Posts tagged "UI"
Play-by-play redesign
The new football drive charts made me think more about how ugly the live sim experience is in all of my games. One problem is that the play-by-play is pretty bad. Basically just plan text. Can I do better? I think so!
Here is my attempt at redesigning the play-by-play log for all of the sports:
Football GM drive chart during live sim
Big news for Football GM today - live game sim now shows a drive chart! By "drive chart" I mean a list of all the plays that have happened in this drive, drawn on top of a football field. Like this:
This makes it much easier to see what is happening while you watch a live game. It's so much better that it kind of feels dumb that it took me so long to add. But, well, it wasn't the easiest thing to do! So please let me know if you notice any bugs.
New league type: cross-era leagues, made up of historical teams from different years
This is not actually a new feature, just an easier UI for an existing feature! The original feature is from last year, but you need to hunt through like 5 different menus to find it. Now you can just go here and instantly create a league:
Bold league leading stats on player profile pages
Inspired by basketball-reference.com, on player profile pages I added bold/highlighted text for each stat a player leads the league in. Most players don't lead the league in anything, in which case there is no change for them. But for the top players in your league, it gives you a quick glance at just how dominant they've been.
It works on all the stat tables on the player page - regular stats, advanced stats, playoff stats, etc. It also works on player ratings, and even ages to show you the oldest player in the league.
I know this seems like a simple little feature, but there's actually a lot of details involved in implementing this, so I figured I would blog about it!
New "command palette" allows easy keyboard navigation of your league
Inspired by a really cool feature for GitHub, I just added a command palette to my games. Open it by pressing ctrl+k on a PC or cmd+k on a Mac. The command palette lets you efficiently navigate within your league while only using your keyboard. Here's what it looks like:
Trade frivolities: biggest trades and most lopsided trades
Following up to the recent updates that added a lot of detail to historical trades, today I added two new frivolities, in a brand new Trades section:
Biggest Trades: Trades involving the best players and prospects.
Most Lopsided Trades: Trades where one team's assets produced a lot more value than the other.
You can find them within a league at Tools > Frivolities.
Improved trade details and a new Trade Summary page
When you make a trade in Basketball GM or Football GM, a summary of that trade is logged and shows up in the transactions list and the news feed. A mildly annoying thing about that is how it handles draft picks. Sure it'll say the trade included a 2021 2nd round pick, but if you check back after the 2021 draft, there's no new information. It doesn't say which player was selected with the pick, which makes it difficult to evaluate trades.
I've gotten many requests to do something about that, and I'm happy to announce that I have finally done something!
Improvements to the injury system
Today I released new versions of Basketball GM and Football GM that contain some improvements to injuries.
In the past, each player (except quarterbacks in FBGM) had an equal probability of getting injured. That's now been changed to give older players an increased injury risk and younger players a decreased injury risk. This both makes sense and is supported by data showing a 3% increase in injury risk per year as a player ages.
New dashboard UI
The "dashboard" is the screen you see here listing all your leagues. I just gave it a facelift. The old one looked like this:
The new one looks like this:
I think the differences are pretty evident from just looking at the screenshots or trying out the new dashboard. But I just want to mention a few of the improvements...
Owner messages revamp
The annual message from the owner has long been a quirky feature of Basketball GM. Each season, you'd get some strange message from the owner about your progress. By reading it, you could figure out how close you were to getting fired.
There were problems though. The messages got repetitive if you played a lot. Sometimes the messages were confusing and possibly buggy, like if you win the title and the owner is still not happy with how much you're winning.
Also the messages were often racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. In my defense, those were all paraphrases of things our wonderful real life pro sports owners have said. But I don't think everyone got the joke.
Overall, it was not a great system. Finally, I have replaced it. Instead of the long old messages, you get a short message containing your overall performance, your performance in the past year, and a quick recommendation for next year. Also, you get a chart of your past performance, which looks like this:
A few small improvements
No huge news here, sorry, but there are a few minor improvements in version 2019.08.18.0097:
A lot more tables (such as Draft Summary) are searchable, filterable, and downloadable. There's still a few that aren't. Let me know if that's a problem. Also let me know if I messed anything up with this change, since the table component is used in many many places!
In the past, when you got fired, the AI would never actually change your finance settings back to something reasonable. So if you made them unreasonable, the results would look silly. Now the AI resets their finance settings every year.
The Hall of Fame cutoff adjusts based on the number of games in a season and the length of a quarter. Previously, short leagues would have empty HoFs and long leagues would have tons of HoFers.
Specifically, the cutoff is multiplied by
sqrt(quarterLength / 12) * numGames / 82. The square root is to account for fatigue in games - shorter games mean the starters play a higher fraction of the game (and the cutoff should be a bit higher) and longer games mean the opposite.
As always, let me know if you notice any problem with this stuff, or if you have any other feedback!
"Untouchable" players and picks in trades
When you're trying to make a trade, you can click the "What would make this deal work?" button to get a counter offer from the AI team you're trading with. Often this results in the AI asking for something you really don't want to give up, like your best player or a high draft pick. Then what you really want to say to the AI is, "okay, you can't have that, but is there any other assets I have that could make this deal work?" But there was no way to ask that. Until now!
Lots of small UI improvements
Today I released an update to Basketball GM containing a lot of small improvements to the UI. Most of them are small tweaks that, when seen in aggregate, will hopefully just make the game feel a bit cleaner and smoother.
But there's also some sexy.