Promising steps as first major test passed

As the early development of the Online Rugby League Match Engine continues the ORL, with the help from early adopters, have passed its first major step.

Over the past week since we opened the ORL in its Very Early Alpha stage many developments have been made, this included adding the ability for coaches to organise their own friendlies (removing the need for the Admin to act as a middle man) through challenging other coaches directly or issuing open challenges that other coaches can take up.

Further more the training and stadium upgrades actually have a direct impact on your players and those in the competitions that include player contracts, retention and negotiations it also impacts players willingness to want to sign with your club.

However, the biggest test for the ORL set up came on Monday evening; it was the first ‘Main Test’ of the most important part of the system – filling a competition and running it.

In competitions like this one of the biggest ‘drags’ is waiting for competitions to fill, sometimes it feels endless and many attempted competitions like this in the past have failed due to not enough people to fill the competitions. Therefore, the ORL Engine is built to recognise the cut-off time for registrations and then create AI-controlled teams to automatically fill the remaining competition spots.

This will then allow the schedule to be generated and matches for that competition added to the simulation schedule at their scheduled time.

Since opening the doors on our Very Early Alpha all eyes have been on the Knock Out Cup – a friendly weekly competition which begins every Monday with 32 teams, matches are played nightly with the losing teams eliminated until a winner is crowned on Friday. Then all the fun and excitement begins the following week.

With 32-teams needed for the competition to run as we wanted it was obvious that this was going to be the first test of this system.

Which is why when at 6:45pm the registrations were closed and we began to see the schedule posted was a very exciting step forward in development as it meant the system was working as designed. We did have an issue however of grounds not being assigned for those AI matches which meant the AI-involved games where they were listed as the home team were stuck in the simulation queue, a hot fix to auto-assign stadiums soon had the results pumping.

Despite the minor set back of the stadiums the important pieces of the puzzle were in place and a success.

• The system recognised the registration cut-off time and populated the rest of the available spots with AI-controlled teams.
• The system generated the competition schedule.
• The system (eventually) simulated all games and progressed successfully to the next stage.

We now sit back, enjoy sending friendlies back and forth as we continue to watch the Knock Out Cup unfold this week and ensure the rest runs smoothly before we roll out some minor fixes over the weekend ahead of next week’s edition.

Again the ORL would like to thank all coaches for coming on board and helping us test this system.