Mystify Soccer - Welcome to the new season

Welcome to the new season

Welcome to season 16 of Mystify Soccer. Hopefully this will be the season where improvements and changes are made to make the game better.

For now, there have been one or two subtle changes to the game which I will mention further down.

In terms of an overall update to the game, some of you will probably know that the first thing I had to do was convert the game code over to a new format before I could consider adding and changing features. This is now not far off being completed. Everything has been converted over except major cup matches. By this I mean the UEFA and European cups. These two competitions are still using the old code until I get chance to upgrade it. During this last season I have converted all the other processes over, including the complex end of season procedure which pays prize money and promotes/relegates teams amongst other things.

I am considering a quick solution to try and get the European matches to use the new game engine whilst I find time to convert the process fully but I'll see what time I have for this. By 'the process' I mean the cup draws, match reports, and displaying of the actual competition page as well as the match playing.

Now for the subtle changes to the game. The major one is the fact that there will be no English Challenge shield this season and onwards. This is because I won't have enough cup weeks for it in future seasons if I implement all the features that I want to implement, and I didn't want to convert the code for it when it could only be used for 1 or 2 seasons more. It may make a comeback in the future but I'll have to see. I have kept all the archive data in case it ever does.

Secondly, you will see that the league/division names have been changed to match real-life counterparts. If you think any are wrong then please let me know and I can easily change these. Some of you live in the countries in question and know the details better than my research.

Finally (from what I can remember) is the conversion of all the National cup processes to use the new system. This means the cups are run fully by the system without manual involvement from me. This should stop the errors in match reports and scores entered wrongly for National cup matches. It also means that I can highlight your team in the draw (if you are in the competition of course) and the results like the league data does. The results will also be listed in alphabetical order of the home teams as well to make spotting certain games easier.

That's it for now as the rest of the changes have involved back-end stuff (removal of old data tables and certain information that was stored in the database to run the game in its old format. All that is left is the European processes and then we can get some much needed improvements in place.

Hopefully there won't be any problems but please let me know if you find any. There's always a chance, especially with database tables having been taken out.