Posts tagged "Hockey"
Free agent contract fixes for football and hockey
This started because of a post on Reddit wondering why ZenGM Hockey was slower than the other games. I figured I should investigate. And I found some low hanging fruit! A significant amount of time during the regular season was spent computing free agent contract values for released players.
That sounds pretty silly, and it is. The reason it's possible at all is because of how free agent contracts work. It's a somewhat complex and slow algorithm. So slow that it doesn't work at all in Football GM and ZenGM Baseball - for those I do a simpler method, which is just a simple formula based on how good/old a player is. But the complex algorithm works quite well in Basketball GM (fewer players), and it works okayish in ZenGM Hockey.
The permanent pulled goalie bug
There are plenty of bugs in my game. Usually it's something like "when I click on X it shows an error message" or "when I change two settings at the same time, it breaks" or "the simulation is doing really stupid stuff". Usually bugs are not very fun, they're just annoying. Maybe the funniest bug previously was when the effect of OL was reversed in Football GM, so playing a bunch of kickers at OL made your team dominate. The problem was that, in addition to being funny, it was also a game-breaking bug. Too serious to truly be funny.
Now I think I have seen (and fixed!) a funnier bug. This is a bug in ZenGM Hockey that only rarely happens. It's so rare that in the 2+ years ZenGM Hockey has existed, nobody ever noticed it. But recently it was noticed for the first time... when it happened with 8 seconds left in game 7 of the conference finals in a multiplayer league!
Goalie fatigue in the playoffs
In the initial release of ZenGM Hockey, starting goalies played literally every game, which was unrealistic. So shortly after that I added goalie fatigue to ZenGM Hockey. But I never actually explaind how it works.
Goalie fatigue works by tracking the number of consecutive games played by goalies, and then decreasing their goalie rating by some amount. That amount is the number of consecutive games played prior to this game, multiplied by a random number between 0 and 9% (the randomness is just so the outcome doens't look too uniform). So after playing 3 games, a goalie will be somewhere between 0% and 27% less effective than normal. If that happens to make them worse than their backup, the backup plays. This is nice because it lets star goalies play more, and it also gives you a good reason to have a quality backup - not just because the backup sometimes plays, but because the more your backup earns playing time, the better your starter will play with a little more rest.