Importing game logs

[ctorg]

One thing that I think would be a very powerful addition to OOTP would be the ability to import game logs, or to replay a game according to its log. It's kind of the next step beyond playing games with actual lineups.

This idea sort of popped into my head not long ago when I came across game logs from a very old Strat-O-Matic league I had. I thought it would be nice to be able to import the logs into OOTP and get all the advanced metrics that OOTP calculates. Then I thought, well, this is kind of something that might be interesting for people using real baseball game logs, too. However, real game logs don't always exist for every game.

So here's how I imagine it:

Right now we can set the game to play with historical transactions, and beyond that, to use historical lineups. So I imagine a third checkbox, "Use historical game logs". Obviously the first two would need to be checked for this third to be checked.

When this is checked, for each game, OOTP looks for a game log for that particular game in its database (the way it currently looks up lineups for particular games). If it finds one, it plays the game, play-for-play, according to the game log. If it doesn't find one, it uses the game engine as it normally would.

For my own purposes, I'd like to be able to edit the game log files, something I also wish could be done for the transaction and lineup files. But either way, I think this would be a good alternative way to build up league history in a way that keeps it very close to what happened but also allows us to keep more detailed stats for earlier years. I don't like starting a historical league and not having VORP or left-right splits or various other kinds of data for anyone from an earlier year.