure I could upload and download without corrupting the format, so that's why it has an upload and download. I'd like to do pages for the offensive gameplanning and hope to, but like I said, no promises as to when that might be ;) Fortunately the library of javascript I did for the sliders will probably make it easy to do. I whipped out the defensive personnel screen pretty fast.

[headtrauma]

That's a nifty tool. Agreed that this is how these screens should run in the first place.

[Yoda]

Heh.

As a web programmer/designer, I hate IE. I hate anything that has anything to do with Microsoft. I have a Windows PC in my office for two reasons: 1) to check my web designs in IE (which costs my clients a good 25% more in labor than it would if IE obeyed the web standards like all the other browsers) and 2) to play FOF :-) Everything else I do on my Mac and Linux boxes. Since I don't use IE, and I'm not officially making this for anyone but myself, there will be no IE support. :D

I know you said there wouldn't be any IE support, I was just posting letting people know before they tried it, you had said you didn't test it in IE.

As for your 1)- , for a while, the only browser that fully supported CSS was OPERA. Most browsers are lacking in one way or another when it comes to applying the 'standards', even the new FF3 doesn't (this is just from reading the forums on FF3, not from any testing I've done myself). But, I am impressed that FF3 does pass the ACID2 test.

*NOTE= I am not bashing FF3 and I am not a MS fanboy. There are things Microsoft does well, and there are things it doesn't. And I think that anyone that hates on something just because MS made it, really has a narrow view of things. I tend to evaulate each thing based on it's own merits. FF3 is currently the best browser availible. With it's updated security, requiring less resources than FF2 (which reminded me of AOL) and I like it's use of the new Gekko 1.9 engine. I have IE 6, 7 (and soon 8), FF2, 3, Opera and Safari installed to test webdesigns.

[Yoda]

There are two things you can do with the offensive gameplan:

1) You can upload it.

2) You can download it.

:D

I started just making sure I could upload and download without corrupting the format, so that's why it has an upload and download. I'd like to do pages for the offensive gameplanning and hope to, but like I said, no promises as to when that might be ;) Fortunately the library of javascript I did for the sliders will probably make it easy to do. I whipped out the defensive personnel screen pretty fast.

Could I suggest one tweek? I know this is for your personal use, and I appreciate that you have opened it up for the community to use. I am not sure how you do your gameplans, but I name mine based on the team it's for, or the TYPE of offense it is. When I go to download the file, it saves as offensive.fop or defensive.fdp, can you set a varible so that it saves the name of the uploaded plan?

[jdavidbakr]

Sure, no problem.

BTW, the personnel screen does NOT have the column swap bug ... one of the reasons I'm doing this ... :eek: ... so when you load the gameplan back into FOF it should put the correct info in the wrong columns for the defensive personnel screen as should be expected.

[jdavidbakr]

Interesting, but what is the point of uploading the offensive gp, or is that for future use?

What I want to do with the offensive gameplan is upload an extractor export from the scouting report and your own roster (you'll have to do it three times and rename the files obviously in order to upload them) and show for example when doing your run directions a comparison of each of their base defense's run defense bars vs. your offensive run block bars, etc. Who knows when I'll ever get to that though...

Part of my hope is that Jim will see this and incorporate this kind of interface into the next version. This is more or less some of the suggestions I made in the "how much control is too much control" thread. Unfortunately I just don't have all the info from the game to do everything I'd like.

BTW, have you noticed that whether or not you're in a 4-3 or 3-4 is not saved in the defensive gameplan? If you save a defensive game plan as 4-3 and change to a 3-4 (or vice versa) and load that game plan, the defensive front doesn't revert back and the blitz boxes that were not there before have 0's in them.