I thought I'd start a quasi-blog here about what's happening with development for HD. I'll try to post something here somewhat regularly when there is significant active development happening. I'll keep this thread locked to keep things clean, but feel free to start a new thread for discussion about any posts made here.

As I've mentioned before in various spots, the next release will be huge, including several key areas of the game. The SimEngine is being translated to a new programming language and so it's pretty much a rewrite. Some of the logic will remain the same, some will be tweaked, and some will change more significantly. It's a little early to say what will change and what won't, but our focus area is emphasizing individual matchups more. This process will most importantly give me a complete understanding of the SimEngine and allow for easier improvements in the future.

One change that I want to mention is that durabilty will play a bigger part in injuries in the next SimEngine, so plan accordingly. You may want to start looking harder at durability. We're not planning on drastically changing the frequency of injuries, but we do want durability to be meaningful.

Another key target is recruit creation. We're changing the methodology there to allow for more variability in player quality, making truly elite players stand out more. This will inevitably involve a lowering of ratings across the board in order to keep the 1 to 100 scale. So there may be some growing pains at first as new players may not be quite as good as in the past, but in the long run it will make things better. Another result of the changes will be more unique players, where they're not tied so much to a traditional mold. So you should see more perimeter big men for example.

We're also revamping the top 25 ranking system along with the tournament selection/seeding process. I know there has been some disconnect between the two and we're trying to bring them more in line.

It's important to let you guys know that we are working to improve the game and we're targeting the areas that generate the most feedback.

Thanks.

I should also mention a timeline: we're probably looking at 2-3 months before this release is ready as we want to thoroughly test it beforehand. We'll be asking for testers in a month or so probably.

Things are still chugging along here. Lots of work happening in the language translation process that isn't useful to p*** along to you guys. One thing that is of interest is that we're not going to do a full translation of the entire game logic at once, so after the next release game simulations, recruit creation, rankings, and probably some tournament seeding things will be separate from the rest.

In the newly translated processes, the timing of when things run may change a little. The cycles will still be at the same times, but most likely the new processes will run on a world by world basis. In other words, Naismith will complete all of its tasks before any other world processes and so forth down the line. In the current process, it's the other way around, where games run for all worlds, then recruiting is processed, etc. I don't think it will drastically change things since there are a small number of worlds anyway, but I wanted to give a heads up.