Whoops, missed a scheduled post back there. I was expecting to be able to add a write-up about the MWWS charity tournament in Builth Wells, but unfortunately was struck down ill that weekend and was unable to attend. I was extra disappointed because I was supposed to be driving two other players to the tournament, and we were unable to organise alternative transport.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m trying to work on building up a buffer of posts for the site to ensure I always have something ready to go ahead of time, but I\u2019ve been working on a few hobby projects instead. One of these is a revival of my Gorkamorka\/Necromunda skirmish engine in WPF, and is coming along nicely for the moment. It\u2019s nowhere near finished, and it\u2019s never going to have pretty graphics, but I\u2019m practicing my architecture design on it (as a large, complicated project it will be ideal for that). The other is an actual public website: www.dreadballhub.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Right now, it\u2019s a small website that only has two features. The first is an Xtreme team manager (this will need to be completely rewritten in a month or two when the Player Handbook comes out), that calculates an Xtreme team from the two sponsor options in the book. You can even download the finished roster as a PDF. It\u2019s not entirely pretty, but it works.<\/p>\n The second feature is a relatively new one: a game tracker. Someone made one previously (back when DreadBall was barely out). They closed it down last June as they walked away from the game, citing irreconcilable balance issues and a difference between the support requested and the support given. A number of people have requested that the database be reopened.<\/p>\n I did consider building it earlier this year, but I had heard that Mantic were going to have an all-singing all-dancing ranking website to track players in tournaments, record games, and all of that jazz. Since it hasn\u2019t appeared (and I\u2019m still waiting on Windows Phone versions of the existing Mantic Digital apps) I thought \u201cwell blow it, I can write code\u201d and dived into the project.<\/p>\n There\u2019s more things that I want to add, but I figured it would be best to get the site out there and collect data. Even if it\u2019s not publicly visible yet, it\u2019s there and working behind the scenes.<\/p>\n One thing that I want to add (that will be difficult without an internet connection on my lunch\/code breaks) is a way to login to the site (with Google\/Twitter\/etc) so that individual players can be identified as being great players. Identifying the opponent that you played against, however, will be much harder and I\u2019ll need to think about the process before I do any work. Possibly each player will need a unique name of some kind after they\u2019ve logged in to be identified by their opponents? I can also see the possibility of abuse, if people record massive wins against you that never happened, and so a system of verifying games becomes necessary as well as a way to record games against unregistered players.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s what I\u2019ve been up to instead of going to tournaments and writing blog posts. I\u2019m still aiming to be at the Wales and South West<\/em> Regional tournament in two and a half weeks (yikes, best get painting) and trying to decide if it\u2019s worth trekking across the country for the South-East and Southern regionals too.<\/p>\n