APBA GO Convention Updates
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Hi Everyone,
This year’s APBA Convention in Alpharetta was another good one.
In addition to seeing many members of the community in person, there were the usual shared insights into APBA’s past, present and future.
I gave two one-hour presentations in the morning. One was about the new APBA corporate site and online store, and the other about APBA GO.
I’ll focus on the latter here. :)
This year’s major updates to Go Baseball will include:
- Changes to the back end to faciliate the speedier creation and maintenance of the 2024P season (and all future Preplay seasons)
- A rework of the lineup selection process to include Historical Lineups - the as-played lineups for every game by every regular season team in the catalog (courtesy of retrosheet.org)
- As played Schedules for every game played by regular season teams in the catalog (courtesy of retrosheet.org)
- New functionality called Replays, which will allow users to replay a year’s games for all or a single team including automatic integration of Historical lineups and Schedules, and optional lineup rotations for multiple Autoplay games.
- At least one new Micromanager - 1970s era
Minor funcitonality updates including:
- The addition of divisions filtering in Collections for the American and National leagues
- The ability to designate Custom Teams as belonging to the American or National leagues
All of which should hit before the end of the year.
Currently the team is working on optimizing Autoplay games to allow chunks of, or an entire Replay to be played more efficiently.
I went on to cover Safe Bet Baseball, including a demo of its features and game play.
Other highlights of the hour included a look at the randomness of the APBA GO random number generator. While you don’t get my breakdown of the conspiracy theory I gave during the presentation, you can look at what one billion dice rolls using the APBA GO random number generator look like:
All of this was followed by a question and answer period where I addressed things like usage, scalability, infrastructure, the development team and more.
If in the future you’re contemplating going to the convention, I highly recommend it, as in addition to the opportunity to try all of APBA’s games, visit the company HQ and take in the collection of historic APBA memorabilia, you get to meet and hang out with a group of APBA fans and sports fanatics who share your interests.
Thanks,
Jeremy -
Thanks Jeremy. The consistent numbers on those one billion random-generator GO dice rolls are amazing.
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Thank you for the update! I’m looking forward to all those features, especially the replays.
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Jeremy, great update in the works! One request, can you work on the naming of custom teams so it does not show the word custom when searching for team in game setup and in collection/stats? Maybe more characters to help with abbreviations and if possible see the team/nickname in stats/standings?
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@mariner-0 Hi,
We recently changed abbreviations to 8 chars.
This is as big as we can go without disturbing the game screen interface.
I went over your other points with a new dev team member and we’ll try to accommodate your ideas in one of the follow up deployments to Replays.
Thanks,
Jeremy -
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@nmikleson Hi,
Goals:
- New site and store coming before end of year
- Modernization of ecommerce processes
- Better digital downloads
- Realtime shipping estimates
- Up-front payment validation and processing
- Better search and organization of products
- Corporate site and store in one location
- Modernized look and feel - mobile friendly
There’s a lot of behind the scenes work that has to take place before we can go live, but we’re getting there.
Thanks,
Jeremy -
@APBA-GO-Jeremy thanks for the update and for all that you do for the game.
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@APBA-GO-Jeremy Sounds outstanding… There are several of us IT guys in the APBA community if you want to reach out and ask for beta testers and the like.
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Thanks Jeremy. Just curious what is the rough rough time frame on the update?
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@mariner-0 Excellent question.
We’re hoping to have a version out in the next week or so but it’s subject to performance testing/scale testing.
We have a code freeze in effect (not adding more features/functionality to the release) but there have been bugs associated with performance optimization that are holding us back from deploying.
We do know it will be a two or three day release, meaning we’ll do a deployment with most of the backend pieces in place one day, and a day or more after deploy a release with access to the new features after necessary data has generated in the production environment.
Mostly we’re trying not to blow anything up, and the deployment date isn’t set in stone so much as it’s tied to having a proven stable product.
Thanks,
Jeremy -
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@chaneyhey Hi,
The field idea passed inspection and it’s been added to the list. No ETA on when it will be done.
The rest of the changes - Replays, etc. is still in testing.
There are performance hurdles we need to overcome before we can release it.
Lots of cyclical testing and improvements but every move forward seems to be taking us to a new problem :)
I’ll make a post when we’re ready to deploy.
Thanks,
Jeremy
