The KOA Tournament DB analyser
v3.4 - 24/1/2012

by Spyros Paraschis
spyros1973@yahoo.com

A small application to view and analyse the Kick Off Association Tournament database, maintained by Alkis Polyrakis (alkis21@freemail.gr)

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Notes
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The Kick Off Association (www.ko-gathering.com) is an on-line community devoted to one of the best computer games of all time, the legendary Kick Off, its managerial complement (Player Manager), and some modern incarnations (KO2002, KO2004, UPM, Throw-In). 

The KOA has over 1000 members and organizes Kick Off tournaments throughout Europe.

The KOA tournament database (KOATB) is the definite source of statistic information concerning these KOA tournaments. 

The KOA Stat Analyser, is a little application written to provide a complete and user friendly environment for processing the KOATDB. Its features include detailed stats for every KOA player, detailed matchup statistics, tournament information including scores and tables, cummulative stats for all tournament games ever played etc. Hopefully the interface is clean and makes using the program easy. 


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Installation
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The KOA Stats Analyser comes in two flavors; a. the full install archive and b. the update.

a. The full setup of the KOA Stats Analyser registers the VB runtime environment and the required OCX controls. The application also requires a version of MDAC (Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects) installed - normally if you have MS Office, you'll have this. If not, or if you face any problems, you can download MDAC from various web sources (Microsoft's site being your logical first choice) - I recommend MDAC 2.5, simply because my developing machine had this version.

b. After installing the application for the first time, you should also download the update, which contains the newest version of the KOATDB and may also contain an updated version of the executable. Remember, the full setup of the analyser does not include a database, so obtaining the update is required for the application to work. You can download the update from the KOA site - the db is always updated with the new tournaments' results. Unpack the update archive in the application's directory, overwriting the files existing there (make sure the analyser isn't running, otherwise file extraction will fail). 

When you run the analyser for the first time, it will prompt you to locate the KOATDB. This information is written in the koastats.ini file, so if you want to select a different file, just exit the application, delete the koastats.ini file and rerun the analyser. You should also do this if you have any problems starting the program or if you get strange runtime errors. These are almost always caused by using incompatible versions of the Analyser and the Database.

Please keep in mind that this little program was written in a hurry - in fact I worked just for a few days on it, so many bugs are expected to lurk in it. Comments and suggestions are welcome, even though I can't promise any enhancements.


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Usage
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Not much to say here, it's a standard Windows application with a (hopefully) easy to use and intuitive interface. One note though - if you want to export the data displayed in the tables the application presents, right click on them.


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Credits
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The application was coded by Spyros Paraschis (Abyss in the KOA forums) using VB. The freeware 'Chameleon Button' control was also used.

The World Cups playoffs and playouts screens, as well as the Groningen VII screens were taken directly from Alkis' KOATDB.

Thanks to Alkis for his comments and his beta testing. 

Thanks to the KOA community for welcoming this application and to each KOA member who proposed ideas for enhancing the application.

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History
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24-1-2012: Version 3.4
- Changes to accommodate the 11th KOA World Cup in Birmingham

8-6-2011: Version 3.3
- Changes to accommodate the 10th KOA World CUp in Dusseldorf
- A function to copmpare the db version to the one on the "server" (aka Alkis' page)

1-12-2009: Version 3.2
- Changes to accommodate the 9th KOA World Cup in Voitsberg.


1-12-2008: Version 3.1
- Changes to accommodate the 8th KOA World Cup in Athens.

28-11-2007: Version 3.0
- Changes to accommodate the 7th KOA World Cup in Rome.

6-8-2007: Version 2.9a
- A new option in Fantasy League for simulating A>B or A=B
- Minor fixes

17-7-2007: Version 2.9
- Added a new statistical category in player and misc stats: games/month in the last year
- Games between players are now shown in a single window (since after A=B it was obsolete to split them in Home and Away)
- The biggest win for each player is shown in the "Find Pair" module.
- Minor bugfixes

4-7-2007: Version 2.8
- Fixed a bug in the Misc stats display, as pointed out by Alkis.
- The last tournament a player has played, along with its date, is displayed in the players' stats, as suggested by Garry.

30-3-2007: Version 2.7
- Seperate Team A and Team B (Home and Away) statistics have been removed; with the advent of KOCV by Steve C, which has mainly been used in tournaments in the last year or so, these statistic categories were becoming obsolete.
- Enhanced the Rankings table to display the ranking points gained/lost.
- Enhanced the World Cup pages to include a player filter (so that only the games of the selected player are displayed).
- A world cup medals / 4th places / quarter finals appearances has been included (accessible from the World Cups section)
- A new section called "Country Stats" has been added.
- To calculate the hardest / easiest opponent of a player, a minimum of 4 games is now required (was 3).
- All the games a player has played can now be displayed in a single list.
- Clicking on a tournament name in the player's tournament positions list displays the info page of that tournament. Similarly, clicking on a player's name in the country stats link, displays the selected player's info page.
- Various smaller changes/fixes.
Thanks to Alkis, Gianni, Gunther and Garry for their suggestions.


22-11-2006: Version 2.6
- Changes to display the results of Worlc Cup VI in Rickmansworth.

25-10-2006: Version 2.5
- Fixed some issues with the calculation of the 'N Team' stats. In next versions, the A/B stats will probably be removed.
- Fixed a minor issue pointed out by Alkis when drawing the progress chart.

6-4-2006: Version 2.4
- In some occassions, the first appearance of a player in a tournament was calculated incorrectly. Fixed.

12-12-2005: Version 2.3
- Changes to accommodate the results of World Cup V in Cologne.

11-11-2005: Version 2.2
- Implemented the "active player filter", which replaced the "tournament participation filter" (a player is considered active if he has participated in at least 2 tournaments in total and one tournament in the last two years).
- Some statistics for "Team N" (see the FAQ for an explanation) have been added.
- Some internal changes to support more effectively various tournament formats.


16-8-2005: Version 2.1
- Made necessary changes to accommodate the results of recent and older hybrid tournaments (Milan V, Milan X and Homburg II).
- Enhanced html export abilities (not available through the interface yet)
- Some minor fixes

2-2-2005: Version 2.0a
Small bugfix.

24-11-2004: Version 2.0
Development was halted but after some "encouragement" by Alkis, I made a new version. The biggest changes were:
- Made necessary changes to present the results of the 4th Kick Off World Cup, held in Milan on 13/14 Nov, 2004.
- Added some more player filters in the Fantasy league - now you can easilly select the Top/Bottom 10/20 players.


5-2-2004: Version 1.9
- Added a new stat data display in the 'Player Stats', named "VS The World": See how a player has performed against all players from a given country.
- Added a helper app in the distribution package, the RankCalc. It is just a simple exe (pure Win32 C) that reads the rankings.dat data file (created in the Analyser's directory each time it is ran) and allows you to calculate the rankings points gained/lost from a given matchup.

(version 1.8 was not public)

14-1-2004: Version 1.7
- Changes to present the Norwegian Champs.
- Another addition suggested by Alkis - Added a new stat category (both in Player Stats and Misc Stats): Games where more than 10 goals were scored/conceded. 
- Added export feature to the Milan Champs tables / results grids.

7-12-2003: Version 1.6
- Corrected a spelling error, as suggested by Alkis.
- Added export feature to the player results listbox in the 'Find Pair' section.

14-11-2003: Version 1.5
- Made changes to present the 3rd World Cup.
- Added an option to force db stats recalculation (availabe from the Options screen). Previously the user had to either delete or modify the ini file to do so.

2-11-2003: Version 1.4a
- Fixed another (the last?) sorting bug in the Fantasy league table.
- Minor fix in exporting of tournament results.

31-10-2003: Version 1.4
- Corrected table sorting in the Fantasy league table.
- Slight change to display overtime and penalty results when needed.

1-8-2003: Version 1.3b
- Small bugfix in the easiest / hardest opponents calculation.
- In the 'Player Stats' section, the opponents who have a player as their easiest / hardest opponents are listed.

30-7-2003: Version 1.3
- Many many new stats, both on the 'Player' and 'Misc' sections have been added, as proposed by Alkis Polyrakis and James Beard: corrected easiest/hardest opponents, no of clean sheet games, no of games with no goals scored, most consecutive wins/draws/losses overall, as team a and as team b and many more).
- A country filter has been added to the 'Fantasy League' section (proposed by Alkis).
- Major changes to the stat engine. All data are now precalculated (a long process involving heavy math-crunching and data access, taking about 6 minutes on my development machine, a P3-850MHz Dell Inspiron - fortunately, it needs to be done only once for each version of the KOATDB). Data presentation is much faster. The db should not be read-only
- Speed increase (about 35%) in the 'Fantasy League' calculation
- Maybe more, I can't remember!

23-7-2003: Version 1.2 (not published)
- Added text/html export to all tables presented by the application
- Added the calculation of the two hardest & easiest opponents for each player, in the 'Player Stats' section

18-6-2003: Version 1.1
- Added a text export function in the 'List All' window of the 'Misc Stats' section
- Added an option to select a different version of the KOATD in the 'Options' section
- Corrected a mistake in the 'Player Stats', which resulted in the wrong display of the average value in some statistics.

28-5-2003: Version 1.0
- Adjustments to accomodate the strange format of the Italian Milan Tournament
- Small fix in Groningen VII playoff/playout screens
- Stored all additional bitmaps in the executable

18-5-2003: Version 0.9
- Resizable window with a custom resize handle
- In the Rankings section:
  a. Previous months' ranking points are now recorded and displayed
  b. A country filter
- In the Tournaments section:
  a. Correct no of tournaments shown
  b. Tournament dates shown
- In the Misc Stats section:
  a. Stats calculations are saved on disk - they will only be calculated once for every version of the db. Can be recalculated on demand
  b. Full sorted lists of all player's records can now be displayed
- In the Fantasy League section:
  Table position is now defined by goal difference when points are the same
- In the Player Stats section:
  a. Ranking progress graph for each player


30-4-2003: Version 0.8 - first public version


Athens, 15-1-2004
Spyros Paraschis (Abyss)
spyros1973@yahoo.com