NSFootySim

NSFootySim is a program written in Java used to scorinate domestic football leagues and cups as well as some international competitions such as the World Cup. Though not originally intended as a competitor to the highly successful Leagion, its market share has been growing due to its usefulness as a somewhat more user-friendly alternative.

The current release of the program is version 2.0.1, released on August 11, 2006. The program is licensed under the GNU General Public License, and its source code is included in the download.

Features

The program will generate results for all matches in leagues consisting of two or more teams (the theoretical maximum is 32,767 teams, but this is untested). Each team can play each other team either once at home and once away or once on neutral ground. At the user's discretion, draws can be disallowed, requiring tied matches to proceed into extra time or penalty shootouts if necessary to determine a winner.

In addition, single-elimination cup-style knockout tournaments are possible with any even number of teams; rounds will be generated until an odd number of teams remain. Such tournaments, like the leagues, may consist of two matches or one in each round. An option exists to randomize the fixtures for the first round of the cup; otherwise matchups will proceed in the order defined in the input file.

Limitations

Unlike Leagion, NSFootySim does not have an "interactive mode" allowing one to scorinate matches without creating an input file. It has also occasionally been reported that all matches are generated with 0-0 scores. The cause of this has not yet been determined, but it is usually fixed by simply restarting the program.

History

The program was originally created in the late summer of 2003 by Bedistan as a simple DOS-based utility to generate scores of individual matches. At the time, it was programmed in C. In its first year of development, it underwent several wholesale rewrites and language changes, being converted to Java for version 0.2, back to C for 0.2.5, then to Visual Basic for version 0.3. During this time, it gained a graphical interface, a first among non-spreadsheet-based scorinators. It also became more powerful while simultaneously becoming more limited in scope