First, a brief announcement; now that times can be sent in via a form
on the WWW, I will not acknowledge new times sent to me any more,
even by oridnary e-mail. This is more convient for me, but will
require you the drivers to double check that each edition does
contain any updates sent. You should do this anyway since I do
occaisionally make mistakes...
Okay, now onto the fun stuff. Over the brief easter vacation I
started building some stuff for maintaining HOF2: Son Of HOF, ready
for when v2 of the game is released, hopefully this Autumn (Fall).
Below is a taste of things to come.
Design
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The new HOF is stored in a genuine database; currently, MS Access 2.0
is being used, but access is via ODBC so I could substitute something
else, such as Oracle, later on. The database is used to store
information only; it is not used to do any reporting. A simple form
can be used to enter information. Lap times are stored forever; when
a driver submits a faster lap, the old one remains in the database.
This allows two things. First, it will be possible to generate a HOF
as it would have looked on any given date, and show the changes
relative to any previous date. Secondly, if a lap time is revoked for
any reason, or moves category, the old one will automatically be used
once more.
To actually generate a HOF, I am writing a front end in Visual C++
with the MicroSoft Foundation Classes. This program, called "Hofman",
uses ODBC as mentioned above to access the database, and builds two
snapshots of the database, one for the "current" HOF and one for the
"previous" one (for comparison). It can then generate a HOF in a
variety of formats; generators be be added at runtime using the
Windows DLL mechanism, and can thus also be written in a variety of
languages. The DLL interface will be publicly documented (in fact, I
will probably release source code to the whole system) so that
others can write formatters. I will do HTML and plain text to start
with.
Thingss which can be generated will include championships for
multiple record categories, new lap times marked clearly in the
tables, the currently experimental information provided for Phoenix
only (time/MPH/distance behind), and more things which I haven't even
dreamed of yet. Send me ideas!
Status
------
The database is almost complete. Records need timestamping, but
otherwise all the tables and fields are present.
Hofman is partly complete. The user interface is almost finished
(it's just a single dialog box). Communication via ODBC with the
database is fully working. Actual report generation is totally
unimplemented; the snapshots are not constructed (this requires the
database records to be timestamped), and the DLL interface is not yet
defined.
I hope this has been of interest to some of you. For the brief time
the HOF was located at Rene Smit's home page, he reported that the
WC2PCHOF page was the most visited. Please feel free to send any
ideas or suggestions you have as to how we can make HOF2 an even
greater success than the current HOF has been.
Thank you and goodnight!
