Foundations

At last, Sensational Soccer has finally flown the nest! I must admit that the reception so far has been luke warm. Maybe people were expecting something with the depth of NSS3 but really I just wanted to add full team control to the existing match engine and offer people an arcade style game. Hopefully there will be a couple of reviews in some magazines in the next month or two, so things might pick up then. I've been ironing out a few niggles such as random crashes caused by the security wrapper (at least I hope they're ironed out) so now I can put all my efforts into NSS4. Yee-hah!

'So how's it going?' Well, thanks for asking. Progress is steady at the moment but things are coming together very nicely. I had the core of the NSS4 database editor up and running a few weeks back and now work has begun on taking that data and doing something with it.

Here's a picture of the Editor. Cool eh? Nah, I guess not. Well the really exciting thing is the competition editor. With a few careful selections in the editor you should be able to create any competition in the world and plug it straight into the main game. I figured that all competitions basically break down into two types, league based or knock-out based. Pretty obvious really, but some competitions like the World Cup use a combination of the two, with a group stage then a knock-out stage. So in the editor you simply create two competitions; World Cup Stage 1 and World Cup Stage 2. Then the really neat trick is the section where you set the promotion places. For the WC Stage 1 you set places 1 & 2 to get promotion to WC Stage 2. Then when stage 1 is over the program finds the top 2 teams in all the groups and "promotes" them to the knock-out stage. This same technique can be used in all types of league or cup competition, even for relegations. For instance, you simply set positions 18, 19 and 20 of the Premiership to get promoted to the Championship. I use the word "promote" here, but in effect the same thing is happening whether a team is promoted or relegated.

Ok, so that's the theory behind the competition editor, but the tricky part is implementing it in the game. So far I have all the World Cup Qualifying stages ticking over so that national teams are assigned fixtures and the group winners qualify from one stage to the next.


This is the game in it's embryonic stages. All it does is run through the fixtures creating random scorelines at the moment. Once this is all in place so that the game plays through from World Cup Qualifications to the World Cup final then it's just a matter of adapting the code so that it does the same thing (in principle) for the club competitions. Having multiple leagues, cups and international competitions running smoothly without any fixture clashes will be the first real milestone, and the foundation upon which the entire game will be built. As I said, progress is steady and I hope to reach that milestone within a couple of weeks. Soon I'll put the competition engine up on the forums for people to download and test, just to make sure everything is working correctly.

I'm using BlitzMax for the main game this time around, which means development can move pretty fast. It also means that Mac and Linux owners will finally be able to experience the joys of NSS. Don't get too carried away though people, it's still early days. :)