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Netrunner General
21

Thanks for the replies!
I neither understand the need or the desire for such a program, but at least I understand now what you are talking about. Thank you! :wink:

22

I believe FFG built TOME in-house, so it’s pretty likely that they already have some developers. They’ve also built mobile apps to compliment their games (i.e. XCOM), which I think was done in-house, but I haven’t looked it up.

The glimpses I’ve gotten of TOME is that it’s a web app, so they likely have some kind of hardware infrastructure to be able to host it and allow all the stores that uses for all their games. They could possibly go in the direction of adding some kind of record keeping in their TOME infrastructure and it might not be a huge effort.

But, given how long it took to roll-out TOME, a year is definitely not too long.

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23

TOME is a very weird web app. It appears to only use local storage. The good side of this is that you don’t need an account for it and it can run without an internet connection; the bad side is that FFG gets no tournament data, multiple people can’t view the same tournament, you may lose data if something goes wrong on your computer, and you can’t keep your past tournaments stored in TOME. More critically, it means they don’t actually have the infrastructure that you’re suggesting they could build on.

It’s true that FFG is listed as the publisher for their mobile apps. I figure that either the TOME team is entirely separate, or the dev team has some kind of grudge against web apps. Or they’re being micro-managed for TOME only by someone with a very poor understanding of how web apps should work.

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24

Oh, didn’t know that about TOME. That likely removes a lot of the benefits I assumed about their development capabilities.

I suspect that their Apps team is separate. Given what you said about TOME, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just one or two people in the OP team that wanted to try out some rusty development skills and build it for fun, and they liked it well enough that FFG blessed it as their tournament software.

25

Yeah, that would make a lot of sense.

It’s open to everyone now, if you feel like playing around with it.

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26

TOME doesn’t seem to use any kind of database, it’s just a web app that works locally hosted on their web space.
FFG could easily outsource the development of this software, it’s a pretty straight forward database with litterally a couple of web pages for the data input, and rent the server space needed to handle it. I don’t know the actual size of FFG and how much money they budget on IT, but it shouldn’t be a prohibitive cost for them.

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28

Yep, @Absotively already pointed out that it’s a web app that seems to only have local storage. If they already have people that are capable of building it, maybe they have enough skill to make a simple database back-end.

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29

I didn’t know that about TOME. That shows a possibility of development in-house capability.

I did know about the X-COM app, and I’m almost certain that wasn’t developed in-house. I’d bet it was contracted. It can be difficult to positively identify who actually made computer programs, though. The plus side is that either way, they have an in with someone who’s capable of that, at least, so that’s a positive for the idea of making this sort of database.