The UFL Forum

Well, my name's WordsBG (or Patrick as I'm called in real life) and I joined this forum on the 3rd of April, looking for some game about football. On 7th Mai I send a mail to Ben, informing him that I would be interested continuing the programming of UFL. He even was so friendly to give me a copy of the UFL Source Code which is written in Visual Basic 6, which is definitive not a language I would have chosen, because I'm a happy Delphi and PHP (and some other stuff like python, perl ...) Developer.
Mainly because my very limited knowledge of football statistics I made not to many advantages in doing the next Generation of UFL. About a week ago I got a mail (sorry for not answering: I was on vacation and hadn't had access to the Internet for a while), asking if I'm still interested. And in fact I am interested in doing a cool and realistic football simulation as an open-source project. So I really hope somebody will read (and answer) this and might have the time to support this project. I don't have a copy of my old source anymore, but that shouldn't be such a big problem. What I mainly need to get things started are some kind of beta testers (even one would be great), who could tell me when something is unrealistic or when something needs to be changed. I'll update this thread when I have something to look at, which will take me - I guess - two or three days. When some of you foodball guys could look at it from time to time most of your wishes will be able to fullfilled.

-- WordsBG

I would love to help, I have a copy as well of the source code if you need them, you can contact me here if you need it. Also I was trying to make a pocket pc version in Basic but because it was written in visual 6 I was told I could not do it. My programming knowledge is limited as you can see, might you be interested in helping me with this? or anyone? Football season is right around the corner, I can't wait...has anybody put together a 2007 file? Thanks
Wis

PocketPC Version shouldn't be so complicated because there is free pascal for arm/wince (and maybe even for these old mips, but I'm not sure) so if UFL would be written in Delphi you could port it in some hours (which I could do, too of course, because I own an iPaq) - would be quite cool because Madden for PocketPC sucks imho.
About the data - If the engine (the core of the whole thing) is up and I have decided which data-format I could use (I guess XML is the best way to do this), I could program a dumper to dump the real player data from NFL.com into that format. In fact i've already done this when I was first trying to program UFL, but they changed the layout of the site and so my tool became pretty useless.

edit [07-08-19 06:34PM CET]:

I finished the Team Generation Tool which will give you a quick look at the new data format (XML) and the ability to generate own (up to now useless) Teams by random. But I need someone to help me out with the Mins and Max' of the Player's Stats. In the new version there are skills for each Player (Run, Throw, Catch, Kick and Defence) which are used to calculate how good a player is at his position. These values are random generated (within a specific range) based on the position. For now I copied the UFLv2 Layout and wrote an config.ini for it. But what I need is someone who knows what is important on which position (I guess everyone knows it, sorry I never played football in my whole life) and could write it in the config.ini (open it with Notepad or an ini-Editor). It's quiet easy you'll see sections like this one: There you set the values. For example a QB should be good a throwing, so set MaxThrow to 10 (the maximum) and MinThrow to 8 or 9. Because he doesn't need to kick a ball you can leave the Kick Values at zero. "Amount" means how many of this type are on a team (copied from UFLv2). After you have a good ini you can generate a team with the application in the "Team Generator" Folder. They will be outputed as an XML File (open in notepad, too). If you want, you can then adjust the values if you don't like them (so cheating is more easy now). The other files are source code files and you can look at them in Delphi (suggesting v7), which is a programming tool (note: not freeware, but sometimes limited free versions are offered [Turbo Delphi for example]). The gpl.txt is the licence I released it under, which says in general that everbody can use it for free and continue developing if he likes. The First/Last Name Txts are Name databases, which will have to be adjusted A LOT (Or do you want to play with "Zackery Troxel" or "Holden Fritts" as your WRs?!).
Anyway hope to create something playable soon.

Download Link: http://www.box.net/shared/pr1obvdmxx

edit [07-08-20 02:05PM CET]:
Just set up an wiki for UFL so we can put on interesting things and devolopment notes. Here's the link: http://wordsbg.uttx.net/UFL/index.php/Main_Page
Feel free to add and edit everything you want.

Madden does suck for the pocketpc. I would be eternally grateful if you might be able to port this to the pocket pc as I wouldn't even know where to start. Thank you so much for your time and effort in keeping UFL up to date and alive so more can enjoy.

Ok, my kind of dayly update:
Today I managed to start working on UFLs Core which is pretty boring because I haven't yet done any of the game-routines, but at school I had a lot of freetime (around 3h) where I wrote down some of the calculation routines I thought of. They need to be tested and stuff but I think they'll work pretty well when I finally put them into the project (which I'll do tomorrow after school in about 14-15h). The interface is redone and looks a bit like the old one, but in fact it's quite cool:


The gray background you'll notice on the pictures is an embedded ActiveX Component of MS Internet Explorer which allows you to display a HTML-Site as the background. What you see there is just a very simple 'skin', but you can use lots of stuff like flash or javascript to customize your version of UFL just the way you like it (It's just like Maddens Team Themes you'll get when you set your fav-team in the options - pretty useless but why not?).

Here's the source of the grey background: As you see: simple but in a way retro

It's great to see you working on UFL again, WordsBG! I have stickied this topic. It would be easy for me to tell you what ratings are needed by what positions, but first there needs to be more ratings categories. Here is a list of the ratings categories in the original UFL:

Years Played (experience)
Durability
Power
Speed
Running Skill
Passing Skill
Catching Skill
Run Defense
Pass Defense
Blitzing
Punting
Kicking
Punt Returning Skill
Kick Returning Skill

I would be happy to help you anyway I can on the new version of UFL!

Thanks a lot, I'll add some more. But do we really need to seperate punt and kick return - I mean is there really such a big difference? And how do Power and Speed affect the other values - because I thought the 'power' you have to kick the ball is already inside the 'kicking' skill, same goes to 'Speed' and 'x Return'/'Running'. Anyway I'll post some of my functions I want to use for calculating the chances tomorrow when I added all your new skills so you can look at them before I put them in the game. One of the things I wanted to do anyway is the posibility to mod the game in just the way you want. You can already add and remove positions using the config.ini file as you may have noticed. The same way you will be able to adjust let's say the length of the field (for indoor matches or - if you want to play in a soccer stadium). This way things like indoor football (requested here) shouldn't be to hard. Maybe even Canardian Football (haven't checked the differences, but I guess if it's not completly different it would be possible). Statistics will be the way you have them in old UFLv2 - maybe even a bit more detailed - with statistics for single players and teams. Internet/LAN multiplayer will be added when singleplayer mode is done. Leagues will have less limits than the old version (you will be able to play with as many teams you like with as many pre-session / playoff games you like). More on that when the game is at a stage where you can play a full non-league game against the CPU.
Another thing I need to know is: Which formations should be added because as far as I saw it on UFL they are not named the way they are in Madden. So for example I-formation or shotgun. Same goes to the plays (rush or off tackle) like they can be found on some wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_plays
So as a player you would select both formation and play or as a combination?
Other suggestions are welcome (yes I noticed the wishlist).

I would be interested to see what the other guys think, but I think that there should be separate kick return and punt return ratings because very often a teams kick returner will be a different player than its punt returner. So I think maybe there should be 2 different ratings.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about how UFL uses the player ratings. I have no idea what Power does, maybe some of the other guys have some guesses. But I would think that Speed is a player's outright running speed.

I like the idea of being able highly customize the game. And I love stats!

Yes, UFL does not name the formations. I would think Madden is a better resource for formations and plays than UFL.

There are two ways it could go with formations and plays: it could be simple like UFL with a small group of plays to choose from, or it could be complex like Madden where you have a numerous plays and you choose the formation and play. But again, I would be every interested to see the opinions of other players.

I think that what makes UFL so unique is some of the simplicity of the plays, I like the current system. However if you were able to choose which way you would like to play might be a good idea too, (indepth playbook or original playbook). I think power would equal strength. However I might be wrong. I agree in keeping punt returns and kick returns sepearate, but possibly adding a Special Teams catagory for stats where Kick Returns, Punt Returns, Extra Points, Field Goals are all under one view.
Also on that topic, is there a way to somehow limit the leaders to let's say a Top 25 Leaders? In the passing stats only allowing QB's to be visible in the leader's section because it always seems I have to search a ton through them just to find my QB or other QB's (yeah I am not that good at passing.) I know I am throwing out my personal wish list sorry just excited about the new UFL...

Ok, then you want to seperate thing a bit more like it was in the old version because I thought of calculating things like "how good can a player return a ball" at runtime using the catching and running skill in this case, because as a returner you should be good at both. Same goes to punting/kicking - I mean what these skills are in UFL is the combination of "how good can a player kick" and practice of it. One thing we could do is, like I thought using some basic skills and then "collect" their exeperience in doing things seperated. This way we wouldn't need to calculate age-limitations (is that even possible in UFL? Like creating a player played for like 40yr and is than worser than normal even if he got good skills?).
So I would have these things then:
Running
Passing
Catching
Kicking
Age (I thing having the Age is more clear than "Years played in the UFL" - which can be viewed in the stats too of course)

Plus the real 'skills':
Kickoff Kicking
Punt Kicking
Blitzing
Intercepting
Tackling
Durability
Strength

wich could be trained by playing or - why not? - Training Camps
So Skills like Returning would be calculated like Running*(Durability/10)*Catching*(24/Age) [Thinking of 24yr as a starter age - well I don't know which is it].
For example an 27yr old player with Running 10 - Catching 9 - Durability 8 would get 64% of the maximum (which are 100 Points) (perfect skilled 24yr old guy). The calculation I used is quite easy, just using Running (which is affected by the Durability [A Number lower 10 will produce for example 0.9 as you know]) together with the Catching skill and then adding a age-limiter to the whole thing. If someone wants to create something like kids-football we would need to turn of the age-limiter of course or he would get wired results. To calculate the returning we would of course need to calculate the defence stuff and maybe even the chance to make an returning-touchdown .
But well, it's your game and when I learned one thing in Linux-Communities it's that Newbies (like me in UFL) shouldn't make too many suggestions for changes because some systems look wired when you first look at them but start to make sence as soon as you know them closer.
Talking about Linux: Linux and Mac OS X will be of course supported systems for UFL, too - but on OS X UFL will need to run unter X-Window (until a native-GTK2 is out at least), but hey - it'll be playable native without emulation so not too bad I hope.

Hello,
Love the game & would love to see a good off season option built into the game.
With free agency & the draft. I now play Total Pro Football 2004 that came out in in 03 but is now defunct.
It had a great off season with hiring & firing coaches, Free agency, draft ect. I could send screen captures or
a copy of game if you wanted to check it out. The guy made Bowl Bound college football last year and is doing
a new pro game which will come out next year. Look forward to your game alot.
Thanks,
Scott