PING: Multiplayer Lague Commissioners

[Fido]

I have recently been working on a HTML generation utility (Thread ) but development has stalled in part because I realized that there isn't that large of a target audience for it, and in part because Jim announced that there would be some kind of HTML output add-on by the end of the year.

I was wondering if there would be any interest in a utility where you load up a save game, make a few selections and have it spit out a couple hundred (maybe thousand) html pages that can be uploaded to your site. I currently have League Standings, Game Logs, Box Scores, a very basic Team page done, a player pages about half done (complete with graphs), and have not even started on Season/Career leaders pages.

The questions I have are:
1) Would you use a third party utility after Jim added the functionality to the game?

2) What features would you require to use the utility over the built in functionality?

3)What should the max total file size be on the output (i.e. how much web storage does the average league have available to it for such reports).

I am willing to invest the time to finish off this utility, but at the same time, don't want to waste my time writing something that is going to go unused, so any feedback would be much appreciated.

[Front Office Midget]

I would certainly use it for my league. I'm not sure about the other questions though, I'm not the Webmaster, just the Commissioner. It certainly would be an awesome utility, I'll have to talk to the Webmaster and find out. I will get back to you.

[primelord]

Fido,

I think even single player users would like a utility like that. It is a bit of pain to print out reports to be used in dynasty reports posted here on the board. Being able to export all the information to HTML would give users a lot more flexibilty in what information they wanted to put into their dynasty reports and just make the whole process much easier.

[cthomer5000]

Definitely interested. I'm sure a 3rd party utility will be able to go prettty far beyond what the game will provide itself.

[RPI-Fan]

Along these lines...

primelord: Is your stats utility still bouncing around? Would it work (or be easily modified for use with) the new box scores?

If so, combining it with Fido's utility could be insane. Imagine being able to reminisce about your star QB, and then look at how when entering the 4th quarter down by 7-20 points he had a career rating of 112.5.

[primelord]

I still have the code around here somewhere. My utility had several issues though. I never did progress past doing QB stats with it, although it wouldn't be too difficult to extend it to ther othe offensive skill player positions. But the biggest problem was it was written in Perl. So without everyone having to install Perl on their systems most people wouldn't be able to run it.

However it would probably work very nicely for multiplayer leagues that were storing all of their game logs on the web server. Almost every web server has perl installed these days. I may break the code out again and look into finishing it up.

[FBPro]

I think I would use it in a solo career if possible and probably others would as well.

[gstelmack]

I think a lot depends on when Jim gets his version done and what goes into it. I'm of two minds on this (even if I have contributed a bit )

On the one hand, I'm finding in my MP league that I can get most of the information I want from within the game. The web page seems more for people not in the league who are trying to follow along than the coaches inside the league.

On the other hand, I liked the sample box score layout MUCH better (with the teams side-by-side) than the vertical arrangement of the box scores in the game. So I might use whatever subset of features provides more useful information than the game's interface.

On the gripping hand, what I'm really missing is export of TCY data. In our league, I'm simming TCY seasons to generate draft files, but not everyone in the league has TCY (we've brought a couple of new players into the FOF fold thanks to the multiplayer support in FOF2k4). So if I had a way to capture TCY's end-of-season state in a displayable/viewable format for the other coaches in the FOF2k4 league, I would definitely use that.

[DukeRulesMAB]

For FOFL...

1) Would you use a third party utility after Jim added the functionality to the game?

2) What features would you require to use the utility over the built in functionality?

Same answer to both, we'll use whichever is better, or if both have advantages, we'll use both if necessary (much like FOBL uses both OOTP's HTML and BOSI). Hard to say what additional features would make us more likely to use a 3rd party without knowing what the in-game HTML will have except to say the following:

- Make it attractive, and it's more likely to be used.
- More stats = Better
- Given the presense of scouts, I think the less ratings in the HTML the better.

3)What should the max total file size be on the output (i.e. how much web storage does the average league have available to it for such reports).

I'll have to refer that one to FOBL and FOFL's web guru, Simms.

[Simms]

3)What should the max total file size be on the output (i.e. how much web storage does the average league have available to it for such reports).

Given the number of pages involved (assuming we're talking individual player pages here), and with an eye toward maintaining a reasonable balance between functionality and aestethics, anything below ~50 MB total would be respectable, IMO.

As a matter of comparison, the FOBL output using OOTP5 is about 45 MB (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4000 pages).

[RPI-Fan]

Let me correct our Canadien friend...

(somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4000 pages).

should read...

(somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 pages).

I'll apologize on Simms' behalf.

[TredWel]

Let me add my two cents from the eNFL.

1) Would you use a third party utility after Jim added the functionality to the game?

It depends upon what the third-party utility offered me in terms of simplicity. For example, I've created scripts that read standings and individual statistics from text files that you upload to your web site, and automatically parses them right into your HTML file. Just because they're so easy to update, I'll most likely still continue to use them over any other utilities.

2) What features would you require to use the utility over the built in functionality?

Once again, depends on the simplicity of the matter. The less copy-and-pasting I have to do from one file to another, the better.

3)What should the max total file size be on the output (i.e. how much web storage does the average league have available to it for such reports).

I really don't have much in the way of space constraints currently. I'm not going to post zillions of pages, however. Nobody's going to read them. I'm basically interested in putting things on my league's website that can't be found easily inside the game, i.e. completed trades.

I do want to commend you, as your utility as described is light-years ahead of anything that I can make. I can't stomach jumping into the game's data files to extract all the information.

[Fido]

Thanks all for the comments even if it is a "finish it them we'll use which is better" situation . I will be finishing this up - just to tie up loose ends if nothing else. I figure if people use it great, if not then oh well, I can still enjoy it.

In response to some of the comments:

- Make it attractive, and it's more likely to be used.

This is tough because I am a programmer, not a web designer. Knowing that going in is a benefit for me though, as it has caused me to make the thing completely configurable. The utility takes HTML files as an input source and places the data in designated areas within the template to generate the final files. Its also being set up to make extensive use of CSS so that most of the display can be changed by editing a single file.

- More stats = Better

If you mean more stats than what the game displays, then I can't help you. I just ectract the data from the FGA files and do some very basic manipulations to figure out other stats (QB Rating, Rushing Avg, etc).. But I do make all of that availableto the templates.

- Given the presense of scouts, I think the less ratings in the HTML the better.

I agree 100% which is why I do not include any ratings in the output.

[quote]Given the number of pages involved (assuming we're talking individual player pages here), and with an eye toward maintaining a reasonable balance between functionality and aestethics, anything below ~50 MB total would be respectable, IMO.[quote]
Then I'm pretty much in line. A generation of the first version of the player pages generated 2500 files totaling about 14M. This is exclusive of player photos though, but those are optional so need not be included in my totals.

Box scores/Game logs could be an issue though - thse are about 126K total per game, so you'd be looking at 40M per season.

It depends upon what the third-party utility offered me in terms of simplicity

Simplicity shouldn't be a problem:
1) Open your Save game/league file
2) Configure the generation options (first time only)
3) Click Generate
4) Click upload to FTP server



I do have another sample to share with those of you who are interrested: Sample Player Page. This is pretty preliminary, and there are some issues with it (Comp Percent is wrong for example - needs to be * 100), but any comments positve or negative are always welcome.