Mana Games

[Curtis]

I'm having difficulty getting started. I can't get the profile accepted. After I type in my name there is no cursor to move over the 'OK', so I can't get past that screen.

I'm also having difficulty with the cursor. It either swings wildly across the screen (on windowed mode) or barely crawls (on full screen). Do you have a suggestion?

[manutoo]

Curtis, you don't need to create profile to play ; and when u enter its name, just press the "Enter" key on your keyboard to validate it.
About the mouse, its speed in windowed mode should be the same than your OS (so u can lower the speed in the mouse setting of ur OS), and for fullscreen, u can edit the Tennis.ini to change its speed ; look for this line, under [Game] :
Mouse = 0.9
to make it faster, change it to :
Mouse = 2.0

[Curtis]

Thank you, Manutoo, that worked well. I couldn't find how to change Emily's birthday, though, and I know I've done it before.

I do have a couple of notes for when you work on your next version (I know; not for quite some time ). First, when Emily played in the France 1 and 2 Futures she had to sign up for the qualifiers for both singles and doubles. Not a problem. She went out in the first round of singles qualifying for France 1, but won the tournament in doubles. Then two odd things happened, one of which has since happened several times to most of my players.

First, she was prevented from playing in the singles qualifier for France 2 because she had not lost in the first round of doubles for France 1. If they were held at different locations I would understand that (in fact I asked for that two versions ago), but since they are held at the same location, it should be no more difficult than playing singles and doubles at the same tournament. This happens consistently, so I have had to cut my doubles play by half or more.

The second thing only happened once (so far). After winning doubles and not being allowed to participate in singles qualifying, she was forced to go through doubles qualifying for France 2. She only had to play one qualifying match, but that still should not happen. And after that she was made the top seed in the France 2 doubles tournament! How often is a qualifier made the top seed in real life? I bet it doesn't happen often.

Other than those things the game seems to run smoothly.

[manutoo]

Curtis, unfortunately, the engine cannot let you play in 2 different tournaments at the same time, even if they are in the same place... It'd need a lot of rewriting to make this work correctly.
For the doubles, the engine considers u have the time to play your qualifying match (which is the case), but it's true it looks a bit weird...

[Curtis]

I may not understand (which would not be the first time ), but two things seems to be happening with doubles that should not. I have been playing a lot of Futures series (three players who cannot get their rankings high enough to move on to the Challengers).

On at least six occaisions I have had players who were ranked well enough to avoid qualifying for doubles who then went on to win their tournaments. After receiving their trophy, they were then made to go through qualifying for the next tournament in the series. In three of the cases they were seeded 4, 3 and 1 in the tournaments they won.

In case I did not explain that clearly, my players who were ranked high enough to avoid qualifying and be seeded went on to win Sweden 1 (and Iran 1, Uganda 1, Italy 5, etc.), which should only have improved their ranking, were made to go through qualifying to play in Sweden 2 (Iran 2, Uganda 2, Italy 6, and so on).

The second odd thing is that in each case they were then made the top seeded team in the main tournament they just went through qualifying for! I could understand this if the following tournament was in another country, but I feel that if a player wins a tournament in a series they should receive a wild card for the next in that same series IF they had previously registered for it. And I just do not understand making a qualifier the top seed.

One other thing that is only annoying is that there seems to be multiple standards for who is ranked high enough to enter a qualifying tournament. I tried to get Emily and her partner into a $25,000 Challenger in Nottingham, but was told the week of qualifying that they were too poorly ranked. ALL FOUR of the teams that qualified into the main tournament had worse rankings than Emily's did (and Emily had not played again to improve her ranking). Similarly, a few weeks later there is a $21,000 French Challenger. All three of my Futures teams attempted to register. The two teams with the worse rankings were accepted with the proviso that they might not qualify when the date arrived, but Emily's team (which was 50 and 80 combined rankings better than the other two) was simply told that her registration would not be accepted because they weren't high enough. I think there must be a conspiracy against my Emily!

[Eterno Noturno]

Hello Manu,

It says it is not possible to unarchive the download. Error 1. Im on a mac 10.4.11

Cheers

[Eterno Noturno]

Hello Manu,

Tried again and its working fine.

[manutoo]

Curtis, I tried to reproduce the bug to be seeded #1 after have been qualified, but I didn't succeed...
U still have PPC Mac, not an Intel one, right ?

Other things u describe are a bit strange, but it can be due of difference of the players' ranking filling the tournaments... Also, don't forget, it's your ranking 1 week earlier that matters for the Main Draw.

[Curtis]

Hello ManuToo. Yes, I have a PPC, and I run 10.3 instead of 10.4.

Since I moved up from Futures to Challengers there have been no other problems, but I forgot to mention an oddity that occured about a year ago in game time. One of my doubles teams was entered in two Scandanavian Futures (I don't remember which, but I will say it was Sweden 1 and 2), followed by Belgium 2. When the third tournament started I kept getting messages that she had no available partners to spar against, so she ended up getting in a lot of calisthenics and serving practice (which she really needed). After winning the Belgian tournament everything became clear, as the game asked whether I wanted to send her back to the training center FROM SWEDEN. The reason she had no sparring partners was that she had never left her apartment in Stockholm, and the rest of the tour moved on without her. I thought it was considerate of the event organizers to allow her to helicopter in for her match every day. Or perhaps they were experimenting with a virtual tournament, and she participated via Wii?

I have a couple of other issues, but they aren't bug reports, so I will start another thread for them. Thank you.

[Curtis]

I have two more bug reports, though the first one may have been a cookie instead.

1) Emily and another of my girls were playing each other in the finals of a $50,000 Challenger, and I noticed that the Head To Head said '0-0', even though they had played each other several times before. I clicked on the text that said 'Head to Head', and it took me to a page that showed me they were actually 3-3 against each other. I had never seen this page before, and it had some interesting information. After clicking around it for some time I hit the 'Back' button, but instead of taking me back to the setup before the finals, it took me to a screen showing a stout fellow with a beard and a racquet held back over his shoulder. The heading at the top of the screen simply read '1751'. Hitting 'Back' again took me to where I was supposed to be.

2) This was more serious. As you may remember, I take my Fed Cup responsibilities very seriously. Since all of my girls were performing very well recently, I signed them all up for both singles and doubles for the first round of year two. (France had gone out in the third round in year one.) As you may also remember, all of my girls are French, so I knew most of them would get nothing but a 'thank you for thinking of us' note. Imagine my surprise when two of them received notifications that their country had not made it to the first round! Especially because one of them had won two singles matches for France in round two of year one. The other two (Emily and her partner) were accepted as a doubles team, and they fulfilled their duty, winning their match. Meanwhile, the second singles position was held down by some poor thing ranked 96 who really wasn't even that good, while my Tanvier (who was ranked 20 in singles and 40 in doubles — much better than Emily and her partner, who are around 160 and 180) sat watching the live feed from her condo in Paris.

What happened, and how can I prevent it from happening again? The only thing I can think of is that Tanvier and Pitkowski both tour with foreigners, while Bouvier and Lamarre team with each other, but that had no effect last year. (Tanvier was touring with Huber both years, although that may be why she wasn't chosen for doubles last year.) I don't remember this being an issue in versions 1.0c or b. It used to select the two best ranked singles and two best ranked doubles players from each nation, regardless of who their regular partners were.

EDIT: The same thing happened in the second round against Belgium, except that this time Emily was pressed into service as second singles. (She acquitted herself well, despite having almost no experience points left from pushing on to the semi-finals at Wimbledon the previous week. She took Applemans, who was a much better player, in three sets, then Wasserman 6-0/6-2 and with Lamarre again won the doubles match.) For the second consecutive time Tanvier and Pitkowski were informed that their team had not made it to this round. So, this was not a one-time glitch, but is a repeating bug. This could be fatal to france in the third round, since we face the United States, and Tanvier is a much better player than Emily.

[manutoo]

Hello Curtis,

1- I found & fixed a bug in the Head to Head, although I'm not sure if it's related to seeing this additional wrong screen...

2- actually, this bug was always there : the engine just looked for the first 2 coached players ; I fixed it.

version updated, u can download it again, it should work fine now (at least for the Davis Cup)...

[Curtis]

Thank you, ManaToo. Is there anything I need to do in order to not lose the game I'm playing? I'm not even through the second year, and Tanvier is in the top ten in both singles and doubles, and the other three are all in the top 40 in both singles and doubles.

[manutoo]

Curtis ==> /!\ Updating: when you update to a newer version, you have to transfer the "Profiles" subfolder from your previous TEM's directory to the new installation folder to keep your saved games.

[Curtis]

Sorry to be such a pain, ManuToo, but I can't replace the existing Doc folder with the new one. Sometimes it tells me that Images is in use, and sometimes that images.gif is in use. I don't know how it (they?) can be, because the program is turned off. Do I need the new Doc folder, or can I continue with the previous one?

Note that this did not happen when I updated from 1.0c to the previous build of 1.0d.

I just tried starting the game up to check on something, and I did lose my current game. It now thinks I was playing a men's tour. What I did was overwrite the Profiles folder in the new build with the Profiles folder from the previous build. Apparantly that was the wrong thing to do. What should I have done instead?

Not that anyone cares but prior to the tournaments of week one, year three (1992), my standings were:
Emily Bouvier participated in 15 race singles tournaments and 21 doubles. She was ranked 36 singles/23 doubles. She also participated in two Fed Cup rounds in singles and two in doubles, going 3-1 in singles play and 2-0 in doubles.
Lamarre was in 17 singles and 21 doubles tournaments. She was ranked 39 singles and 23 doubles. She also participated in one Fed Cup round in singles and three in doubles, going 0-2 in singles and 2-1 in doubles.
Pitkowski was in 20 singles and 24 doubles tournaments. She was ranked 29 singles and 25 doubles.
Tanvier was in 21 each singles and doubles tournaments, and finished at 7 singles and 13 doubles. She also participated in the Masters in both singles and doubles, going 2-2 in singles (out in semis) and 1-2 in doubles (out after round robin).

[manutoo]

Curtis, replacing the "Profiles" folder by the one from the previous build was the right thing to do, I don't know why it didn't work. And you don't have to replace the "Doc" folder...