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April Fools, streakers and a fixed substitution bug

Bubbles, FC Sunnyvale Developer 4 April 2014, 14:02

The weekend nearly upon us, so it is time for the weekly update.

April Fools

We obviously had to have a bit of fun here on April 1st. I put up a blog post saying that Virtual Manager was going to turn into a single player, offline game, and quite a few people actually fell for it. I hope you all have recovered from the shock ;)

Streaker

As a bit of extra fun for April 1st, we added also streakers to the game.

In most games played in the afternoon and evening on April 1st, a streaker would suddenly appear on the pitch and interrupt the game until the players or the referee caught up and tackled him. If you haven't seen it yet, check out some of your matches from April 1st.

It only took us about 3 hours to code the streaker and it's been a while since we've had that much fun coding a feature here at the office.

The streaker was also a hit on the forums so we are considering adding him in as a regular feature. If we do, he obviously won't appear quite so often.

Substitution bug solved

We have finally found the cause of an error in the selection of substitutes for players who are injured during the match.

The error meant that it was not always the most suitable substitute, who was selected - for example, a forwarder might be selected in place of a defender, even if there was an equally capable defender on the bench.

This error has now been corrected, and from now on, the system should always select the most suitable replacement.

However, keep these points in mind:

  • If you have set substitution rules, then they will always take priority, even if the player you have selected isn't the most suitable replacement.
  • Energy also plays a role in the selection. A forwarder might still be selected instead of a defender, if the only defender on the bench is so exhausted that his overall performance would be worse.
  • This bug-fix only applies to substitutions carried out during the match at the moment that an injury occurs. Next week we will examine whether a similar error might also have slipped into the routine that selects replacements at kick-off or when a player is sold or retires.

Have a nice weekend :)