Criggit - New cricket simulator coming to Windows

tglover

Club Cricketer
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Hey everyone, it's been a while! For those that know I worked with Syedur Rehman on Super Cricket Simulator back in 2001 as a bit of a high school project. I'd always been wanting to remake a more serious version that sits on Windows/Mac and was made for the cricket community.

Given Dan Thomas made ITC so well and he moved on to work for Empire (who intially made International Cricket Captain) I feel that as a cricket-loving community we haven't had, outside ICC, any good simulator in the last 20 years despite having so much to look forward to ... ESPECIALLY:
- Twenty20 internationals
- New cricketing teams (pretty much every country now with status)
- Advancement of smart phones, internet, technology in general, etc.

Of course there's been International Cricket Captain to keep us company whilst they have enjoyed a health monopoly. I'd personally like to try and change that because I really hate their business model which is to charge users to buy a new game despite the only change being an upgraded player database which they just pull for free from places like CricInfo / CricketArchive.

(Childish Things you are reading I'd suggest you switch to a web-app and subscription model).

Criggit as a project actually goes back as far as the mid 2000s but life just meant this idea got stuck. I originally was even prepared to outsource the development for this due to time constraints but this also didn't eventuate (as per a recent post). So I decided to make my own given ChatGPT etc can accelerate some development for when I would often get stuck.

The GREAT news:
After about 2-3 solid months of development (and pain along the way) I now have Criggit working for Twenty20 and One Day Internationals so far. Users can create teams that contain player information (at the moment I've got PlayerName, BatSkill, BowlSkill and BowlType) and will make more as I progress along. It simulates a full match pretty well (I'd like to think!) after testing for the last couple of months I am hopefully nearer to a release.

As for the UI/UX the intention was to try for a combination of nostalgia (ITC and HODI) whilst also trying to match ESPN CricInfo for modernity. We'll see how that goes!

Whilst I am super keen for beta-testers I am actually in really favour of building a community around Criggit to eventually look to bring this game to a web-app. That is to say that Discord will be a prerequisite to accessing the game (e.g. Login/Registration). This will be ideal for sharing of scores, requesting feature updates, etc. But for now of course we can use this thread for me to share development updates.

I'll attach just a couple screenshots at the moment which are UI/UX designs and not the simulator itself, although there is a 80-90% resemblance.

Roadmap:
- Tests, of course
- Player stats recorded
- Online functionality (likely a web-app)
- Mobile

etc etc
 

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pillowprocter

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I'd love to be a beta tester aswell, around what time can we take this thing for a test drive?
 

Neptune

Panel of Selectors
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Looks very promising, would be down for beta testing
 

tglover

Club Cricketer
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Australia
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For the meantime I can probably describe what I have built so you can start to get a mental picture of what to expect:

- Simulate Twenty20 and 50 Over matches
- Team selections from data files consisting of Team Name, Flag (png file) or HEX colour, then player data consisting of BatSkill, BowlSkill, BowlType (where 0 = None, 1 = Spin, 2 = Medium, 3 = Fast and -1 = Keeper).
- A team can have multiple keepers in it but in this case the keeper who is lower in the batting order becomes auto-assigned as the keeper (meaning the other keeper(s) could potentially bowl).
- I kept it a bit like ITC so our skills are more or less ranging from 0 to 70 (Bowlskill can be considered to be 70 minus bowling average, etc).
- Toss is automated and user controls both sides - I think a CPU option is doable but I didn't see it as a priority right now.
- Simulate each over - we have three main areas in the UI that you can observe namely the short scorecard (resembles CricInfo a little bit), then the over icon area (inspired by ITC), then the text ball by ball comms area (inspired by CricInfo comms and Syedur Rehman's simulator).
- Have a batting selector for opening batsmen and when a wicket falls - the batting order can be changed around and this reflects well on the scorecard
- Have a team bowling selector - see the full bowling list at all times
- Team batting aggression control works and responds quite well. The higher the aggression the more you're at risk of losing wickets, etc.
- Icons for all the ball outcomes, including each type of wicket. At the moment the "rarest" dismisall event I have is Hit Wicket, but I'm probably going to add in Obstructing The Field and Handled The Ball, albeit with life-like probability chances (1 in 25,000+ type occurrences).
- To simulate an over select the bowler and click "Simulate Over" - although I have enabled double-clicking on any list item in the simulator, so you can simply double-click on the bowler's name to bowl their over (much easier I find) especially for 50 overs.
- For no-balls we do have a free hit on the following ball as per modern rules. Unfortunately there is a weird bug that sometimes (not always) will duplicate the ball by ball comms for a no-ball event and I can't seem to work out why - but that's on my to do :)
- View the scorecard at any time (raw text format) in a popup window (the scorecard is not live it gets generated on a click event so you need to close and reopen it if you view during the middle of a game) - you can copy and paste from the scorecard or save it to a *.txt file. and I also have a Worm Graph control (hoping to add more Graphs soon).
- At the moment teams can be made simply with a text editor, but I have made a Team Editor *.exe too for convenience going forward.
- The Team Editor effectively can also act as a "First XI" selector because we select our playing 11 based on the first 11 player rows in the data file. The Team Editor has the ability to move our players up and down, etc.

More to come :)
 
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tglover

Club Cricketer
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Jul 18, 2022
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Australia
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Btw, would anyone be interested in trialling a weekly PBEM league using the sim? Hit me up.
 

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