AntLog - double elimination result logging tool

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

Talking to people at the AWS, I don't think there would be much objection to reducing entries from 4 per team to 3 as long as it was absolutely necessary, and everyone had to do it. Its not as fun but most I mentioned it to said it would be an ok solution if it came to it.

[EpicentrE]

I was discussing this with Andy on the way back; I too wouldn't object to reducing entries to 3, as long as we didn't make the third have to be a walker or a cluster. I think walkers and clusters have their own advantages nowadays so that they don't need to be incentivised.

In fact, for all events, I'd be happier having 3 antweights per team, but an arena which produced longer fights, rather than having more robots having very short fights.

[BeligerAnt]

Without wanting this thread to drift further into a "how to run the AWS" debate...

Alex, we tried running two arenas several times in the past and it has never worked sucessfully.

The original 4 robot limit was introduced in the days when walkers and clusters were harder to build and consequently rare so few people actually entered what is now considered a "full" team. I don't see a problem with reducing the limit to 3 on a case-by-case basis.

I suggest we now get this thread back to a discussion of AntLog itself.
How should it be improved?
What are its failings that really need to be addressed?
What enhancements would be nice but not essential?
Does anyone want to help with AntLog3?

My plans for Antlog3 include coding it in PHP and hosting the project on GitHub to make collaboration simpler.
It will run on a webserver with a MySQL database to store the data. It should be able to provide both an admin back-end to set up the event and log results and a user front-end for competitors to monitor their own progress.
This is a big project with no clear timetable attached yet...

[joey_picus]

My coding skills are near-nonexistent but I do own OpenOffice (.org) on at least two computers so I hereby volunteer for testing duties and if there's anything else I can do - I have some slight experience with server maintenance - I'm more than willing to try. One thing I would like in that future incarnation, if not planned already, would be some way of searching the upcoming fights and/or groups for your own robots - I have no idea how large a job that is though...

I don't know if there's any major failings of the current setup of AntLog, but my experiences yesterday did highlight a potential problem with how hard it is to fix an incorrect result entry - or even to spot it - which is something that will inevitably happen as humans are involved. (no offence to the humans who were involved who put everything right, it happens!) I had a couple of words about that with Gary already and it's a hard thing to really deal with, short of having two separate people entering the results which is a little unwieldy to say the least, so does anyone more intelligent than me have any ideas?

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

We did encounter bugs with AntLog that me and Mark had to put right but he'd be much better at explaining them.

And without meaning to drift off topic again, with all due respect Gary, I can only think of 3 AWSs where we used two arenas and it always worked completely fine.

[BeligerAnt]

Well, after a few weeks of brushing up my PHP and SQL skills and getting to grips with the Yii framework, I have a working "first prototype" of AntLog 3.0

This is much sooner than I expected as using the Yii framework made for much less coding than I had anticipated.

AntLog 3.0

screenshot.jpg (57.31 KiB) Viewed 41371 times

It still needs quite a bit of work to get to where I want it but so far you can:
[*]Create a team
[*]Create robots (must belong to a team and weight class)
[*]Create events for a particular weight class
[*]Add entrants to an event (8 to 128 in 2, 4 or 8 groups)
[*]Run all the fights of an event, automatically handling byes

The "fights" view shows all the possible upcoming fights (not just 4). In the final stages you still lose visibility of upcoming fights because of the dependencies. I might look at ways to improve this but I think there are better things to look at.

The "entrants" view shows each entrant's robot name, team name and number of "lives" left - starts at 2 then goes down to 1 then 0 as you lose fights. The table can be sorted by robot and number of lives, and filtered by team and event so it's easy to see the status of all the robots in a team.

The "event" view shows all the robots signed up for an event. The "robots" view also shows which robots are signed up for the current event. Most of the views allow filtering and sorting, but some of it requires more work.

The biggest improvement over AntLog 2 is in the visibility of fights. Since AntLog 3.0 is a web application running on a web server it can support multiple clients viewing the database at a time. If the venue has a wireless network available anyone can view the data on a laptop, tablet or smartphone. I need to work on simply setting up a private network for venues that don't provide wi-fi.
Although AntLog 3.0 is a web application (makes use of web technologies) it does not require an internet connection. It runs happily on a laptop, and I believe a Raspberry Pi would be able to run it as long as it wasn't doing too much else!

There is still much to do.
Figure out the login and access restriction features in Yii to restrict the entry of fight results to the event organiser.
Now that the core logic is working, improve the user interface as it's very clunky in places.
Much more testing as I've only run one small event through it so far!
Detect the last fight in an event and actually announce that there is a winner. [DONE ]
Add a lot more error checking, input validation etc...
Add a facility to upload teams and robots from the AWS signup form.
Refactor some of the code where it is badly hacked together
Sort out a GitHub repository to share the code.
... and probably lots more...

[peterwaller]

Sounds and looks rather impressive I must say.

[joey_picus]

Looks very nicely done, good work I presume accessing the results is reasonably simple from a browser on a Wi-Fi enabled device, to ask the blindingly obvious? (maybe I'll have to finally upgrade my phone...)

[BeligerAnt]

Viewing the results should be easy (at the event). Viewing the results after the event relies on the event organiser uploading them to a website somewhere...

(Something else to work on )

Currently, from the home page, select Events, view the completed event you are interested in and click the Results button:

Results view

results.jpg (50 KiB) Viewed 41346 times

This is something that needs streamlining, and positions need extending beyond the first 8 places.
However, limiting access to certain functions by organiser login appears reassuringly simple

[Rapidrory]

Excellent!

Is the 128 entrant limit an inherent limit or just a user defined one? It would be hard to run an event with more than 128 entrants, but it'd be even harder if the software doesn't support it We worked out as load of contingency plans for the Reading AWS just incase we went over antlog's limit, but it would be nice not to have to worry about it if it's a simple change.