Introduction

Openfootie is back, having stripped out all the unnecessary complexity for a minimum runnable "product" (MRP) or minimum viable run (MVR), if you (or don't) like. No squads, no fancy team names (yet), just pure generation of football events and matches based on the data sample. There is not even a special treatment of goals calculation based on chances, it is all based on data for now. I think, this purist approach is more realistic comparing to introducing unnecessary elements, in order to make the output more plausible, before the structure is in place. This is something for later stages, now that we have a minimal implementation in place. In this respect, the data is also minimalistic. No need to cover too many details too soon, but only the minimal concepts to have a football match generated. No need for the nasty and baroque XML files as representation of the sample football match. I wrote the data sets in a symbolic and minimal represenational language, good enough to translate the data sets by hardcoding them in Java. In the future, the data sets can be loaded and/or translated dynamically to Java. Maybe, I'll use some different (domain) language for this and integrate the data sets in the whole engine, by using that same language for writing the engine itself (more ambitious and not seeing it happening, but good to think about it). Now, it's time to start building the features.