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Visual Foos 2005

Soon after the release of CLibrary, 10K Monkeys is proud to present the second MonkeySource release, Visual Foos 2005.  I know, the name of the app sucks, but I was in a hurry.  Visual Foos is a foosball scoreboard witten in VB.NET with a SQL Server DB for tracking stats on our foosball table at work.  I wrote an article for MSDN's Coding4Fun that should be posted on March 10th, so check it out. 

Let's jump ahead a few days and assume you've read the intro on MSDN and you'd like to download the code.  Even better, you want download it, make it better, and send it back to me <g> 

So on to the install instructions. Let's just say this isn't ready to run out of the box.  You'll need Visual Studio 2005 to build this app and you can download the code here.

The Visual Foos solution file should open 3 projects and the website code.  The FoosSP Project contains all the stored procedure scripts and the table creation script. You'll need to setup a SQL Server DB or use SQL Express.   After you run the create table script in your foos database, you can then add all the stored procs.

The next step is to configure the FoosDataAccess project to point to your foos db.  If you right click on the project, go to properties, then settings, then you can add in your connection string.

The scoreboard app and website are configured to use the FoosDataAccess project.  You'll also need to install the fonts that are in the fonts directory of the Visual Foos project folder.

Now all you need is a foosball table to attach to the computer, or you can just manually track goals using the keyboard.

The website allows you to login and view stats, upload personal sound files, and change your nickname/picture.

Right now, I've commented out the instant replay code since I'm rewritting it with DirectX.

Since I wrote the Coding4Fun article, I've added a prediction engine.  Initially I wanted to use Analysis Services, but that seemed like a bit of overkill.  I included what could be considered one of the worst stored procs that I have ever written, which surprisingly does a fairly good job of predicting outcomes.  After several games worth of data it usually gets the winner right and now has become quite good at giving the spread.

If anyone actually uses this or if you have any ideas for furture enhancements, I'd love to hear about it. 

Some things I have in the works are a RSS Feed of games played, finger print or rfid scanners to identify players, force sensors to measure shot speed, and a more advanced announcer.

I have no idea how to measure force/speed of a foosball so any ideas would be much appreciated.  I am currently ranked as the worst offensive player, but I have monster shot and I'd like to brag about being tops in at least one category <g>

As for the announcer, I'd like to have some sort of animated character or maybe a photo of real announcers with animated lips.  I'd also like them to make comments based on game situations.  Kind of like Sega Talking Football, only less annoying.

Check back for updates!
Posted: Mar 06 2006, 09:47 PM by kmarshall | with 5 comment(s)
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Comments

lroth said:

I'm not sure how you would measure force, but you could set up some optical (photoelectric) gates to measure velocity. Basically you can set up the gates to record how long it takes the ball to completely cross through the sensor's line of sight. Knowing the diameter of the ball then gives you the ball's velocity across the gate. You could probably mount them inside the goals just on the other side of the goal line, to keep them out of harms way.
# March 7, 2006 9:23 AM
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