Hello again everyone and happy holidays.
I guess its obvious by now that JSB 09 wont be coming out in 09.
We are not close enough to beta so I have no set time in mind.
My wife and JSB partner Nancy had a medical emergency and I have been tending to her and have spent very little time on the new game. She is doing much better now and I pray that she continues to get better.
Most of my time has been spent working on the current version of the game as we have been getting a frustrating number of reports about errors especially when it comes to the the All star break. It’s a pretty new problem and we haven’t had new updates recently so I am struggling to figure out what’s wrong. It doesn’t make it easier that its old code and since JSB uses totally different development tools I feel a little lost looking at my own code. I need to correct this first and also have to finish work on updated rosters. I’ll probably add a small feature or two and then release it as JSB 5.7. When done then it back to JSB 09 
I spent a lot of time on the JSB graphics engine to the point that it’s taking too much out of the development as well. So I am going to keep it where it’s at now and move on to the meat of the game features instead. The graphics are a simple top down 2d screen with some physics based animations that allow you to see whats happening on the floor as the game plays and make choices on the fly. Its pretty cool the way it is now but I have more ambitions for its progress but will revisit it after beta releases and I can get some of your feedback.
The engine itself is pretty stable and all the standard features are in place – season, progressions, trading, drafts, free agency etc. I’ll try to give more details when time allows. (Not that, that happens much)
Thanks,
Frank
Quick post about the ratings sytem in JSB 09.
JSB will feature different rating systems including a hdden system. You;ll be able to make notes on a player report and based on stats and descriptions you can enter your own “ratings”
Other than that we still have 1-99 available but they will be normalized so an average player rating will always be 50 and the rest of the ratings for a category will be distributed on a curve. We hope this makes it easier to glance at some numbers and quickly determine just how good he is in that area.
We are often asked what tools we are using or are available for developing your own sports game simulations or similar. If you are interested in developing your own software for games or anything else. Free versions of Visual Studio programming languages are available at Visual Studio Express Editions.
Packages available include Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Web Developer and SQL Server.
Also available at no cost is XNA Game Studio which allows you to develop 2D and 3D games for the XBox 360 and PC. Visit XNA Creators Club Online
None of these tools are a breeze to work with but with all the great resources available online it may be worth a look.
We are currently working on the brand new version of Jump Shot Pro Basketball (3577). This version will be free to anyone who purchases the current version of our game between now and November 1st. The game is being designed using Visual C# 2008 and WPF. WPF is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based application. This is fairly new technology that I needed to learn but I now have a full grasp of it and allows development of the game to come much easier. It is very powerful and allows some features that I didn’t think possible. The game will feature realistic full sequences that will play out in an animated full court display and will be completely customizable and realistic. We have stopped and started this project several times in the past and started from scratch on several occasions but we are far enough along that we wont be starting over again.
Please check back for more updates as we continue along.