UHS Build 6377 – May 13 2014

AutoGM Logic Update
The AutoGM logic has been updated to handle various things relating to free agency, waivers, contract renewals and coaches:
– A Coach will have their contract renewed only at 0 years remaining and only if there is no coach available in free agency with a higher overall skill.
– A bid will be placed on a coach free agent only if the existing coach is at the Minimum Contract Reoffer value (default 1 year) or less and the free agent has a higher skill than the current coach.  The AutoGM will fire the existing coach if a bid attempt is going to be made.
– The AutoGM will look at how many teams are bidding on a particular coach before thinking about making a bid.
– Players will be renewed if they are under the Maximum Age Protected value (default 22).
– Players will NOT be renewed if they are over MaxAgeProtected AND have a skill than is more than 30% less than the team’s top player.  This is being done to coax the AutoGM to start looking at free agency for better players and improve the team.  We don’t want it re-signing makeweights.
– The AutoGM will now look at Free Agency and Waivers as other avenues to acquire players to improve their team.

Player Training
GMs will now be able to train their prospects for a certain fee.  The COM will set up three settings to govern this:
– Skill Pts / Season: The number of skill points the GM is allowed to train per season.
– Maximum Age: The oldest a player is allowed to be in order to have a skill point trained.
– Cost: The cost the team incurs to train ONE skill point.

A team is only allowed to train a player’s skill once per season.  By default a team would get 3 points.  They are free to use all three points on the same player as long as they are applied to difference characteristics.  This is to prevent teams from stacking all three points on something like the Skating skill.

Training can only happen during the Off-Season or Pre-Season.  If the training points are not used they are lost.  Skill points will not accrue over seasons.

To add some risk, there is a chance that training doesn’t actually update the player’s skill at all.  The messaging from the system will NOT indicate if training was successful or not.

When running in leagues with Skills Hidden, instead of seeing the skill values, the GM will see the scouting report texts for each skill.  If a skill is at 9, the option is still there to spend the training points, however, be aware that a skill can never go beyond 9…  a skill that is trained at a 9 would simply revert back to a 9.  Again, there will be indication if this has happened.  It just adds some risk & uncertainty when training your players.

SavePoints No Longer Converted
It was part of our conversion process when we went from UHS3 to UHSDark(4)…  it made sense to update all savepoints to ensure everyone started out on the same playing field regardless of what savepoint they were loading, especially since UHSDark had a few database/table changes.

Keeping it in our Release Task List did put some focus on how long it was taking to convert them due to the file size… which forced us to look at the size issue.  Even with compression, we were still seeing releases around 3 hours… the majority of that coming from backing up current SavePoints and then converting existing SavePoints to use whatever database/table changes we added.

I think 3 hours is still too long, so we’re going to go back to the old way of doing things…  SavePoints will not be updated during a Release.  They will be updated once a league loads them.  Doing this will add a negligible amount of time to the load process and it will mean that UHS’s Release downtime will be minimized as well.

What I am thinking though is that perhaps once a year we’ll shut down SavePoints completely and do a one-time update with all the changes that have been made.  Once those are done, SavePoints will be back up and running and we’ll carry on as-is until the following year.

Miscellaneous
– We’ve added Manage Coach, Protect Players and Retire Jerseys as menu options when hovering over Team > Personnel.
– There is a new Home page for COM’s Settings area.  This just gives you a list of links to use.
– SavePoint file lists are now zebra striped to make it easier to identify which file to Load or Delete.
– Added a listing of all teams in the league when clicking on the Teams link in Public Websites.  This will help alleviate scrolling issues for large leagues.

Bug Fixes
– Fixed an issue where creating Makeweight D-men would result in an error.
– Fixed an issue where a COM changing an account’s password would not save the new password unless a random password was requested.
– Fixed an issue where no message would appear when a user signed in with the wrong password.
– Fixed an issue where a reset password request would result in a blank error.
– Fixed an issue where players retiring were not showing whether they became a coach.
– Fixed an issue where leagues would not be locked when advancing from PlayOff to OffSeason.
– Fixed an issue where the automatically created savepoint would use the previous season’s number when saving.
– Fixed an issue where a pending savepoint would not appear in the list until it was In Progress when changing from PlayOff to OffSeason.
– Fixed an issue where a COM would see blank lines when clicking on the Power Play or Penalty Killing lines for a team.
– Fixed an issue where retiring coaches would not appear in the Activity Report.
– Fixed an issue where COMs sending players to the Farm without there being a full Farm System implemented would receive an error.

Hot Fixes
– Fixed an issue where errors would return if a team did not have finances set up properly.    This could result in games getting hung or using data from a previous game.  Released April 29 2014.
– Fixed an issue where the schedule would not change to the desired season using the public website.  Released April 29 2014.
– Fixed an issue where unset lines could sneak through the linechecker causing the sim engine to hang.  Released April 30 2014.
– Fixed an issue where coach free agency would run on a 24-hour period instead of the free agency hours value set by the COM.  Released April 30 2014.
– Fixed an issue where a pro team’s arena was not showing up in the Team Home section of the public website.  Released May 2 2014.
– Fixed an issue where the drop-down link for Team Personnel in the public website took the user to the Team Home page instead.  Released May 2 2014.
– Fixed an issue where the Auto-GM will use the wrong PlayerID for ActivityReport and PlayerMoves entries when creating a Makeweight.  Released May 4 2014.
– Fixed an issue where teams with an apostrophe in their names would not have players or goalie stats updated when using Live Mode games.  Released May 8 2014.
– Fixed an issue where Away team Goalies were not getting properly credited with shut-outs when games were played using Regular mode.  Released May 12 2014.