I have had this program working on the Linux box since mid-March. I just ported it over to Visual Studio (my main development environment) and updated it slightly 5/24/01.

Essentially this program sets up all of the home dates for for the entire season in the league. It needs several support files (all are linked below) to run:

• 1 file for every team in the league with the following info:
  • The first line contains the teams 3 character abbreviation (I have thrown out abbreviations right now and am using only numbers, though I have left the code to add abbreviations back later)
  • The preferred home dates for that team, in the order of preferences. Must use MM/DD/YY.
• A .ini file with general set up info (the league sets this up)
  • How many teams in the league
  • How many home games each team plays
  • The file names for each team's preference file, in draft order.

The way the program works

Essentially, the program loads everything from the .ini file first, then opens each of the team's files and gets their abbreviations.

The "draft" then proceeds until every team has picked enough games. I may change this later to allow for an "overdraft" to give more freedom in choosing games later. This change is easily accomplished by changing a constant in the code.

The first date from the first team is loaded and placed on the calendar. Then the next team is loaded, and it keeps going. In the event of a conflict (a date has the maximum number of home games) then the program discards the overflow date and loads the next date from that team and attempts to place that date, and resumes as normal.

The results of this program

The results of this program is simply a very long list of dates and the team numbers assigned to have home games on that date, in the order they were placed on the calendar, so the first person to choose a date gets first pick. This will come into play later as teams will certainly compete for weekend dates. This also allows them to avoid packing their games too tightly together, by not selecting dates too close together.

I have included 2 seperate runs of this program and the input files. Both runs work off of the same input files, which are the home dates used for the CHL 96-97 season. I ran 1 test with the full 10 teams and 33 home games, and all 330 games were placed perfectly (generating the exact same set of home dates from the 96-97 season). I also ran a smaller test run of 5 teams with 4 home games, but using the same set of dates as above. This schedule is spread MUCH wider than would be useful, but this is because I was using the actualy dates assigned for the 10 team season. A real 5 team schedule would be much more tightly packed.

The files

• The Source Code
• The 5 team .ini file, and the 10 team .ini file
• the results of the 5 team and 10 team tests
• The team preference files (in their draft order)
  • Columbus
  • Fort Worth
  • Huntsville
  • Macon
  • Memphis
  • Nashville
  • Oklahoma City
  • San Antonio
  • Tulsa
  • Wichita