Quote:
Originally Posted by DrArbiter
Not to pick nits in an otherwise fine post, but not all independent leagues were outlaw leagues. "Outlaw" specifically referred to leagues which did not respect the contracts of other leagues, especially National Agreement leagues.
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Hmmm, I've always read the term as simply applying to leagues not part of the national agreement/organized baseball, not necessarily to those which raided other leagues for players. But I defer to your more in-depth knowledge in this regard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DrArbiter
However, often starting with a clear vision of what the system should look like in the end winds up leading to simplifications in the software engineering... There've been many times I have rewritten major parts of programs once I had a clearer vision of what the overall structure should be, and wound up with a program that was both much smaller and more powerful.
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This is it exactly.
Personally, it seems to me much of OOTP's growth in terms of features and capabilities has been done on an ad hoc basis rather than necessarily with any long-term specific goal or vision in mind. Users request certain features, Markus codes them in, adds a few things which interest him, puts out the game, which in turn garners more feature requests, and so on. How much of this is by design and how much by reaction I don't know, but it certainly seems as much random as planned sometimes.
I approach things with a specific vision and goal in mind: to one day have OOTP as the ultimate baseball sim. This means the user can select any year and have the game give a recreation that comes very close to that real year, in terms of player stats, league structures and relationships, finances, the whole deal, and regardless of whether it's for a historical or fictional league.
But to accomplish this means having a foundation within the game that can accommodate the full breadth of baseball's history in all of these various areas. The league structures and interactions of the 1920s is quite different from today's, for example, so the game needs to be aware of the differences and have a system by which both can be recreated by the user without an unduly complicated interface.
This is all doable, I feel, provided one thinks long and clearly about what needs to be included in the foundation and how it might be presented.
Then, with that foundation laid, the individual elements can gradually be put into the game each year. One year might see the introduction of a few league interaction categories, for example. The next version might see a few more added, and so on, until the full scope of the possibilties have been incorporated. With a solid, flexible foundation, adding all those options is easier than without such a starting point.