Here’s the author’s post 
Hello again. No new build, but I expect to have a significant update available for the start of the French Open.
First of all I actually have a new reason against custom names. Setting up the match screen was enough of a pain when it had to handle Li and Hernandez, the thought of having to deal with a last name like Carreno Busta, Sorribes Tormo, or Suarez Navarro is terrifying not to mention Auger-Aliassime and Davidovich Fokina. It’s one reason that in Ace of Spies there just won’t be any hyphenated last names for tennis players.
Now for a preview of the actual update there’s enough going on that I’m going to number it:
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Most importantly a match engine prototype for doubles. It’s both more and less complicated than singles, more complicated because it’s twice the players, twice the skill variables. Less complicated because I can pretend styles of play are less important in doubles. The doubles engine will also feature my first attempt at randomized point generation (only used in long deuces which occur in roughly 10% of games). I’ll offer some more details when I update the build.
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Surfaces and playing styles in singles. I’m not crazy about how I’m implementing them, but they will be implemented so serve volleyers will get the maximum playing surface bonus(+4 for all skills) on grass, baseliners get the same on clay. To go with that I’ve implemented changing playing styles working off similarity scores for the styles. IE Serve volleying is more similar to power players than it is to defensive baseliners or tricksters. I’ve worked up two whole tables for them which will be included under the stats screen.
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A momentum function so that the skill ratio I’m using to determine game wins changes slightly from game to game. IE Breaking or holding at love is an indication of how the match is going more than holding at 40-30 and that’s now reflected within the engine. At the moment the singles engine resets momentum every four games, but I’ll probably change that to resetting every set or every six games at some point.
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New singles and doubles matches in Dubrovnik, Valletta, Austin, and Altoona to make the most of the engine tweaks.
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Finally a tutorial function to show what random numbers are being used. I’ve been using it just to make sure I know what numbers are going into where and figured it would also be a nice option for actual users.
Reminder all of those additions should be available in about a week, hopefully they’ll even work properly!
As ever thanks for reading, be back in about a week.
9 Likes
Missed it by a few weeks, but new update with functional doubles engine.
This update is unofficially dedicated to Martina Trevisan the Italian journeywoman, who lost in the semis of the French Open. Making it that far is the dream of just about every random tennis player making an appearance in Ace of Spies.
As it turned out dealing with the myriad bugs in the doubles engine was quite the headache, but the engine is up now. It is less polished than the singles engine except when it comes to the random point generator I’m using. A version of that will come to the singles engine eventually, but my main priority in the short term is more writing than coding.
If I’m counting correctly I should’ve added three new doubles matches(one each in Dubrovnik, Austin, and Malta), two and half new singles matches(one each in Austin and Malta, but the Austin one can be against two different players). There are over ten doubles partners available(Izzy, the Kyrgyz friend Rustamov/Murzaeva, Dunbar, Etxebarria/Zubeldia, Goralski/Gomes/Tieh/Diagne/al Shamsi, Boonen, Montoya, and Avery/Pendleton)
No guarantees there aren’t bugs all over the place, but the match engines should be working.
Tutorial info is turned on by default, but can be turned off in the stats screen. The style conversion table and surface affinity tables are present in glossary under the stats screen.
While the surface functions are implemented for singles, they aren’t fully implemented.(it doesn’t have an impact within matches just choosing styles before them)
Playing through the tennis engine I’ve started wondering if there’s too much tennis if I actually use the engine to handle every tournament I’m planning on including as opposed to say only doing one or two matches in each tournament.
My first reason for doing a lot of tennis action is that your character does a lot more tennis than espionage and the story should reflect that, but even though according to the books it’s clear that James Bond does way more desk work at HQ than being a globetrotting international man of mystery, but that majority of Bond’s actual work never makes it into the books/movies.
My other reason is that in the few Choicescript projects with the sort of engine set up I’ve done I find they always underuse them. I could’ve done with way more pitching in Fielder’s Choice and a little more crusader mech action in Ironheart and again the plan is for the final match engines to be significantly better than the current versions.
As ever, thanks for reading. Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
7 Likes
startup line 4230: invalid @{} at letter 1; ‘paper’ is equal to 11 but there are only 2 options
Ouch, so that one completely destroys the Austin tournament. Don’t know how I missed it. Should be fixed now.
Have fixed several minor typos along with it, including accidentally giving the Kyrgyz ambassador the wrong name and other messes from the Irish ambassadorial reception. Still playtesting to squash bugs, but have probably missed some especially if you can get to Chapter 2, that’s still a largely untested space.
3 Likes
Hello, much development going on, but sadly I’d need at least a few days of polishing/testing to put it into a position I’d be happy with, so I haven’t updated the build.
I’ve mostly been working on the Espionage Engine which is both more and less complicated than the tennis engine. It’s less complicated because well the missions themselves are less complicated than tennis matches, so less complicated from a programming standpoint. More complicated on the writing side. There’s some more detail on that below.
About the Espionage Engine
Five general operation types(provisional and subject to change later, specifically asset extraction and fugitive apprehension which are somewhat similar already) -
- Recruitment
- Asset Extraction
- Fugitive Apprehension
- Infiltration
- Surveillance
Significant variations within those five types(I’m not going to provide a number other than to say that not every specific variation will be seen in every playthrough) and within specific missions based on whether you have a partner, the exact target, the exact location and language requirements, that sort of thing. It gets complicated, but using those specifics as variables within a basic framework is actually simpler than doing full bespoke operations where I’d still have to tweak things based on tournament choice and language skills.
There will still be full bespoke operations at the beginning and end of the story, but the middle will mostly be tennis action using the tennis engine, spy action using the spy engine, and actual narrative involving the main characters. Hopefully that will make the middle go way faster for me as a writer than the beginning and end.
I want to have at least one of each type ready for a demo in the next updated build, though that’s less likely. I’m looking at a system similar to the tennis engine, the player specifies an operative type and a mission type to try and plays through a quick operation.
It is a little unnecessarily complicated, but I believe the payoff in keeping the middle of the story fresh will be worth it. This is the sort of thing I can try because there really isn’t an overarching narrative tying all of the action together beyond being a tennis player/spy and I’m trying to make the best use of that premise.
I can guarantee that status effects, injuries, and retirements will be included in the tennis engine the next time I update the build. That comes with the disclaimer that the retirements should be very unlikely unless your character is trying to lose.
On a related note I have never understood why forfeits or withdrawals are called retirements in tennis, it confused the heck out of me as a kid understanding that retiring means ending a career in anything else, but only a relatively serious ankle injury in tennis.
Lastly the final two routes for the summit will be complete for the next update, they’re close now, but polish is required and will take me at least a few days.
Thanks for reading, will try to have that rather significant update ready before the US Open… or before the end of the US Open or slightly after the Open, whichever way it goes the US Open is the target.
4 Likes
Mildly updated build. The updates aren’t polished yet and because I still haven’t fully tested them the status effects aren’t in.(I’m currently testing what I’ve added, so even I’m not sure where my typos might be.) My official recommendation is to feel free to mess around with the good old match engine, but that due to a lack of testing/polish the story might not be in a good place.
Well the US Open timing didn’t quite work. Nobody to blame, but myself I do tend to get distracted. Specifically with the espionage engine, which as I expected is both a lot of work and annoying to write for.
Espionage Engine Updates
The plan is between 10 and 15 choices per operation.(Possibly as high as 18 if working with a partner)
- Loosely split into five phases within the operation.
- Sometimes one type of operation can merge into a different type. IE Surveillance can become infiltration which could become an asset extraction or recruitment.
- 3 partner options. Usually chosen for you, but could be chosen by you. Moreno. Your chosen coach at the Co-op.
- At least three characters specific to the operation(nominally one target and two people of interest)
- Adaptive difficulty levels. IE If you go back to the hotel between phase 1 and 2 you could have a choice to study a phrasebook you picked up for the local language which will lower the language requirement for subsequent language checks or look up technical data for an outdated computer system they’re using which would lower the technical requirement. The reasoning being that you aren’t really improving your skills, you’re just getting better at this one operation specific thing.
Lastly I’m doing operation names too, because it’s fun. This is separate from the chapter headings and the Bond inspired names I’ve been playing with earlier, and just serves to add a little fun and immersion. There are more noir inspired Maltese Falcon sorts of things. Examples include: The Claw of (country name), (city name) Accordion, The Sparrow of (city name), (country name) Sundial, and (country name) Javelin.
With country and city names you might have:
The Claw of Latvia
Port Moresby Accordion
The Sparrow of Montevideo
Paraguay Sundial
Morocco Javelin
If anyone is interested in suggesting something along those lines it would be appreciated. Just as I appreciated all of the Bond-inspired name suggestions earlier such as Volley Royale.
As ever, thanks for reading hopefully I’ll actually have a polished build in a few weeks, but I wouldn’t bet money on it if I were you.
10 Likes
Update of significance!*
*If it works. Not fully tested.
Things I know work:
- Surface effects for playstyles(singles only) - It’s a little tough to prove because the light randomization means that unless you’re at the extreme of the RNG for base skills in matches I can’t really prove that the bonuses are taking effect, but they should be.
- More matches in the Austin, Dubrovnik, and Malta tournaments. - All three now have three singles matches and two doubles matches.
- Changes to the friends from spy school. Two things, first I decided it was weird to have an entire trio of non-binary characters going into espionage at the same time. So now one of them will always be male, one female, and the other non-binary. Secondly, I decided that a non-binary college wrestler would be too high profile for intel work so Giricek can only be male or female so Abarca and Caldwell are the two that can be non-binary.
Things that should work:
- Injuries and status effects - I know some of them work but they’re meant to be rare enough that I haven’t seen them all yet.
- Forfeits - They should work, but a forfeit requires getting the same injury twice which I think is a 1 in 3,250 shot or maybe 1 in 1625 because your opponent can forfeit too. However rare the possibility I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll offer the chance to induce a forfeit if your character is injured because I love the ability to throw matches.
- The Irish Ambassador - I’ve finally gotten around to the Irish ambassador turning up. After writing for her I’m interested in giving her and some of the other characters introduced in the Skopje flashback expanded roles.
- The Trans Andean Democratic Republic - It now has more figures with names than just Horacio Carillo. Introducing Fabiola Ascues, Cesar Duarte, and Miguel Rivera, I won’t be doing much with them, but I’m a big believer that giving characters names just as a way to make them feel more like characters and less like plot devices.
Things that should be done shortly, but who knows when I’ll get around to it the World Cup’s on:
- The Summit - As ever I’m close to being done with it, but I just realized I was doing a fair amount of stupid things so there’s some light rewriting going on.
The Espionage Engine is very much a work in progress, not nearly done enough to even enable the demo of it.
Meet a Random Character
Kirill Sokirko(RUS) - Sokirko is the little brother of a superior tennis playing sister the Asia-Pacific champion Irina Sokirkova. He plays in the Dubrovnik tournament against Izzy Noguera in the second round. I wanted some more variety from the tennis community I’m introducing and Sokirko fits as someone a bit out of the mainstream of tennis that could have associates that are up to potentially shady things.
As ever thanks for reading and sorry about any bugs that I’m off to search for.
11 Likes
Update of Moderate Significance*
*- If it works. Still not fully tested.
The first thing you’ll notice is the new introductory page so you can have an idea what’s going on with development without reading these posts or blundering through the story looking for new sections.
My primary focus for this update was finishing off the Summit(and darn it I’m even more almost done with it than I was last time!). There are significant updates to the Bolivian approach to the summit (your character can crack a safe now) and minor updates to the other approaches to the Summit. At least there should be if my programming has been competent.
In the process I got distracted by the actual unrest in Peru(there’s a link to an article about it on that introductory page), learned interesting things about the area I’ve set up for this breakaway republic and discovered a few very interesting things about sparsely spoken languages in the area around the Peruvian-Bolivian border.
Just last night I was watching the Netflix series Home Game about weird sports and discovered interesting things about Kyrgyzstan that I’m going to have to add to the character of Murzaeva/Rustamov. That’s not relevant now, but I’m going to wind up writing about just how much the Kyrgyz love their horses, if perhaps not so much about the bizarre sport of Kok Buru/Buzkashi.(look it up, it’s worth it)
Meet a Random Character
Katerina Zhukova(RUS) - Zhukova is the daughter of a prominent Russian oligarch who sits somewhere around 150 in the ranking in Ace of Spies. She plays in Dubrovnik against Izzy Noguera in the second round. Basically Zhukova is the female shady Russian character as opposed to Sokirko as the male shady Russian. No real writing done for Zhukova, but she’s supposed to be the most absurdly wealthy player on tour and someone that could have associates up to shady things.
As ever thanks for reading and I’m off to search for bugs.
10 Likes
I don’t have much of an update today. Work continues, but it hasn’t been a productive two months.
That’s disappointing to me, because I thought I left this one in a good place to wrap up the summit for my next update. Unfortunately reality intervened, there was a family emergency that ate up most of my writing time for almost a month. I won’t share the details, but it wasn’t pleasant and though things have resolved well, it still took up a lot of my time.
What I have been doing:
- Work on the match engine. Building out tennis archetypes and playstyles just to make my programming efforts a little bit easier.
- I’ve been filling out parts of the summit including visits to Huancayo and Puno and still have to put in a couple of matches to close.
- Accidentally coming up with a name that I wish I had chosen for this project instead of Ace of Spies. The Racqueteer - Which I really like, but doesn’t quite indicate the covert side of the story. Just wanted to share that a year and a half after starting this project I’ve finally come up with a name I like, even if I probably won’t use it for this project.
Meet a random character
Alistair/Eliza Dunbar(USA) - While I don’t necessarily intend on a traditional sort of sporting rival, there is Dunbar the UCLA player that defeated your character in the semifinals of the NCAA singles championship. If you’ve played through the Austin tournament you’ve been introduced to Dunbar who is a bit of a jerk. Being of a similar age to the player character Dunbar is someone that will be turning up in tournaments or on the periphery of your character’s tennis life for basically the entirety of the story.
I have no plans for Dunbar getting involved in the covert side of things, but Dunbar can become a more antagonistic force for the match fixing police if you get a little sloppy with your efforts to lose matches.
Thanks for reading. Hope to be more productive soon.
10 Likes
Reilly approves of this game.
1 Like
I wish I had a more substantial update.
This is the second update in a row that I have to say I don’t have an updated build. Basically I thought I was closer to being done with the summit than I actually am. I’ve wrapped up the section on Huancayo and Mayor Duarte while continuing to learn a surprising amount of interesting facts about obscure cities in the Andes.
What I have been doing:
- Work on the match engine. Now finishing up personalizing game descriptions depending on playstyles and the singles version of the randomized point descriptions already present in the doubles engine.
- As mentioned the summit. I’ve planned it out really poorly and I’m still not enough of a programmer to comment my work well enough for me to easily edit it. Thought I could be done with the Huancayo stuff for this update only to discover that there was still a section involving visiting Puno that I had to write.
- The intro for the Co-op. Been working on the first mission(a boring infiltration of a city government in New Jersey for training purposes)
- Endgame planning. The last mission or two is dependent on the relationships developed within your player’s career so it’ll be pleasantly complicated.
Meet a random character
Ronen/Rachel Mizrahi(ISR) - Mizrahi can be mentioned briefly in during the tournament in Malta. The greatest Israeli singles player in Ace of Spies, a friend and former doubles partner of your character, and possibly the best hand to hand fighter in pro tennis not actively moonlighting as an operative.
Mizrahi is one of the characters that turns up at multiple points in your tennis career, both in the lower levels of challenger tournaments and once your player arrives in the top 100. As a friend of your character Mizrahi has more involvement with your character than a typical opponent/doubles partner.
While Mizrahi is not a Co-op member they can get involved in the covert side of things, but they won’t be happy about it.
Thanks for reading. Next time I declare there will be an updated build! Probably.
8 Likes
Update of mild significance!
The meat of this update is the brand new tournament demo. Essentially instead of doing one off matches to mess with testing the match engine you can now* compete in a 32 person tournament. There’s also some stuff in the summit, but I’ve been focusing on the tournament demo for the last few weeks. I thought I could knock out a tournament demo in a few days, three weeks later I’m finalizing it. The thing has been a bit of a mess.
Still a better time estimate than I usually manage.
*- Finalizing some bug squashing so while I’ve been messing around with the tournament engine for the last few hours I haven’t actually uploaded it yet, but I will shortly. My hand picked top seed in this tournament keeps losing and I’m trying to fix it.
I also spent a fair amount of time rethinking the relationship options in AoS after reading a scathing article from the Telegraph about coaches engaging in sketchy relationships with their mostly significantly younger female charges.
How I'm addressing the coach player relationship(this will be a bit long)
Mostly your player doesn’t have to deal with it. Your player does have a primary coach and can enter into a relationship with the coach(who is between ten and fifteen years older than your player). The coach is very sensitive to such issues(as is the Co-op itself which generally discourages fraternization within the organization) as such the coach is very big on consent and will generally attempt to slow down any attempts at romance.
Firstly, your player doesn’t really have an outside coach that they’re paying. Coaches are selected from three options within the Co-op all of whom are former players. So the relationship is very different, more of a partnership and not just because you’re also doing the occasional intel operation with them.
Secondly, your player is always a consenting adult and a college graduate. That both means that your character is more mature compared to the minors some of these sketchy coaches take advantage of, but also that your character while popular doesn’t really socialize much with teenagers.
Thirdly, in the world of Ace of Spies the Global Tennis Confederation has acted to deal with this problem. For the purposes of these distressing, toxic, generally icky relationships I can also assume that the tennis world has been trying to deal with it for thirty or forty years. (The WTA and ATP both now have people appointed to roles to combat this sort of abusive behavior.)
In Ace of Spies that takes the form of a robust accreditation system for coaches, requiring the players and coaches to sleep in different rooms, banning coaches from locker rooms, limits on how many tournaments a coach can travel with players for, and a general trend towards the use of tennis academies(also accredited) for aspiring junior players instead of single coaches(so far there hasn’t been a need to mention any of this). In keeping with the AoS love of groups like the Match Integrity Task Force, the Global Tennis Confederation also operates a Coaching Ethics Task Force that polices potentially inappropriate relationships between coaches and players. The CETF is staffed with some professional investigators and the next best thing, a number of alumni from the Co-op.
Finally despite your character not being directly involved in an unhealthy player coach relationship they are still out there. Your character can meet and befriend players in that sort of a relationship and then act to deal with the relationship either directly, with the help of friends, or through referring the relationship to the CETF.
As ever thanks for reading, I’m back to polishing off that tournament demo.
12 Likes
No updated build because I’m polishing up a significant update to the tennis engine and it isn’t quite ready. Unless you last checked out Ace of Spies when the tournament demo was basically unplayable, it isn’t anymore, but was an important lesson in humility and the importance of proper testing.
Haven’t gotten a lot done on the spy sections, mostly dealing with some of the spy engine stuff. The nice thing about the tournament demo is that now that I know it can work I use many of the same programming tricks in the spy engine, so once I finish writing it I know it will work… Just not close to being done with it.
The main thing I have been working on is the modular point descriptions that I currently have for doubles but not singles. Quite close to done on those point descriptions, but not entirely done. My main headache has been that in those point descriptions I’m defining the server and returner with one as “you” and one as NAME the last name of your opponent. That causes the problem of writing point descriptions that make sense in both second and third person, which very quickly becomes a headache when writing something as simple as ‘server was ready for returner’s forehand.’
That statement will never work because ‘you was’ is just as wrong as ‘you’s’ when they should be ‘you were’ and ‘your’ respectively. The solution results is clunky, awkward, annoying writing, and has been bothering me for like a month, though it would probably have been bothering me for longer if I had done a better job of proofing the point descriptions in doubles.
Details on Point Generation
It can get complicated. I’m using 11 variables, five variables for each point, four that determine the actual description and a fifth that determines which section to use. Because I’m starting by dealing with only deuces that means ten variables. The eleventh is used to determine who actually wins the game.
Two are randomly generated from 1 to 3, two more from 1 to 4. The last one is generated from 1 to 100.
The smaller numbers are used for the multireplace function in choicescript. The big number determines how complicated the point is. There are several divisions 1-12, 13-24, 25-36, 37-50, 51-64, 65-76, 77-88, and 89-100, they determine which subtype of point is being described. In the doubles engine the complexity comes from having to juggle four players and their positions, in singles it comes from playing styles because I really wanted it to feel like playing a serve volleyer is different from a baseliner and that tricksters are weird and annoying to deal with.
The result is a LOT of complexity, which I will be quite proud of(despite the clunky, awkward writing) when I’m done with it, but until then I just wanted to scribble down for once just how annoying it has been.
As ever thanks for reading, I’m back to being tempted to do all of the tennis engine in the third person for the sake of simplicity and browsing wikipedia to improve the accuracy of my descriptions of foreign countries.
3 Likes
Updated build: Now includes modular point descriptions in singles for games that would otherwise have gone to deuce and been won by the server. There are some minor improvements to the summit, but I’ve mostly been focused on the tennis engine. Those improvements to the tennis engine should carry over to the tournament demo.
To do:
- Applying those modular point descriptions(I call it the Angry Socialist system because it’s basically mad libs and to translate that to American it gets you Angry Socialists) to tiebreaks. Because I find repeatedly typing modular point descriptions very clunky I’ll be referring to it as the Angry Socialist system(but not using the obvious acronym!).
- Still finishing the darned summit, which continues to be almost done, but again distracted by my work on the Angry Socialist stuff.
- Need to polish the angry socialist stuff in singles and doubles, the spacing bothers me a bit along with the very clunky language I complained about in my last post.
With current events I wanted to briefly discuss what I’m forecasting for the 20-30 years into the future setting of Ace of Spies. It is largely guided by one of my two superstitions when writing, basically back in 2016 I wrote out something in a then speculative future referencing in passing a crazy gentleman that ran for president and got a lot of headlines before flaming out spectacularly. The specifics aren’t important, but basically I no longer forecast in my near future work any developments that I would like to see happen out of an irrational fear of jinxing them.
Details of the AoS future
- Israel - Already mentioned in the Ambassador’s Reception section, but the Israelis are alive, well, and still something of an international pariah in AoS. Not what I want to see happen or what I think will happen, but necessary for the plot. Israel is also a special case because Rachel/Ronen Mizrahi is a recurrent minor character from the nation.
- Iran - Has moderated a bit and allows its athletes to compete against Israelis(because of the way I generate tournaments I don’t want to build in an Iranian only automatic forfeit function). Still the Islamic Republic because I’m not really forecasting any major changes in the larger middle east either.
- Taiwan - Still alive, well, and in a state of tension with the mainland very familiar to the present day.
- The Koreas - I’ve toyed with doing a Korean unification in this story(rebels upset about said unification would be relevant to an operation)
- Vietnam - Gets a new airport in Haiphong. As well as cooler relations with China. I think the airport is currently in the planning stages. Haiphong hosts a tennis tournament in AoS.
- Nicaragua - Gets a breakaway province on the Atlantic coast with its capital at Bluefields. They host a low level tennis tournament.
- Ukraine - I’m vague about it and don’t reference any specific territory currently claimed by Russia as still being in Ukrainian hands because of my superstition, but Ukraine still exists and the implication is that Ukraine has done fairly well in the resolution of the conflict.
- Russia - While the Russians aren’t explicitly losing in Ukraine in AoS the corrupt Russian oligarchy is still largely in place and has to be because any spy story just has to have Russians and Katerina Zhukova is a minor character and daughter of an oligarch, so there still have to be Russian billionaires.
- Tunisia - Is an exception because I referenced them as a democracy before they had a fairly major democratic crisis that I’m hoping they’ll resolve at some point in the next twenty years, but hopefully a lot faster.
- Nigeria - I’m forecasting less corruption, improved infrastructure in an around Lagos, but that’s really more generic moving forward twenty or so years which I do with nearly every city that I’m making available for the operations engine, than it is forecasting any significant developments within the country.
- Scotland - Has left Great Britain/the UK in AoS, I’m making an exception in forecasting significant international development just because Scotland has deserved a break for centuries.
- Peru - There is a secessionist movement within Peru in AoS(as detailed in the Summit) and the city of Huancayo has become something of a significant tech hub in the region.
Amusing anecdotes: It’s been a weird round of testing on the new Angry Socialist setup, I ran into a 7-0 tiebreak that made me check twice on my tiebreak system even though I knew it worked before. Won a 6-0 set with a generic serve volleyer against a defensive baseliner on clay, which was just super weird. It went to three sets but the serve volleyer still won and most of that was just getting lucky with the old RNG, but the skill ration was surprisingly even. It turns out they are almost exactly complementary in that the server volleyer hit the baseliner’s weaknesses just like the baseliner hits the serve volleyer’s weakness so I may have to do some tweaking on surface effects.
As ever thanks for reading. I’m back to polishing off the Summit yet again.
2 Likes
Updated build: Modular point descriptions extended to tiebreaks(you have to have already gone to deuce earlier in the match to see it, because I didn’t want to delete perfectly good code until I knew stuff was working) Added descriptions for different exes so Clark and Ezekiel no longer look the same. Added default races and aliases depending on choice of last name(you can still be a Caucasian Uehara or an Asian Okoye, but are no longer defaulted to being Dwayne/Rachel Sheffield from National Geographic. Still Dwayne/Rachel, but you can now default to Dwayne Shimizu or Rachel Fazari!
Messed around a bit with Microsoft’s AI image generator for a title image.(I liked the old one with a spade and tennis ball, but since I haven’t added any card games to this project the spade just seemed odd.)
To do:
- Doubles tiebreaks, doubles tiebreaks, doubles tiebreaks.
- Implementation of interactivity within deuces. I’ve mostly settled on a method, just have to code it. Will explain it in more detail once it’s implemented. So probably in March.
- Finishing the summit. I swear I’m almost done, just got a tad distracted the last week or so (the Australian Open probably has something to do with that.)
- Additional content for the Skopje reception(need to specifically add stuff for the low-level diplomatic staffers and Seamus O’Callahan the Shepherd’s Pie King of the Balkans)
- Doubles tiebreaks
Meet a Co-op Operative
Name: Malika/Khalid Salehi
Similar profile to yours, standout college player at good, but not great tennis program. Mediocre professional. Language skills in a number of Middle Eastern languages, mostly expertise in various dialects of Arabic.
Career high ranking (Singles): 117(Should consider revising that ranking closer to or inside of 100, any win in a major is likely to put a player into the top 100)
Career high ranking (Doubles): 86
Career wins in majors(singles): 2*
Top skills(Tennis): Backhand(top 50), spins.
Top skills(Espionage): Martial, charisma.
- Operative Salehi defeated the top American seed at the Grand American(#14 overall).
Quote about Salehi: “Salehi doesn’t just win arguments, we’re talking about winning relationships. You know how preposterously unrealistic it is when an agent infiltrates some organization and by the end of it he’s somehow become engaged to the boss’ daughter? That stuff actually happens to Salehi! There is still a head of a mafia family in Vladivostok that thinks Malika/Khalid is going to be marry his kid.”
While the Ukrainian war has somewhat faded from the headlines amidst the situation in Gaza the Ukrainian women at the Australian Open are still doing their best to remind everybody of their plight. If you have a minute look up what #33 in the world Lesia Tsurenko had to say about real happiness after losing 6-0, 6-0 to Aryna Sabalenka or what Marta Kostyuk said after making her third round win against a Russian player.
Kostyuk says “tennis doesn’t really matter” after matching career best result in a Grand Slam
As ever thanks for reading. I’m back to testing the match engine some more.
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Updated build: It’s a small update, just adding an unnecessarily complicated rock, paper, scissors type way of affecting the outcomes of deuce games. I think it works, but you would be surprised by the amount of stupid coding errors(using the wrong variables, forgetting to close a parentheses in a line of code that I copied like a hundred times)
So I do explain it within the current build but I basically offer three potential approaches during deuces(not tiebreaks, tiebreaks already have their own system) offensive, defensive, and neutral.
You select one, and the RNG chooses one for your opponent, I provide information for what the opponent has been playing like within that game up until the deuce. Then a second RNG chooses what your opponent will play like for the rest of the game. That second approach then interacts with your approach taking playstyle(baseliner, power, counterpuncher, etc) into account to determine who gets a boost during that deuce and for as many as three potential games afterwards. IE The rock paper scissors for baseliner v counterpuncher is different than baseliner v power or power v trickster. It was a headache to code.
I haven’t messed around with it that much doing playtesting, but so far I like the additional level of choice and feel of control over the match it gives a user. I’m in the process of adding something similar for doubles, but it’s more complicated with two more players and four different servers switching between themselves.
Yes, I didn’t actually deal with the writing much at all, but I’m pleased that I have something to update, even if I felt like an idiot earlier today as I was fixing that errant set of parentheses.
I think that at the moment there are only two more things I want to improve in the singles version of the match engine, so I’m feeling excited about the state of the tennis half of this project. The spy half really does need work.
As ever thanks for reading and I’ll be back, probably in May, hopefully with significant improvements to the doubles engine and more actual writing being done in the story.
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