I would say about 50% of the feature additions for RTools, beyond just the basic functionality, came from a sentence with this line in it.
Today, two new features were suggested to me, both of which make sense and are currently in varying stages development:
- Match Slips: DCIRv3 orders the sheets in increasing order, or in a way to make it so that cutting on a paper cutter gives you the slips already in order. WER has the former, but not the latter. RTools will fill this gap, and also increase the slip density to 5 per sheet. (plus, one or two other neat little things)
- Side Draft Printing: If you've judged as many single-elimination drafts as I have, you could be handed a bracket (or even just a player list) and be off, knowing player seating and everything you need to go. However, not every judge has done hundreds of these, and it takes a while in DCIRv3 to print out all the needed stuff. In WER, it's a bit worse, as there really isn't anything to do this. So, RTools will soon have some functionality added to print out a half sheet of paper, containing everything you need to run an 8-man single-elimination draft, including draft seating and a bracket, both prefilled.
The first internal (Madison) test for match slips will be this weekend, and the testing for side draft functionality will be after the match slips are finished.
Now, there's a lot of other things that I've been talking about in recent weeks in terms of future updates, and I want to just give a brief update as to where these features are.
- Seating updates: All these changes have been completed. There is one small bug which I am trying to figure out in regard to v4 and the random seating, but outside of that things are ready here.
- 64-bit: I made a post a little while back with information on getting beyond the roadblocks that RTools has with 64-bit Windows. Currently I can get RTools running flawlessly on a virtual Windows 7 x64 machine I have been testing the fixes with.
- EPIC: I added "Event" to the front of the "Personal Information Center" specifically because of the acronym, and because it's been the reaction many people have had when I have talked to them about just what this can already do, and even could do. Right now all the relevant code is in a very early stage, just because the walls that I need to overcome are more related to finding a suitable web server than coding issues. If I work on anything during this time, it will be database optimization.
The problem with sending tournament files from RTools to the web interface is that there's no way to look in the files and know that if a previous round match has been changed. For instance, if you're in round 4 and a round 2 match result needed to be changed, there's no way to tell whether that change has occurred. As such, the current system literally deletes the entire tournament on the web interface and re-sends everything.
The way that I will work this interface and "fix" this issue is to provide two options with the transfer: Quick and Full. Quick and Full will both update player information completely, (as the web interface doesn't calculate anything; they're sent calculated from the program) but the quick transfer will only update two rounds: the detected current round and the previous round. This will allow you to pretty much transfer every time your do a new round pairing, and both get the match results and the new pairings.
So, EPIC will be worked on as a bit of a side-project for now. I'll probably look to work as scorekeeper for a PTQ and test-run EPIC during that event on a custom server setup. This is really the big wait-and-see part of the program right now.
- Release Timeline: First beta sometime during the next week. Full release should still be in the area of GenCon.
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