| Task | Description | Difficulty | Need |
| Specification | Some kind of coding spec would be useful :=) | 2 | 10 |
| Tactics | If there's anything that sets SWOS apart from other football games its fluidity of play, and its immediateness of controls. Almost anyone playing SWOS for the first time can easily pick up how to play it within ten minutes. However, as the saying goes, ten minutes to learn, a lifetime to master. The AI contained in the tactics file is absolutely intrinsic to the game, and must be copied, virtually unchanged into any SWOS implementation. Without this, it would just be another football game. It needs to be reverse-engineered if possible. This is the most important, and the hardest aspect of the implementation. I need to work out the file-format of the tactics editor using a hex editor, possibly attempting to decompile the source as well. | 10 | 10 |
| Goalkeeper AI | Though not as important as the tactics, the goalkeeper needs to be good, though he doesn't necessarily have to be identical to the original | 8 | 8 |
| Physics | Physics of the ball, and players needs to be calculated, but this should be relatively easy, but might require fine tuning to get it to run like the original | 9 | 10 |
| Graphics | Though essential, graphics are nowhere near as important as the tactics stuff. I'm quite happy running blobs round the screen as long as the game plays like the original | 1 (7 if decent graphics are used, 8 if they're ray-traced) | 5 |
| Sound | Sound is much much more important than graphics. Any game can have good graphics and be rubbish. Good sound, leading to good "atmosphere" is essential to a games success. Crowd sounds (probably looped .wav files) are essential, as well as standard things like the thunk as the ball bounces off the crossbar, the referees whistle, and the sound of a player kicking the ball. Commentary is much less essential. However, it shouldn't be difficult to obtain such sounds on the www | 2 | 8 |
| Current Player AI | A lot of work went into SWOS to determine which was the current player that the player was controlling. This is sort-of tied up with tactics AI, but again, will probably be difficult to reproduce and difficult to tune it correctly. It's also just as important as the tactics section. | 10 | 10 |
| Teams | Other people in the past have managed to make a hex-file description of SWOS teams files. This shouldn't be too much of a problem to convert these to another format if we have the HEX specification. Neverless essential. | 4 | 8 |
| Menu System | The menu system includes all the options of the original, comprising Career mode, transfers, injuries, friendlies, DIY cup, etc. It'll be a fiddly job and I'm not planning to exactly duplicate the original because I think several improvements can be made, especially to career mode. | 6 (+2 because it's a tedious job) | 3 |
| Other Team AI | This could be the hardest part. Propose some kind of finite state machine. Possibly at a later stage introduce neural-nets and genetic algorithms so that the AI can improve. | 9 (potentially 10) | 10 |
SWOS Java