You turn away your head from the keyboard for a while and a couple of months have passed since my last blog post! Sorry for that, but Bob Sunesson had other plans for me during the summer. However, we are close to the end of August and we can have a short look what happened the last two seasons.
We spent several months in one of our biggest change ever. Rewriting the Match Engine code was something we had to do if we wanted to improve it further. Using a language like vb6 was too strict and complicated in some cases. We didn’t have the tools and the freedom to improve both functionality and performance. Not even thinking about adding new features. Our developers spent several weeks to rewrite everything in .NET, which is the code language we use for the rest of the Hattrick website. The good news are that since last season, we run the new Match Engine with a bug free transposal process. However, during the transfer, we found and fixed a presentational bug in the old Match Engine where the stars calculation was wrong for Inner Midfield towards wing. The actual performance of that player was correct, so don’t worry about your past matches 😉
Some facts for the techies. About 17600 lines of code have been written, a few dozens of SQL queries have been updated and more than half a million of automatic and manual comparison tests to ensure that old and new Match Engine will have the same behaviour.
We didn’t stop there! In the last season, we were focused on the New Live Experience. A totally new design where you could follow your matches live with more suspense, action and of course a chat to tease your opponents when you are ahead on the match.
Some of the new features:
- A live 2d viewer of the pitch, where you can watch your lineup and chances for goal!
- A commentator who cannot wait to create suspense with his comment about the matches
- Split Event texts. Now, you cannot know exactly what is happening at once. Same starting text could lead to different events. A new rush to your opponent’s box, can be a goal, a corner or a foul in the end.
- A chat system where you can discuss and tease your own opponent, but also every manager that participate in the same league.
- Recommended matches. National teams, future matches and also your own manager network is everything that matters to get a new recommendation to follow a future match live.
- Free live ratings for everyone!!!
Again for the techies, we used AngularJS for it which gave us a huge flexibility and we will probably use it again in future projects. We first used it in our new mobile website and combined it with Ionic framework for mobile apps.
The implementation this time was somehow different from the past. We created an alpha version and then we released it to Stage, not only for bug hunting, but also for suggestions that we could implement asap for the first version. It wasn’t an easy decision since it took as a few weeks later in our schedule plan, but it was welcomed with open hands from users. The outcome? We had about 20% increase on the Live usage comparing with the previous weeks and close to 50000 chat messages since the release! Awesome?
Last, but not least, we created a new, experimental thread in Global forum for your own Small Irritations during your daily experience with Hattrick. Thus, the last one month, we’ve implemented seven of those irritations.
- Allow mentors to see scout reports
- Give full access of style of play in Lineup Simulator without a Tactical Assistant
- HOF length time is calculated from coach promotion and not the arrival date on team
- Add forum tags for national teams (16991382.137) – use [ntteamid = xxx]
- Sort results of youth leagues by first match date instead of alphabetical
- Make stadium attendance public to everyone
- Remember the last choice of filtering on matches list, so you can show/hide tournament, ladder and single matches
If you have anything to suggest, do not hesitate to post in the thread following the link: Small Irritations Thread
And here is a spoiler for our reader! Do you know that the 19th birthday of Hattrick are coming soon? Are you ready for it? Because we are eager to reveal a secret project close to that day!
Great job, involving players on stage was a good idea!
Any clue about the secret project? 😉
Great Job about the new HT-Live… and great idea opening the irritations thread…
“Rewriting the Match Engine code was something we had to do if we wanted to improve it further.”
What improvements are we talking?