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 (Still not published yet!!) 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. From the 25th of January 2006 to June 5th 2006, a private group of beta tester helped me improve a lot the product and I was able to publish a 'Release Candidate' version of simulator after 540 hours of work. Between 5th of June 2006 and 10th of February 10, 2007, there were 13 versions of the simulator. Each one of them fixing problems reported by the users of the simulator and improving the simulator with new options suggested by the users. On February 10, 2007, the simulator was finally released in version 1.0.0! After 820 hours of work, quality of the simulator was satisfactory for me.

On February 10 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.

From summer 2008, I started working on a version 2 of the simulator. The idea was to completely rewrite the code in a modern programming language. This change also allowed me to rebuild the foundations of the simulator with 4 years of experience to add several new features that I could not do in version 1. For 18 months I finally programmed to release a beta version in October 2009 with over 70 new features, more than 1 million of scrimmage to get the best possible simulation engine and more than 1,700 hours. Some 10 months later, I was at 1900 hours of work and 75 new features for version 2.0.0!

In 2011, I added a new simulation engine, and several new features were added gradually during the year. When I released version 2.1 of STHS in September 2011, I was over 2100 hours of works. In April 2013, the version 2.2 was release with many improvements with the free agents functionality. I was over 2300 hours of works.

Between October 2009 and November 2015, there were 29 updates for the version 2 of the STHS to add multiple new features and improvements. In November 2015, after more than 2650 hours of works, the simulator has been updated to version 3 to be sold by annual subscription. As of October 2021, it is possible to purchase web hosting with STHS.

Today, with more than 3,700 hours of work, the simulator and the STHS community continue to grow. With a dynamic website, an online STHS Client, an online API, a career statistics database, hundreds of rating files, the STHS is ready for several more years/decades of simulations.

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