Generating Newgens

This was originally posted on FMHVibe a while back, but I'm going to post it here too in order to help make this forum more active. Also, I can't guarantee how well this would work in practice, I have neither the PSP nor iOS SDK's, it's merely how I'd code such a feature on a low-specced computer (think HP Mini 2133 ) Enjoy

Some background

At the moment in FMH all players which are generated are "regens". This means the player has all of his stats based off a previous, retired player. Unfortunately this adds a layer of predictability to the game and removes some of the fun. For this reason the game should include newgens not regens.

However, with the small amount of processing power in a handheld device then it would be very clunky to generate stats for every single new player in the game, this would slow things down too much.

The solution

It's quite simple, as in Dr. Who the computer made everyone identical to save space, the game does not need stats for players that are not used or interacted with.

A newly generates player needs no stats, they are not being interacted with at all by anyone. It should not be until they're stats are first interacted with that they are generated, for instance when involved in a match (most players will not go straight into the team).

When a newgen is created it gets added onto a queue of starless players. These players can then be ranked on importance, which would be based off some polynomial judging they're reputation, player reputation, etc. to judge where in the queue they are added (quicksort is, as the name suggests, a fairly fast algorithm, with newgens you are unlikely to have a dataset too big to slow down the algorithm).

Then, as the game notices spare processing time, where it is not expected to do anything, for instance the player is looking at the news, then it will take the top player off the queue and generate stats for that player.

This should hopefully be a fast method of generating player stats, the main issue being in the importance vector taking up extra RAM, but the amount saved by players with no stats should displace this fact.

tl;dr newgens are nais.