Summary
Cricket Coach 2009 is a sequel to Cricket Coach 2007. I completed the title myself, with some graphical asset contributions from others. Work began in November 2008 and the game was released in June 2009.
Source Code
Due to the commercial nature of the project. Source code is not currently available.
Downloads
Cricket Coach 2009 v.312 Full Version Download (Trial mode unless a valid licence is activated on the system).
Screenshots
Development Notes
Work on Cricket Coach 2009 began in late November 2008. Cricket Coach 2007 had been well received, however I knew the game could be improved significantly in several areas. The first major change was to rewrite graphics/system code that had been DirectX/Win32, using instead calls to the SDL library. I did this as for similar performance I would gain in portability and reliability. My base system code in CC07 and CCPro had been good, but I was never 100% satisfied that it worked on a large enough variety of systems.
The GUI code was rewritten as well. Earlier versions of Cricket Coach had sucked CPU usage even on high power systems. This annoyed me and lead to a rewrite which meant by only redrawing/reading GUI when I absolutely had to I managed to get system CPU usage down to < 2% and mostly 0%.
On the gameplay front I rewrote the 2D highlights view to use the full screen. This enabled the score OSD to be larger and show more information. I also adjusted the highlights to use a scrolling engine, thus allowing the action to be shown from a closer in viewpoint.
In terms of data storage I enhanced the system so that stats from Twenty20 games were stored. Additional features such as world rankings were added.
A new GUI was created with help from Dustin Smither. Kiki Snell assisted by creating umpire graphics which are used in the 2D view.
An updated player database was built in addition to a completely revamped tour database.
A later edition added tournaments featuring lower ranked countries such as Ireland and Holland. These tournaments allowed these ‘minnow’ nations to quality for test match status and compete against the likes of England and Australia. This feature ultimately proved to be the most popular feature of the release.
Testing occurred in March, April and May of 2009. The game was released online on June 24th 2009, priced at £19.99. A retail release will follow in 2010.
