Challonge Match Display - application helping tournaments run faster

[gazugafan]

Any luck with that pull request, Fizzi ? I can make a release in my fork and link it here if you want / are too busy.

 

[Fizzi]

Any luck with that pull request, Fizzi ? I can make a release in my fork and link it here if you want / are too busy.

Hey man. Sorry I didn't do this sooner. I do feel bad it must kinda suck waiting on me after you've made such cool changes. I'll try to be quicker about it in the future.

I did check out your changes though and I'm a big fan. Great work!

Also you might be interested to know that version 1.3.0 had 87 downloads total.

 

[gazugafan]

Nice! Glad people like it. Hope everyone enjoys the new ending animation :D

 

[StormofThunder]

Hey everyone, thank you for your hard work. However, this program just stopped working for me. I open it, in Windows 10 64bit, and it's just blank then Windows says it's stopped working. Basically, it crashes on startup. I've tried changing to different compatibility settings, but nothing works. Any help?

Edit: After a week it suddenly worked. Go figure!

 

[OninO]

Ok, I'm sitting here looking at how this works and I have tow ideas/feature requests. (Please let me know if I've missed an obvious feature).

1) You should be able to drag and drop matches in the TO panel to reorder them in both TO panel and Player panel. The idea being that not only are the currently assigned matches visible to everyone, the order of matches in the list after the currently asigned is meaningful. This is intuitive behaviour as the player panel looks like a list of upcoming matches.
(I know this requires completely changing the display code for the TO panel but I think it's worth it.) I think a lot more can be done with the vertical arrangement (listing) of the matches to convey tournament flow to participants.

2) You should be able to assign future matches to stations (Assign in advance). Particularly relevant for the stream set up. So instead of upcoming matches being just grey, they can also take on like a baby blue, or a faint orange color when they've been assigned for a future match. They'll keep their position below the active blue boxes but it will be obvious to the players that they must be at the stream setup and waiting.

The obvious criticism of idea 2) is that it's not the most efficient way to run the tournament from the view of station utilisation. That is, you may assign people to a station that takes much longer to complete than you expected, leaving another station idle. But I think maybe that's automatically handled by setting auto-assign on new matches?

Edit: The call pending anywhere is half of the functionality of idea 1). But I think matches called to any when all the stations are occupied should be colored differently to indicate that they're upcoming matches.

 

[Yumemaru]

This app is so useful!
You have my gratitude.

But, one can always do better, so I have a feature request.
That is to have the application create a text file with every result of every match.

For example:

WR1 <- the tournament round, eg: WR#, LR#, WQ,WS,WF,LQ,LS,LF,GF
A vs B 2-0 <- each line one match. Player 1 vs Player 2 Score1-Score2
...
<- (one empty line between rounds)
LR1
B vs C 2-1
...

etc....

Scores are omitted if a quick report option is selected in the Challonge settings.

The text file will be updated with each result submitted and finalized when the "End the Tournament" is pressed outputting the final standing like this.

001 PlayerA
...
005 PlayerB <- for ties
005 PlayerC <-/
...

^-- Optionally, the leading "0" can be committed for brackets that have less than 100 entries (although it's trivial).


(Implement this for other type of tournaments except DE that the application will support would also be nice.)

PS: If all this is unnecessary because already another app can do it please let me know. Thanks.

 

[gazugafan]

OninO : I get what you're saying about the order of upcoming matches being meaningful to players. I'm not sure I like the idea of manually re-ordering them, though, as that makes the TO's job more difficult. HOWEVER! Your second idea, to assign stations in advance, combined with knowledge of how long each match should take and how long each match has been in progress would allow the program to estimate the order of the upcoming matches automatically. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be able to manually re-order them if you really want to, too. It's probably more work than I'd like to put into this program right now, but I'm working on a web-based version that will eventually incorporate features like this.

 

[gazugafan]

Yumemaru : Challonge already gives you a full log of each tournament. If you're just looking to get that log into a txt format, I would think a separate program would be a better choice.

 

[OninO]

gazugafan Thanks for the feedback. Thinking about the work flow, I think the most important thing is just to be able to tag matches as destined for setups, the ordering is kind of secondary.

I guess this would require re-doing the data structure that assigns stations to matches? (So that' assignation is not destructive on the list or whatever).

 

[OninO]

Ok, more thoughts. I sat down and pretended to juggle two brackets, the second starting once the first had reached top 8. I realised what you need on the TO panel is projected matches, in lighter grey with both possible names separated by a slash. So, say match X depends on the outcome of matches Y and Z. Match X should be shown at the bottom of the list on the TO in the following format:

Round....Code.....Player 1.....Player 2....Station....etc...............
L2.............X........Y1 / Y2......Z1 / Z2........................................

Where Y1,Y2,Z1,Z2 are the actual names of the players who could potentially end up there. The amount of projected rounds displayed should probably be a setting. In fact, a checkbox "Show projected" would be ideal (as you're not really interested in the projected matches of a bracket just starting, although you might be).

The reason this would be helpful is that when picking matches in the the second bracket, I can see at a glance who's going to need to be available shortly in the first bracket.

 

[gazugafan]

OninO Yeah, I like the idea of showing projected matches and assigning stations in advance. I would think the projected matches should only go one round ahead (no more than two potential players per seat). This is what's displayed on the spectator window already I believe. Keep the good ideas coming so I can steal 'em for my webapp ;D Or get your C# on and fork this project on github!

 

[StormofThunder]

Yeah, assigning stations in advanced to matches that have yet to happen (but are already assigned which player vs which) would be very, very useful. Damn I need to learn C#.

Also, looking forward to whenever that webapp/web version releases.

 

[OninO]

gazugafan Hey bro, I've never really looked at C# code before, it all seems so ass backwards. Could you point me in the direction of the code that updates the TO panel (i.e. decides how many matches to display)?

 

[gazugafan]

Honestly, you probably want Fizzi to help you out with that. It's all MVC architecture, and I honestly never took the time to fully understand how it was laid out here. I only got into the stuff I needed to hack on for the features I wanted.

 

[Fizzi]

OninO So the way it works is that elements defined in XAML in the View folder bind back to properties of objects in the ViewModel folder.

So for the case of the matches displayed in the TO panel look here first:
https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...geMatchDisplay/View/OrganizerWindow.xaml#L294

ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource Matches}}"

In this case it's actually binding to a StaticResource, that means that it's defined in XAML as well, so let's find the StaticResource named Matches.

https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...ngeMatchDisplay/View/OrganizerWindow.xaml#L17

This is done in order to define a CollectionViewSource with a sort description. So the UI is basically saying that it wants to sort the data in OpenMatches in the ViewModel by the properties defined by the SortDescriptions.

But anyway the interesting part is

Source="{Binding OpenMatches}"

So it binds to a property called OpenMatches in a ViewModel somewhere (you have to find which ViewModel is set as this View's datacontext). I know OpenMatches will likely be an ObservableCollection of a certain type, that way when the property is modified, the view knows to update.

https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...chDisplay/ViewModel/OrganizerViewModel.cs#L28

That's the OpenMatches property. If you modify the contents of that ObservableCollection using .Add or .Remove it will update the view with the changes.

Hope this helps.

 

[OninO]

Hi Fizzi ,

That does help a bit. I'm wondering if I'm on the right track with the following:
https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...hDisplay/ViewModel/OrganizerViewModel.cs#L162

I should be able to change that line to check if the state is whatever state "waiting on winners" is encoded as by challonge correct? If I'm right, then that should result in every other match showing.

If not, then you must have logic somewhere controlling what round/or what state is allowable to be displayed?

The rest of the question about how to display the two potential contenders I'll have to worry about later.

Sorry I can't test this myself quickly, I'm currently at work

 

[Fizzi]

OninO Yeah that sounds right. It looks like that part of the code makes it so the only visible matches are those that are flagged as "open" by challonge. If you expand the if condition you can make it show matches that are flagged in different ways.

 

[Fizzi]

Also gazugafan : this isn't a huge deal but I definitely noticed some formatting issues in some of your additions.

Here for example:
https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...hDisplay/ViewModel/OrganizerViewModel.cs#L253

There's an extra tab added to that block of code.

This looks weird too:
https://github.com/JLaferri/Challon...hDisplay/ViewModel/OrganizerViewModel.cs#L286

 

[BigHairyFart]

It seems that this doesn't display the winner correctly when doing Round Robin. I don't know how this app determines the winner, but the top 3 stated by this app was not the top three stated by challonge.

 

[Yikarur]

Fizzi gazugafan
Thank you so much for this program and all it's features. I can't express how much I love this program and how much more efficient tournaments run since I'm using this program.
One very important addition: The program needs a search function. A simple ctrl + F for finding names would be amazing and would probably make the program perfect for my purposes. If you manage a very huge bracket with a lot of set-ups you lose important seconds by searching for a pairing without a search function.
Thanks for hearing me out

 

[StormofThunder]

How is development on the web-based version going?

 

[kiw1]

i know this is really old buuuuut

any chance of 2 stage tournaments getting implemented?

 

[nova_sorry]

Fizzi StormofThunder
I've been working on a web version of this and would love some feedback / contribution.

The beta is hosted here: http://challonge-to.herokuapp.com/#/ on heroku.
The code is open source and available here: https://github.com/novacourtois/challongeTO

It's not perfect yet, but people can currently run tournaments through it.
A weekly here in Austin, TX has started to use it.

Eventually, I'd be great for participants to be able to view brackets through their phones - as using the Challonge site on mobile to look at your next match is such a bad experience. I'd love to go through the technical details of something like that (It would include having a User base (consisting purely of TOs), so that their api_key can be used (purely on the backent to serve requests) to view tournaments.

 

[StormofThunder]

N nova_sorry Hey! Good work on starting on the web version of that.

The first thing I notice is a bug where certain players aren't displayed. This is what I mean.

I'd look into what's causing that, because it looks like it only happens with certain accounts registered on Challonge.

As for the rest, you know what features that are in this program that are missing from this one. List of stations, pending matches, as well as an actual bracket viewer tab. Another weird thing is how you can't actually go back after you chose a
tournament, having to go to the front page of the site again, click Get Started, and put the keys again.

But this is the starting point. Good work.

gazugafan I know you're also working on a web version of this same app. Any news?

 

[Yikarur]

This program needs a search function

 

[nova_sorry]

Thanks!

StormofThunder
In my scene, nobody does the whole 'registered on challonge' thing, so I didn't think that was an issue. It will be added to my bug list and prioritized because that's important.

- a proper station manager is in the works
- what's wrong with pending matches? I'm not sure what you mean
- as far as a 'bracket viewer', does a link to challonge not work just fine?

- the navigation definitely needs some work for sure. you shouldn't have to put the keys again though, it's saved on localhost. just click enter.

Yikarur
- as far as a search function, 'control + f' works just fine, no? I guess that could be an issue with mobile

- I plan on adding a 'filter' under the 'participant' view that lets you see what matches some tag has, along with a push notification when there is an update for you like a match being called

gazugafan
I had seen your post about a web app, but couldn't find any code on it. I had been playing with this idea for about a year, and definitely don't want to undermine your work. This is totally open source, and if you have some code I can merge my progress with yours.

Fizzi
I also don't want to hijack your thread.

Do you think I should make a separate thread for this?

I was also thinking about naming this "challonge match display online" because it's directly inspired by your work. Would that be alright?

 

[Yikarur]

no the challonge match display program in the OP doesn't support ctrl + F to search D:

 

[PCBYTC]

Here I am replying to a really old thread....but as a Challonge user (for Dart Tournaments) I like this little app, but I was wondering if I could easily hide the "Code" field completely, it's of no use to me. Frankly, all I really need is players and station ideally.

 

[Fizzi]

Here I am replying to a really old thread....but as a Challonge user (for Dart Tournaments) I like this little app, but I was wondering if I could easily hide the "Code" field completely, it's of no use to me. Frankly, all I really need is players and station ideally.

I haven't worked on this app in a really long time. That said it's all open source so if you have some programming knowledge you could do it yourself. https://github.com/JLaferri/ChallongeMatchDisplay

 

[PCBYTC]

I would not say I have much for programming skills, I guess I'll ask if there might be a way to motivate you to work on this? I'm not rich, but time is money?

 

[gazugafan]

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but after 6 years my "web-based version" is officially out of beta and v1 is live for the public! It's called RoundOne, and it's actually a full drop-in replacement for challonge (or startgg). I needed to do it this way to accomplish everything I wanted, which took forever, but I think it was worth it. It's a proper webapp that I host (with native app-store versions coming soon). It's not open-source, but it is 100% free.

Just like the Match Display application, you can create stations in RoundOne and assign matches to them. When you update scores on the streaming station, TXT and XML files are automatically updated that you can use in your stream overlays. Unique to RoundOne is that you can create multiple streaming stations if you want (not just one), and the files are updated via Dropbox. So you can just install Dropbox on your streaming computer(s) and then run the tournament using RoundOne from as many other devices as you like.

That part about using multiple devices is important. I actually implemented rollback netcode to keep multiple instances of RoundOne in sync in realtime. It works like Google Docs... multiple people can be viewing/updating the tournament all at once. So, you could have TO's assigning matches on one computer, the station assignments being projected from another computer, commentators updating scores on another computer, players checking their progress on their phones, etc, etc... Something I've found super useful is adding the station manager to OBS Studio as a browser dock and just running the whole thing straight from OBS!

It doesn't stop there, though... RoundOne uses the station data to give you ETAs on how long the tournament will take, how much time another station would save, when a station is overdue for a match, when a match is running too long, and when a station can be opened up for casuals.

After the tournament is over, it automatically updates every player's TrueSkill score. So you end up with skill rankings for everyone in your community with no extra work. On top of that, trusted communities all feed into global site-wide rankings for each game.

There's lots more, and lots more in the works, but that's the gist! Hope you check it out. It's available now at https://round.one