I'm sure everyone here has heard of and/or used Tournament Maker 2, the de facto standard for organizing tournaments and running brackets. TM2 is a fantastic program, but it's been a very long time since it was released and the developer doesn't seem to still be working on it. Inspired by TM's functionality and convinced I could do better, I set out 3 months ago to make my own version of the program, along the way fixing bugs, reworking the user interface, and adding some needed features.
Thus was born tio ("T-O", or "tournament organizer"; yes, I'm aware this means "uncle" in Spanish ), an application that's almost a complete superset of Tournament Maker. Tio has all the features we love about TM2: tracking multiple games per event, easy seeding and bracket generation, and a simple, attractive interface for updating brackets. But tio has a lot more, including a round-robin mode (with the option to automagically import pool winners to a new bracket), highly detailed bracket results (more than just the overall placings), separation of players and teams in the UI, and a very very big feature I'm really proud of...
...automatic bracket updates online.
As a bracket progresses, tio automatically sends update to a web server, which displays up-to-date results for anyone to watch through their browser. These results include the same bracket image the tournament director sees on their computer, detailed win-loss ratios from each pool in a round robin, and overall rankings once a bracket completes.
You can see a demo of the online capabilities at
http://www.lbpolymusic.com/tio. There's a test tournament there with two games, one double-elimination and one round robin bracket. The page obviously isn't very pretty, but the functionality is all there, and you should be able to see a full double-elim bracket, match histories for each player in the DE bracket, and full pool results for each pool in the round robin (note that only the first pool has completed, and the second one has a single finished match). And yes, this is a fake tourney, with match "results" somewhat reflecting player skill but also subject to my own fancy.
Tio isn't done yet, but it's close enough that PrinceZane will be using it at this weekend's INNsomnia IV event. Anyone can watch the results update online at the URL above. I'll release a beta version to the backroom first, at a date dependent on tio's performance at INN4.
Anyways, I just wanted to share what I've been up to, and solicit any suggestions from SBR members. You're supposedly () the best players and most experienced tournament organizers, so I'd very much appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on features for the program.
Cheers,
Neal
UPDATE:
Ok, so here it is, my first semi-public beta of tio. I've included an almost-complete manual and an example tournament in the zip file below. Online updates are disabled for this release until I make some optimizations to the web server code. Until then, I'd appreciate attempts to break the application.
link:
http://www.lbpolymusic.com/tio/tio_1_0_beta_3_10323.zip
Please note that you need the Microsoft .NET runtime version 1.0 or greater to run tio. See
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...cb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en for a download.
for future reference: als het tournooi goed gaat en ik het dus vaker ga doen, dan kan ik dat gebouw voortaan ook voor een heel weekend krijgen :D dus dat is alvast mooi (moet het gebouw uiteraard wel bevallen zijn achteraf)
