Welcome to DDS:PB 2024 FirstAccess - PLEASE READ FIRST

[Gary Gorski]

Hello everyone and welcome to FirstAccess! Very excited to bring you this year's edition as a lot of hard work has gone into the build. For those of you new to FirstAccess let me preface this with a couple of items.

1. This is a pre-launch beta build you are downloading. You may find errors or things that need to be corrected. If so, please post them here in this particular forum and I will correct them and update the builds as we head into release.
2. The game is not 100% final at this point - if you have suggestions you can offer them and they may be included. There is also the chance that the saves you create will be rendered useless because of additions or changes. Obviously once the game is fully launched we would not make any changes that would invalidate a save but before we hit that final point its always possible.
3. Mods will work in these builds and you can use almost all of the same ones from last year - I made a post in the mod thread as to what will require some new work but the logos, courts, pictures etc are all good to be reused again.

Ok so lets get to work here - the biggest question is what is new, right? Well the most noticeable thing feature wise is going to be the addition of the in-season tournament for 30 and 32 team leagues. The IST is something you can opt your league out of if you don't like the concept. When the schedule option comes around just choose the option that does not use it if you don't want to. However I think its a cool new feature and alongside it I also invented a tournament pool drawing reveal which will take place right after you elect to use the IST for the season. I think it adds a fun wrinkle to the game especially if you're not a serious contender for the championship - you might be able to make a run in the IST at least.

You're also going to notice many presentation changes - things like the ticker at the bottom of the screen, the way you choose which team you want to swap views to, the draft screen got redone and a number of other pages were redone to provide better or more clear info. The dashboard screen for example is much more useful as it gives you info about not only your next opponent but the morale of your team, your draft pick and future cap situation and things like that. There is also an option when setting up your league to use an overall rating instead of the "stars" approach so if you like that way of doing things better that is an option for you now.

For a couple of years now I hoped the personality trait feature would be something that was explored and figured out but I've gone ahead and added a link in the game so that you can see specifics on what each personality type means and there are additions here as well such as being able to learn the personality of a rookie you workout.

There's been work in extension rules and logic and free agent logic as well as features there such as getting an email from a rejected free agent bid so you know what the problem is with the offer. There is also ongoing work to find the right balance with what I call "star player issues" - essentially replicating the seemingly annual thing where a star has just had it and wants to be traded (AD, Dame, James Harden every year)

There's additions to the game engine for even better stats - one big change here is what I call the "black hole" feature. If you have players that basically don't want to pass players will now tend to pass to those guys a little bit less which has resulted in better and more realistic stats as sometimes those guys could skew heavy on shot distributions because all they want to do is shoot. Also I worked a lot on depth chart settings to be more modern and give teams better options such as trying to stagger star players during the game and things like that.

Work has been done on the 2D side of things - I've added a cursor type thing to help find who has the ball more easily and also made things a standard speed while also giving the option to skip ahead as opposed to doing the speed change thing which works out much better now I feel.

There's a host of other fixes, changes, improvements etc as well but that's a good start of a list to get you interested (I hope)


Now as I said work is not 100% done - as I mentioned I am still tinkering with the right balance for the stars demanding to be moved, I'm still tweaking things with the 2D and not only use of that ball tracking cursor but just overall movement and motion etc, still going to be adding more text and depth to some areas plus whatever other good suggestions and feedback I get here. So I thank you in advance for your patience and help in doing the final testing here and I look forward to another great hoops season here!