History

My journey in the world of hockey simulation software began in 1999. Back then, one of my high school friends introduced me to another hockey simulator. I thought the idea of being the general manager of a fantasy hockey team was great and I joined one league after another. Eventually, I was the general manager of 5 teams at the same time.

In 2001, the league I was the most active in, the LHN (Ligue de Hockey du Nord) was about to stop its operations because the commissioner did not have enough time to run it anymore. Since I was already the co-commissioner of the league, I took over the commissioner duties and kept the LHN alive.

From 2001 to 2004, I ran the LHN's activities every day but I was looking for more. The simulator I was using at that time was lacking features that I wanted to see in my league. So over a period of time, I released a number of add-ons and PHP code to help other league commissioners to make their league and website more fun and exciting.

At the end of 2004, I noticed that a lot of league commissioners were complaining about corrupt league files. I decided to make an add-on that could change the data directly into the league file so that a commissioner would be able to fix his corrupt league files on his own. This add-on was never released because at the same time, the owner of the simulator offered me to join the development group. After giving it some thought, I decided to join the group in January 2005. I finally had the chance to fix an impressive number of problems in the current version (yet to be published in 2008!!) and to implement features in the next version of the simulator and make it better.

That experience had good and bad issues. I learned a lot but I got very frustrated at the same time from the lack of support from the rest of the developing group and especially the owner. So in August 2005, I decided to quit the development group and decided to create my own hockey simulator from scratch.

On September 2, 2005, I wrote the first line of code for my simulator. On January 25, 2006 after 310 hours of work (More than 2 hours per days), the Alpha version of the STHS was release to a private group of Beta Tester. This version was very basic and did not allow the simulation of farm team. After some very constructive comments, I added around 70 working hours to release the beta #1 on March 9, 2006 to the same private group of Beta Tester. At this stage, the simulation of farm team became possible, the simulating engine was improved, the simulator allowed the simulation of international tournament, different pointing style became available, the rivalry between team became possible and a lot of small options were programmed. After another 80 hour working, beta #2 left on May 2, 2006. This version improved the simulating engine, added new interesting option like manual fantasy draft, the history by team and XML files.

On June 5, 2006 after 540 working hours, the 'Release Candidate' version of the STHS was released to the public. This version added new options and improved the stability of the product. Between on June 5, 2006 and on February 10, 2007, there were 13 versions of the simulator. Each one of them fixing problems reported by the users of the STHS and improving the STHS with new options suggested by the users. It is at this stage that the option to make draft list in the STHS Client became possible.

On February 10, 2007, the simulator was finally released version 1.0.0! After 820 hours of work, the quality of the simulator is satisfactory! But this was only the beginning, since that date, 5 versions of the simulator have been issued to repair bugs and create new features. In the future, there will be other versions of the simulator based on this simulating engine to continue to provide long-term support.

On 10 February 2008, exactly 1 year after the release of version 1.0.0 and more than 1,000 hours of work, version 1.1.0 of the simulator is published. This version significant change the simulating engine where the idea of making a development branch. This version also includes more than 35 new features including the abilities to simulate minors games without unknown players and the abilities to decide how many players are playing in a match, between 18 and 25.

Today, the STHS continues to progress. A completely rewritten version 2 in Visual Basic. Net is already being prepared for 2009. Among the suggestions for version 2, the possibility of a general manager to adjust the time lines for ice, the best strategies for coaches, lines of defenders independent of the lines of attack, the abilities for a general manager to erased from its statistics to be able to know how his teams produced before and after a big event.