The AI will now trade more than 2 draft picks at a time| zengm.com
Posts tagged "All-Star"| zengm.com
I just added 20 new teams to all the ZenGM games. Thank you to all the users who helped pick team names and to Elliott Strauss for actually making the logos. He's the same designer who made almost all the existing ZenGM team logos. I'll show all the new teams below, but first I want to mention a few related changes you may notice: In ZenGM Hockey, the Nashville Nightingales are now a default team, replacing the Memphis Blues. In ZenGM Baseball, the Chicago Gangsters are now a default team, re...| ZenGM Blog
New achievements| zengm.com
Posts tagged "AI"| zengm.com
Import Real Players, and how you can use it to create custom historical teams| zengm.com
Real players leagues created during the current playoffs now include draft lottery results| zengm.com
The latest update has two nice improvements to the cartoon player faces. First, relatives now look similar rather than being completely random. Here is an example of four brothers: Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Recently someone posted on Reddit about how he completed all the achievements in Basketball GM. In response to that, here are some new achievements! Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Merry Christmas! My present to you: 12 new logos! 5 new international teams in Athens, Delhi, Istanbul, Lisbon, and Seoul. 3 new American teams: the Colombus Cardinals and Raleigh Red Wolves, which will appear in default leagues in ZenGM Hockey (replacing Cincinnati and Charlotte), and Providence Shoggoths, which will appear in historical BBGM leagues from 1947-1949 (replacing the Providence Blue Chips). 4 of the original 30 BBGM teams got new logos: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Detroit. As a...| ZenGM Blog
Thank you to everyone on RedditandDiscord for suggesting names for new teams in some international cities. I got the usual logo designer (Elliott Strauss) to make the logos, and he just finished this week. There was also some good timing. Right about when these logos were getting finished, a user (utmothgirl on Discord) sent me a fun logo for a team from Kentucky. That is included in this update too. And as the title mentions, there was also a relocation in this update. Right after I released...| ZenGM Blog
There are plenty of bugs in my game. Usually it's something like "when I click on X it shows an error message" or "when I change two settings at the same time, it breaks" or "the simulation is doing really stupid stuff". Usually bugs are not very fun, they're just annoying. Maybe the funniest bug previously was when the effect of OL was reversed in Football GM, so playing a bunch of kickers at OL made your team dominate. The problem was that, in addition to being funny, it was also a game-bre...| ZenGM Blog
When developing ZenGM Baseball last year, there were a bunch of things I wanted to do but decided to leave for later. Can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good! One of those was the regular season schedule. In baseball, due to the large number of games with few days off resulting in the need to minimize travel, teams usually play 3-4 games against the same opponent, which is called a "series". In the initial release of ZenGM Baseball, there were no series, games were randomly ordered jus...| ZenGM Blog
Click to regenerate Every ZenGM game now supports women's leagues! You can set the gender of a league by changing the new Gender setting in the Players section of the league settings, or by clicking one of these handy links that presets the gender to female: Basketball Football Baseball Hockey Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Every now and then I write a blog post about purely technical issues I've dealt with that have nothing to do with sports or video games. This is another one of those blog posts! For some reason I want to talk about JavaScript bundling - how it was in the old days when I first started working on Basketball GM; how it's changed over time; and what I'm doing now. Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Every year I post some traffic stats here. It's a fun tradition because the numbers keep going up. I'm sure that won't last forever, but it did for 2022! Some nice milestones that were achieved last year: Over 500 million pageviews across all games, a 25% increase from last year. Total play time was 393 years. Since that is larger than the number of days in a year, that means that every single day, more than a year's worth of time was spent playing one of my games, which is kind of insane! Or...| ZenGM Blog
I know there have been a lot of logo updates lately, but this one is especially exciting. Elliott Strauss is the designer who did most of the logos in my games, and he just finished a new batch of 10 teams. There are a few straggling North American cities, but it's mostly international. You can use these teams in several ways. You can create a new custom league and click "Customize" next to the list of teams. You can go to Tools > Expansion Draft in an existing league and pick one of them as ...| ZenGM Blog
This time there are two new teams: the Quebec Voyageurs and the Anchorage Glaciers! Read more...| ZenGM Blog
There's a new team in the ZenGM universe, the Albuquerque Thunderbirds! Read more...| ZenGM Blog
There's a new team in the ZenGM universe, the Oakland Blue Oaks! Read more...| ZenGM Blog
This isn't that important of a bug fix, and I bet most people won't notice either way. But it does need a bit of explanation to make sense, so here is a blog post! Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Earlier today I released an update allowing the draft lottery to be customized, rather than only having a handful of preset options. You can set the number of picks to determine in the lottery, and set the odds for each team. Previously, my draft lottery odds calculation code didn't support this kind of thing. Originally it was 3 hardcoded nested loops to handle the 3 picks in the NBA draft lottery. Then when the NBA added a 4th lottery pick, I added another conditional nested loop. At this p...| ZenGM Blog
Some people reported performance issues in my games recently. After debugging I found that there is indeed a serious performance bug in some situations. For example, viewing the standings page and auto playing a season took 3x as long as it did a couple weeks ago. That's pretty bad! After looking in my past commits to identify exactly when the slowdown started, I found it happened when I upgraded @rollup/plugin-commonjs from version 21 to 22. That's a package used in compiling JS for producti...| ZenGM Blog
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with baseball. My dad says this dates back to watching the Mets win the 1986 World Series when I was a baby, but I don't remember that. I do remember my favorite childhood book. This was back before normal people had the Internet, and sites like baseball-reference didn't exist yet. But I had this giant book of baseball stats going back to the beginning of professional baseball. Just page after page of tables - standings, stats, playoff results, awards, etc. I ...| ZenGM Blog
Happy New Year! 2021 was the year of the variants. Here at ZenGM a new hockey variant escaped from our lab, and the existing basketball and football variants continued to evolve and spread throughout the population: Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Omicron messed up your New Year's Eve plans? It's okay, you can stay home and try to win one of these new achievements: Read more...| ZenGM Blog
In Basketball GM, regular season and playoff games are a bit different. In the playoffs, the coach shortens the rotation. Stars play more, depth plays less, and everyone plays harder. This means that top-heavy teams tend to do better in the playoffs and deep teams without true superstars tend to do worse. This presents a problem for the Power Rankings, which list ratings for every team in the league. Those ratings are regular season ratings, so they may not reflect how teams will preform in t...| ZenGM Blog
Previously, exporting leagues only worked for small leagues. After you played a couple hundred seasons, it no longer worked unless you deleted some historical data. A similar problem existed for importing large league files, although that was probably not noticed much due to the issue with exporting. That's why there have been no updates the past couple weeks - I have been trying to fix all these import/export issues. It's actually pretty tricky, because it requires rewriting a lot of my code...| ZenGM Blog
Do you like text-based basketball simulation? Then you'll love the new text-based slam dunk contest in Basketball GM! The All-Star Game has been in BBGM for a while. Now, before the All-Star Game is played, you can also simulate the slam dunk contest. The slam dunk contest has no impact on any other part of your league. It's just a fun little mini-game. But honestly, it's pretty fun. I probably spent way too much time working on it, but the end result is that it has a ton of nice little featu...| ZenGM Blog
There's a few new things related to the built-in teams: 8 new teams. Some are now in default leagues, others are available as expansion teams or when customizing a league. 3 old teams moved to new cities, to better fit their team names and make way for some of the new teams. 3 old teams got new logos. Most teams now have a more compact secondary/small logo that is used in places where there is not much space. For some teams, their old logo is now their small logo. Read more...| ZenGM Blog
Editing settings in a league has always been a little disjointed. There were some options available on the league creation screen, but others were only available within a league on the League Settings page. Now that has changed in version 2021.04.12.0826. The entire League Settings UI is available before creating a league by clicking the "Customize Settings" button. This isn't just good for consistency. There are also a couple concrete benefits of the new UI: Some settings really only make se...| ZenGM Blog
Positions in Basketball GM are determined by player ratings. There's some complicated formula that takes player ratings as input and spits out a position. However it sometimes behaves a little strangely, and this is something people have complained about in the past, that sometimes you see drastic jumps in player positions like a PG becoming a C. Hopefully today's change will improve things a bit. @nicidob came up with a clever new position formula. Read on for details, but ultimately you pro...| ZenGM Blog
As the maker of basketball, football, and hockey simulation video games, sometimes I get amused by all the silly little differences between the major American pro sports leagues. Maybe they need some kind of meta-commissioner to iron out all those differences. If duty calls, I would gladly do my part to help! I'm writing this today because I just rewrote my draft order code. For a long time, there have been options about how to handle the draft lottery. Those still exist. But what I'm talking...| ZenGM Blog
I started working on Basketball GM back when I was in college, in 2008. It was an on-again off-again hobby until 2012, when I got this crazy idea to make the whole game run in a web browser. In 2013 it got its first bit of publicity. That felt incredible at the time. I went from basically no users for years, to thousands of people trying my game in a single day! Sure, within a few days almost all of that traffic disappeared, but still! Thousands! Social media buzz is a crazy thing. Even crazi...| ZenGM Blog
2020 was horrible, but not for Basketball GM| zengm.com
Basketball GM finally has an All-Star Game!| zengm.com
Nostalgia from my changelog, and how to play 2013 BBGM today| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Settings"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Draft"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Player Mood"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Game Simulation"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Customization"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Hockey"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Free Agency"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Football"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Finances"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Contracts"| zengm.com
Free agent contract fixes for football and hockey| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Stats"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Real Players"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Basketball"| zengm.com
Null values for historical stats| zengm.com
View career totals/averages for ranges of seasons on player profile pages| zengm.com
Bulk actions from any table of players| zengm.com
Posts tagged "UI"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "Trades"| zengm.com
Posts tagged "New Feature"| zengm.com
Trading block filters| zengm.com
2024 usage stats| zengm.com
Slightly increased the "value" (used in logic for trades, free agency, and draft) for kickers and punters in FBGM.| zengm.com
Review of Dean Oliver's "Basketball Beyond Paper"| zengm.com
Improved UI for the four factors in box scores| zengm.com
Holds and blown saves in ZenGM Baseball| zengm.com
Neutral site for playoff/finals games| zengm.com
Team Notes| zengm.com
Advanced Player Search| zengm.com
Cap on fickleness of superstars| zengm.com
Gzip compressed league files| zengm.com
View signed free agents (not just available ones) on the Free Agents page| zengm.com
Shootouts - in all sports!| zengm.com
New "Compare Players" feature| zengm.com
2023 traffic stats| zengm.com
Basketball game clock rewrite| zengm.com
Play-by-play redesign| zengm.com
Football GM drive chart during live sim| zengm.com
Groundhog Day improvements, including a "players only" option| zengm.com
The finances revamp made coaching and health spending too powerful| zengm.com
Slightly more realistic contracts for real players| zengm.com
In these leagues, Random Debuts is enabled by default, which means any real players not on the initial teams will be randomized into future draft classes. If you want to disable this and have future draft classes full of randomly generated players, you can by clicking "Customize Settings" and changing the "Randomization" option.| zengm.com
Several small Football GM stat/simulation improvements| zengm.com
Finances revamp| zengm.com
Goalie fatigue in the playoffs| zengm.com
Better handling of players with gaps in their career in historical real players leagues| zengm.com
Bold league leading stats on player profile pages| zengm.com
Improvements to AI valuation of their own draft picks in trades| zengm.com
Better plus/minus stats| zengm.com
Game simulation settings for all games| zengm.com
Create leagues from a mix of teams - random teams, real current/historical teams, and teams from your existing leagues| zengm.com
All sports have an All-Star Game, and more All-Star settings| zengm.com
New "command palette" allows easy keyboard navigation of your league| zengm.com
New settings allow you to disable the salary cap and have more control over rookie contracts| zengm.com
New "Season Preview" page lets you quickly see the top players/teams as well as who is getting better and who is getting worse| zengm.com
Players act differently when they're in foul trouble| zengm.com
I rewrote the football game simulation engine to fix weird bugs and improve penalties| zengm.com
Basketball GM now supports the play-in tournament| zengm.com
Split By Conference - Previously, if you had two conferences, it would try to split the playoff bracket in half, one side for each conference. This just exposes an option to allow you to disable that if you want, so you can have a two conference league where the playoffs just include the top N teams regardless of conference.| zengm.com
No more hard cutoff in three point shooting tendency| zengm.com
Improved identification of rookie contracts in real players leagues| zengm.com
Randomize built-in teams when starting a new random players league| zengm.com
Players can now play through minor injuries| zengm.com