LeagueStats is a user-defined struct that we’ll use to keep our class definition simple and clear.
We’ll hold all important stats for our teams and players here.
Look at what’s in mine:We want to keep track of the teams in our league of course, so leagueTeams will store an array of Teams.
The last two variables, currentDay and gameSchedule, will go hand in hand with creating our game scheduler.
How Our Scheduler Will WorkLet’s say we want to make a league.
We want a simple ordering of games between all of our teams, but we also want some rules to apply to our scheduler.
Our gameSchedule will be in the form of a dictionary, mapping our season’s days (Int) to all the games scheduled for that day (array of Games).
We’ll navigate it with our currentDay variable as a key, and we’ll go through our season and play through all games in a given day.
Next, what rules should apply to our scheduler?1.
We want each team to play against every other team once.
We obviously don’t want a team to play against itself either.
So if we have 30 teams and each one will play against each other once, we should have 870 games in total.
So, when our seasons is ready to start, the leagueGames variable should hold all the possible games within our league:2.
We’re ok with more than one game happening in a single day in our season, but we want a limit of five games a day.
Teams also shouldn’t play more than once a day.
After we collect all possible games in our league, we should then schedule them according to any kinds of rules we decide on.
For each game, we’ll add them to our season schedule:The addGameToDay function will apply our preset conditions to add a game to a certain day.
We’ll fill out our opening day with a full slate of games.
Afterwards, we’ll randomly pick a day in our season, and see if we can schedule a game that day.
LeagueConstants is another struct to hold information about our league that will not be changing during our simulation:Now, we would only have to change the value here, instead of everywhere we reference the days in our season.
The canScheduleGame function will also make sure that a team involved in a game isn’t already set to play another game on the same day:3.
Some days, like Christmas or New Year’s, that occur during our season shouldn’t have any games scheduled.
As I’m writing this post, I just thought of this possible rule.
Although I didn’t implement this in my league, this is simple enough to do.
When we randomly select a day to schedule games, we check to see if that number happens to be a pre-defined holiday number.
If so, find another day.
We could even store an Array of these holidays in our LeagueConstant struct.
Progressing Through Our SeasonNow that we have the core functionality for our scheduler set up, let’s add some functionality to our league to use it!.We’ll need a method to progress through the days in our season, and play all the games scheduled for that day if there are any:While we’re at it, we can make some more functions to progress through a whole week, or even the entire season:I think we’re ready to test it out.
Results of Using Our SchedulerReturn to our ViewController.
swift file.
Because of the beauty of abstraction, we can create our league, set it up, and play an entire season in just three lines of code in our viewDidLoad method:Below is some of the console output:Looks good to me, at least for now.
Concluding ThoughtsNow, there’s a lot that isn’t perfect about our current scheduler.
Most leagues have teams play every team more than once in a season.
Some teams have way more away games than home games.
One team doesn’t have any home games, I think.
But the core foundation is solid, and we’ve done our part to build our scheduler in a way that it can be iterated on easily.
Aside from building out an important feature for the basketball simulation app, I hope this post can be used as a resource for anyone looking to build their own sports projects.
Either as a reference to learn more about how games are scheduled, or as inspiration to make it way better than mine.
Regardless, feel free to let me know what you think!.