2 small programs for Steam Roller Events

[LostBlue]

I wrote 2 small programs to help organizing Steam Roller Events.

First is a Random Scenario Generator.
- This program simply draws a random Scenario for quick reference and keeps tracks of which scenarios were drawn to prevent drawing repeats.

The other is a tournament organizer.
- This program will pair players randomly each round with other similar ranked players.
It will attempt to

• avoid identical faction pairing
• avoid people who are from the same group
  ex: friends who don't want to play each other at a tournament
• avoid players to play on the same tables as much as possible
  However, people with the higher rank will have priority on the tables. If a player has played on that table the program will look at that player's history and pair him on the side of the table he has not played on.

Note: pairing the players by their rank will take priority over the above conditions.
At the end of the tournament, a summary of each player's play history will be generated.


Both programs can be downloaded here on my SkyDrive:
http://cid-f4e58cf9dec68c8e.office.l...0&sa=760628141


Note:
Both programs were written for Windows running .NET 2.0



* Firefox Users (06/17/2010)

Apparently there is a bug in Firefox that renames files downloaded off Microsoft's SkyDrive.
The bug occurs when a file name has spaces in it. The bug adds underscores before the file name and after the file extension.

ex: Random Scenario Generator.zip becomes _Random Scenario Generator.zip_

To get around this bug I did rename the above programs but just for future references/public service announcement, if you do download something from skydrive and it doesn't appear right, consider this technique.
1) When you hover your mouse over download, right-click and Copy Link Location.
2) Paste the link in your navigation bar, and then delete everything after ?download which will be at the end of the link.
3) After you do so hit enter and Firefox should download the file correctly.

Example:
[code]
http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1phScOIgGdc9axbh7UFJpe-7xIpyEi1z0UdyVS8h7QfG1xS545CjRSgc3U-BcJFJgHwDE3-g-nMS2Y9SnG-ol12A/Random_Scenario_Generator.zip?download&psid=1

becomes

http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1phScOIgGdc9axbh7UFJpe-7xIpyEi1z0UdyVS8h7QfG1xS545CjRSgc3U-BcJFJgHwDE3-g-nMS2Y9SnG-ol12A/Random_Scenario_Generator.zip
[/code]You do not have to do this for the files I mentioned in this post. This was just something I thought might be useful for Firefox users to know if they were looking at something else on SkyDrive.

[Kreoss_666]

they are frikking awesome mna ive been struggling on how to organise my event and how to draw players and scenarios, bookeeeping e.t.c and these are invaluable keep ocming up with more stuff like this man

[LostBlue]

Thank you.

keep ocming up with more stuff like this man

Is there something that you think will be needed or think will be useful?
I am open to suggestions and any new ideas.

I do have 2 other projects in the works.
One is an army list-building app for Windows. This is actually 90% done. There is a working version on my skydrive as well actually since the original WM Field test back in the first few weeks of April. It's missing an auto-updater and missing the stuff that came out this month and I would like to clean up some code. Since I never got permission from Privateer, I won't post the link here, but if you look around on my skydrive you probably can find it. (I felt the programs in Post #1 were fine since they're based off freely distributed PDF that Privateer is still currently hosting. If Privateer asks me to I will remove them.) Preferably, if anyone does find it, I prefer that that link does not get posted on this board as I do not have permission.

The other project I have is another army list-building app for Windows Mobile. The above project is actually a testing ground for this project. This project is still in the design stages as I haven't got around to cleaning up the code from the above project to stream line it with this one. When I do finish this, I'll ask Privateer about posting it again. There is no ETA on this project yet.

[Kreoss_666]

the only improvment i can think of is that of like a save feature, with how our gaming club is setup we may not be able to fit all rounds in one night so if i could save the previous weeks results and pairings and then carry on from there that would be useful because otherwise i gotta make sure my laptop dosnt switch off or anything for a whole week lol also army building sofware would be cool i like forward kommander but something that i can use without internet access would be more useful.

like i said before i love the tournement organiser software its perfect just a save function may be useful for those who dont have teh facilities to get their event done in one session

also just tried out ya army building software and think its great it does teh theme lists and everything im very impressed with your work and will look forward to anything else you do

[PG_Bobby Hostile]

I used your program for Bayou Wars this past weekend and I have to say, I really like it. There was a couple of things I'd like to see it be able to do.

1). Edit matchups. In larger tournaments, you may get people from out of your area who want to play someone besides whom they're normally playing against. Being able to edit the matchups to prevent this would be a nice feature. Nothing that is immensely important mind you, but it'd be nice feature if possible.

2). Save tournaments. This could be a really excellent addition and if you can do it, I think any PG who uses would be very thankful since you can send the file to the quartermaster as an attachment and they could view it. Plus, it could actually be used by the Devs to track statistics, trends and players.

Overall, I'd give your program an "A". It's easy to use and minimize's "bs" paper shuffling.

[LostBlue]

the only improvment i can think of is that of like a save feature, with how our gaming club is setup we may not be able to fit all rounds in one night

Okay, I can add this feature.

also just tried out ya army building software and think its great it does teh theme lists and everything im very impressed with your work and will look forward to anything else you do

Thanks for trying out the builder as well. ^^
I'm glad it's well received. I should have it updated again after the merc book comes out. If I find an FTP I like I'll add in the auto-dater, but you can easily goto the builder download section by hitting "update" for now.

I used your program for Bayou Wars this past weekend and I have to say, I really like it.

Wow, that's an honor to have it help with Bayou Wars!
I'm glad it did handle that in a real environment.

1). Edit matchups. In larger tournaments, you may get people from out of your area who want to play someone besides whom they're normally playing against. Being able to edit the matchups to prevent this would be a nice feature. Nothing that is immensely important mind you, but it'd be nice feature if possible.

Currently there is a way to limit this by filling out this field:



You can enter a group name like Swamp Gobbers or Beach Thralls, or even entering a city/state might help if the group of friends don't have a group name perse (the group name field is not case sensitive, fyi). The program will try it's best to avoid matching people from the same group, but ranking, and identical faction pairing do take priority over it.

But the feature to edit match-up after the random generation is something I will look into.

2). Save tournaments. This could be a really excellent addition and if you can do it, I think any PG who uses would be very thankful since you can send the file to the quartermaster as an attachment and they could view it. Plus, it could actually be used by the Devs to track statistics, trends and players.

I will add the save feature.
Also if the tourny data report is handy enough of a feature, I'll look into more ways to improve it.


This kind of feed back is very useful. I have several ideas floating in my head now how to further improve the program. Thanks!

[Kreoss_666]

no worries i like seeing people who come up with a good idea implement it properly and then ask for feedback, shows that you want to make the item better than it was before. seriously though i showed my clubs chairman all the software youve done and he was very very very impressed and says it will be most useful for our events we run.

[PG_Bobby Hostile]

A tourny data report would be immensely useful. We have some analytical types in my area and tracking trends in events would be awesome to help support or refute exploits/broken rules issues.

Thanks for taking my suggestions and for your hard work. It is very much appreciated.

[PG_Tilaurin]

Ooo, I'd love an iPhone version of the tracker

[LostBlue]

Ooo, I'd love an iPhone version of the tracker

I have no experience developing apps for the iPhone but if there's enough demand for it, I'll look into it, but it'll be pretty low priority item especially since I'll have to rewrite the entire code in a different programming language and redesign the interface for a mobile platform. So, most likely won't happen unless enough PGs convince me otherwise.


Also I have posted an update on the Random Scenario Generator for the SR2010 revision 1.
Use the same link in Post #1 (the old version is still there as well).

An updated Tournament Organizer is still in pending status for the moment.

[PG_Norton]

Thank you these are fantastic little programs

[PG_gunnerjack]

Thi programs are great but i have a problem when i with see ranking button, it says that courrier new dosen't support regular style, i'm using windows 7. I hope this problem may be overcome because your tools are really usefull.

Thanks and great Work!!

Edit: Problem solved, I installed the courrier font family and now i'm able to see rankings

[testuser]

Wow, this is a really nice program! Im gonna try it for a tournament soon.

Also would like to have a "save" button incase the program crashes or so during a tournament, there is nothing like that atm is there?

Good work man!

[tensteam]

After a quick test looks like a really solid program! The one thing I'm missing too is the mentioned save feature, because tournies can last more than one day, computers may crash etc. etc. Also it would be great to have some way to edit results that have been previously entered, because you might notice you have inserted wrong kill points for some player during earlier round and fixing such thing would be nice. And one more: please add back button to a situation where one accidentally clicks "generate next round" after the tourney has actually ended. Currently there's no way back.

[PG_Affliction]

The TO program is a great build. I have done mock events to try to find flaws or trends and all in all I give it a 9/10.

One thing I have noticed, and I need to do more testing, that in my 3 round events on 3 separate occasions out of the 5 mock ups I did, 8 out of the 18 players had encountered the same faction in two out of three rounds. I made sure when doing mock ups that all factions were represented and there were not any that were overly domination (ex. just one Cygnar and six Cryx).

Just something I noticed is all. Could be the way I entered data or any other thing. Just posting as a observation to see if anyone else had the same results.

Like I said GREAT program and will help immensely for the 2011 tournament season.

[LostBlue]

Thank you for using the program.
There is a newer version in the works, but currently I'm holding it until the new SR2011 rules are finalized.



As to why some players were paired with players of the same faction...
That might be intentional.


This is the logic behind the pairings is as follows:
1) A random player is chosen to be labeled as Player A.
You have higher chance to be Player A, the higher your tournament score is.
Meaning players with higher scores will have priority in their match pairings.

ex: if there are multiple people ranked #1 (5 ppl won their first round), these ppl get to choose their pairing before everyone else (b/c they have a higher rank), but the order who gets the choice first is determined randomly amongst these players.

2) After Player A is determined from Step 1, remove players which Player A has played previously from the list of possible pairings.

3) The program looks for other players of similar scores and lists up candidates for pairing.

4) Flag players

a. Flag players which have played on tables which Player A has played on

b. Flag players which play the same faction as Player A

c. Flag players which are from the same Group has Player A

d. * Not implemented in the downloadable version, but will be in the new version.
Look at Player A's history and see what factions he has played against and flag players of those factions. Factions that he has played multiple times will be marked harsher.

5) From the list of possible opponents determined in Step 3, list up the players who have been flagged the least in Step 4.

6) If there are multiple good candidates, then choose a candidate for pairing randomly out the the list of best candidates (determined in previous Step).



The players who are playing the same faction are likely players who had a bad random draw at Step 1 compared to other players of the similar rank, or at Step 4 the program decided that this player he's paired with is a better pairing due to the other factors in Step 4. The table matching consideration is weight heavier than faction matching consideration in my program.

I hope that made sense.

[PG_Duckboy]

SR2011 is now official. Also, anyway i can get a way to randomize teams then does pairings?

[LostBlue]

I'm not sure what you're asking.
Are you asking whether you can modify the pairings after the program does random pairing?

For example, program did this match up:

Albert vs Bob
Charlie vs David
Edward vs Frank
Greg vs Harold

but after you see this pairing, you rather have Bob play Frank, so you want to swap players around to get this result?

Albert vs Edward
Charlie vs David
Bob vs Frank
Greg vs Harold

(red colored players have swapped position)

If so, the upcoming version will be able to do this.
If you're asking for something else, please elaborate. I'm not sure if I understood you.


Also thanks for notifying me that SR2011 is official. I didn't see that sticky in General as I excepted there will be some type of notification on the front page or sidebar.


I'll take a look at the pdf sometime next week and hopefully have something up before the end of the month.

[PG_Duckboy]

I want a way where i can Randomly team up people (make a team of two) then have that teams generated into a tournament. This would be greatly useful for the random team tournaments or team tournaments in general.

[Necra-Chi]

This program is a life saver thanks.

[Necra-Chi]

Some feedback after running a small event with 15 players.

The program was brilliant and helped me run the tournament really smoothly with the between round time potentially only as long as it took me to arrange the record sheets in order of play for the next round! It was brilliant.

Couple small niggles, though.

When setting up the tournament and entering players, the club/lgs box when I tried to point teh cursor at it to type something in it would have a text popup that would block my attempt to click on the field, and I wasted a lot of time before the tournament trying to do that by quickly moving the mouse and clicking, losing about 20minutes to the start time.
When something came up in the middle of the event where a player realised he had an illegal army I discovered that there was no way of going back and adjusting scores for his opponents.
There's also no way of saving your progress in case the system crashes or something.
And I couldn't export the final standings. I just cut and paste them to a text file.

[LostBlue]

Thanks Necra for using this program. The next version is long overdue, but I am still working on it on my free time little by little.

Couple small niggles, though.

When setting up the tournament and entering players, the club/lgs box when I tried to point teh cursor at it to type something in it would have a text popup that would block my attempt to click on the field, and I wasted a lot of time before the tournament trying to do that by quickly moving the mouse and clicking, losing about 20minutes to the start time.

I'm not quite sure if I understand.
Basically, are you saying you want to turn off the tooltip (the hint bubble thingie)?
If so, that's really easy to do.

When something came up in the middle of the event where a player realised he had an illegal army I discovered that there was no way of going back and adjusting scores for his opponents.
There's also no way of saving your progress in case the system crashes or something.
And I couldn't export the final standings. I just cut and paste them to a text file.

These features are in the next version.
I know it's really long overdue, but I am still working on it little by little.

There was going to be a big feature pre-checking lists prior to the tournament (this would have required the download of my list building program as well), and keeping record of model usage (both in posted lists and actual usage within the tournament) to an online central database for more detailed analysis, but I can't find the time to really work on these. When I have the time again, I need to go back to the code and take out some of the code that were intended for some features I can't find time to finish so the program is usable.

I'll eventually get this thing posted without the really fancy features. The project isn't dead for all those using this program.

[PG_Duckboy]

I just want a way to export/save results. it is a real time saver in tournaments, i can actually play in small tourneys and run then at the same time.

[Heble]

Awesome... just what I was after. Thanks heaps. :P

[PG_Duckboy]

anyway we can get the random scenario generator updated?

[LostBlue]

anyway we can get the random scenario generator updated?

Here you go, DuckBoy.
Sorry, it took so long as I had to rip out the code from the larger project.

There's a couple new features, like disabling certain scenarios, and some control of how the scenarios can repeat. Another new feature is highlighting keywords and showing there definitions.

Sample Pic:






This can be downloaded off my SkyDrive here:
http://cid-f4e58cf9dec68c8e.office.l...Steam%20Roller

[PG_Duckboy]

sweet thanks dude.

[PG_Duckboy]

i just downloaded it and when i try to start it up it says it has stopped working.

[Zizzlebit]

Programs great. Really takes the pressure off of the TO so that they can do other things if they want to. One thing I noticed though, no minions for the faction selector.

[PG_Chav]

The changes you were talking about that would come in the next version, have you released that version yet or is it just me who have failed spotting it? Also would it be possible to set a fixed amout of rounds?

Great work by the way.

[drachenfels]

i just downloaded it and when i try to start it up it says it has stopped working.

Im getting the same error after just downloading it

The organiser works perfectly tho so coudos on that

[Rinen]

Hey great program. but I gotta ask any eta on when this is going to be updated with the above features ? You know saving/exporting and modifying pairings and such.

[LostBlue]

RE: Random Scenario Generator for Stream Roller 2011

I'm still trying to reproduce the bug.
I'll probably release a more dumb down version similar to the Scenario Generator for Steam Roller 4 if I can't figure out the problem in a few days.

For the mean time, I made an Online random scenario generator SR2011. You can get to it by following the link here.


RE: Tournament Organizer
I haven't released an new version yet. I'll try to release a new version in a few weeks.

[Necra-Chi]

Thanks Lost blue. I have an event coming up beginning of July and I am nervous about using the current version where I can't go backwards if there is a stuff up by a player (or myself). On the other hand I will have next to no time between rounds so I need something that can work out pairings instantaneously. Please let me know iof you think you will have the next version up this month. No pressure. Its still a fantastic program and I'll definitely use it, I just worry about mishaps and weirdness when players drop out or discover they've had an illegal list for the last few games or whatever.

[Rinen]

Hey man its been a few weeks now, any news of a new version done for the Tournament Organizer?

[Rinen]

Can we get an update on this? Thanks.

[PG_Duckboy]

any plans on updating these very fine tools?

[Steamroller]

Can this software be used to play seven rounds for 32 or less players.

[LostBlue]

Re: Update
Still working on it. Had a few set backs as I had to go out of state a few times in the past two months.
Just so I don't make it sound like I'm neglecting this project, the mkII-FCU takes about 10~15 minutes to update with new NQ info.
This project, I have to remove quite a bit of code (about 6000 lines so far).

Can this software be used to play seven rounds for 32 or less players.

It can support 32 or more players (min of 4 players). You can end the tournament prematurely.
It cannot go over the recommended turn limit for Stream Roller.
It does not support Round Robbin play.

[testuser]

What about the ability to save ?