I am busy at the moment creating a program that can manage EH flying competitions. Most people who run competitions in the EH just get the players names and scores, write them out on a piece of paper (or Text document), and then work everything out from there. That's great if your just doing a small competition that may involve just one or two squadrons, playing on the one platform.

What about the huge competitions though? What if it's Wing Vs Wing, Fleet-Wide, or Subgroup Vs Subgroup. The person managing the competition will have lots of members names and details to look after, look up and note the scores they get, work out things like laserless scoring and total points, and then publish the results to everyone. That can be hard work on a piece of paper!

So I am developing a solution. I am utilising the power of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic to make the "EH Competition Manager." You can put in as many EH members into the database as you like, along with details of which wing and squadron they are in, so you can't loose track of who is in the competition. You only have to add a few score details, as the program works out things like laserless scoring, total battle scores and so on for you. It's even idiot-proof, so the Command Staff can use it too.

If you need to publish the results, then no problem. You can use the pre-made reports that come with the program, that can show pilot tables for every platform and get the total and average squadron scores (or wing), which can be printed out for yourself, or saved as HTML to be sent out in e-mails or published on the web.

It is to come in too flavours, Access 97 and Access 2000, and can be used to keep the scores for X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. In the future I will also be planning on making a program that does not need Access, pilot file viewers, and a version for online competitions.

Beta 1 of the EH Competition Manager is to be released on the Battlecry website in the near future (certainly by the next issue) and will be open for bug reports. It will probably be very complete but with little documentation (although I'm hoping it won't be needed).

For more details on new features and release dates, please join the Battlecry Mailing List (more details in Features).