Important Announcement Regarding Future of PCCL

[sohum]

Fellow PCCL'ers. After much consideration, I have decided to stop development on PCCS/PCCL since I've spent too much time on it and not got the kind of results I've expected. I was hoping that PCCL activity would kick up this season with the innovations but obviously I was not able to execute on some things (such as stability of the DB causing live matches to freeze/be unviewable). I simply don't have the time or desire to continue working on it when I come and see that maybe 5 people total have posted during an entire round of matches. Perhaps I bit off more than I could chew and PCCL is better suited for an offline simulation system.

What this means for PCCS
PCCS 2.1.0 will the last released version of PCCS. I will not be making any more modifications to the source code or building a First Class Engine. I've learned a lot about software development through my time developing PCCS and learned a lot about developing a cricket simulator, with PCCS being effectively the third iteration of such software that I've made. However, the original design wasn't as bulletproof as I wanted so it's become a pain to implement new features.

I will be releasing the source code for PCCS as freeware with no license on this site in the coming days. Feel free to download it and play with it as you please. Perhaps you'll be able to refactor some of my muck and continue developing it into a valuable simulation tool for the cricket simulation community.

What this means for PCCL
I will not be running the league any more. If someone wants to throw their hat into running the league in the future, post in this thread. I'll let the current team owners decide who to elect as the person to run the league. I can continue to run the server that the PCCL web application is currently hosted on, but can't guarantee up-time etc. The source code will contain the code for the web application so with some tinkering, you should be able to deploy it to your own IIS server. I'll give you the PCCSDB file I'm using for the game so you can continue using it as desired.

What's in the future?
I am planning to take all the lessons I've learned here to completely start the CricketCareer.net project from scratch. For those of you who've been at PC for a while, this will be a familiar project to you. That iteration was in PHP; after my experience in ASP.NET with PCCS/PCCL I will be moving to that platform. While it would be nice to re-use some of the code from PCCS, I'm planning to design it from scratch so that I can use industry standard tools during it's development. Also, this will not be targeted as a desktop application so I will not have to spend a bunch of time working on developing a frontend UI in WPF, which I spent a lot of time doing with PCCS, much to my annoyance. I will be using SQL Server, as well, so it will be an industry-grade database solution instead of a much less scalable SQLite database format.

I will probably bump the/create a new thread about CricketCareer in the relevant forum. You guys can follow the progress of that project from that thread.

--

Thanks for the support. I've learned a lot throughout the process of developing these two applications, so I can't say that I wasted my time. But for me, the response just wasn't worth the time I spent working on it.

Cheers,
Sohum.

 

[harrisb]

Congratulations Sohum, i feel that you have done a great job with both PCCL and PCCS. And i completely understand your decisions for coming to this conclusion.

I'm very interested in this "Cricket Career" idea, and i'll be looking forward to hearing more about it in the future.

I would like to thank you for all the hard work you've done with PCCS, it is definitely the best T20 sim out there, however there were a few problems with the realism of some of the 50-over scores and that stopped it from overtaking Cricksim in my opinion.

However, there are some decent programmers on the forum, so it might not be dead.

All the best for your future projects.

 

[sohum]

Btw, for those interested in the old Cricket Career project:

http://www.planetcricket.org/forums/search.php?searchid=1832321

 

[ZoraxDoom]

Cricket Career was gonna be so awesome.

Looking forward to it.

 

[AbhishekS]

Good decision on your part Sohum. I have always been a fan of PCCS. It is just awesome. Good to see that you are also releasing a public source code.

Well, on seeing the threads of CricketCareer, it seems to be very interesting. The website gives me an error saying "You don't have permission to access / on this server."
Hopefully it gets sorted soon.

 

[Iridium]

Thanks sohum. Really enjoyed the PCCL. I think we all appreciate all the time and effort that went into running the show. Good luck on your Cricket Career project.

 

[AkshayS]

Really appreciated efforts on PCCL and PCCS, Sohum. I loved it in my debut season.

PCCS is a great sim and it's the best sim for 20 overs game and is gaining much popularity in Leagues section. I respect your decision to stop developing it but there are many good developers around here who can take it forward.

As for the "Cricket Career", it looks promising, I'd say whatever I've read about it, it might turn out to be awesome. So Best of luck on that part.

Kudos to your effort, don't think they are wasted. We actually had tremendous fun in PCCL.

 

[sohum]

The source code has been uploaded here. If you don't know what to do with it, you probably shouldn't be downloading it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4803054/PCCL/PCCS.zip

 

[Chewie]

Just want to reiterate what others have said and say thanks for making PCCS and running the PCCL. It has been a humungous effort on your part, and it'll be good to see what comes as a result of your new project. It is by far the best 20over simulator available.

 

[The Spin]

Many thanks for one of the most interesting PCCL seasons in recent memory. Your effort has been outstanding!

 

[BKB1991]

Yep Sohum was just brilliant with everything. We really appreciate your work man.

 

[KBC]

You've done an incredible job already sohum, If not for the PCCL/PCPL stuff, The stories area will be quite active with your sim

Good luck for your future projects.

 

[khaleel]

nice work sohum...really appreciate your effort.and PCCL was great fun too...wishing you the best for your new project!

 

[Themer]

Yeah thanks Sohum was a great season.

 

[Pranav]

This season was fun, but a bit disappointing in terms of activity.

Nevertheless, you've done a fantastic job and your effort is appreciated. Well done.