Introduction

GoMaxi! downloads and stores information about your team in a local database. It can display all changes to your athletes, due to training, competitions, and such. It also displays nice graphs.

GoMaxi! is written in Python (see the official web site for more information). It requires a bunch of external libraries (or modules in python speech): a GUI toolkit, PyGTK, with all related modules, and a relational-object mapper, SQLAlchemy. For now the only supported SQL backend is SQLite, which is included in Python 2.5 and later.

GoMaxi! is released for free under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence v3. This means you have full access to the source of the program.

Installation

Download the latest gomaxi-X.Y.Z.zip from SourceForge. Create a folder on your desktop (or where you feel like to) and extract the archive contents there. I name my folder after gomaxi versions, that is gomaxi-X-Y-Z. When you install a new version, all you need to copy from the old one is the database file myteam.db.

If you’re not sure about the installation of all libraries, first run envtest, it will produce an an output like this if everything’s ok. Then run gomaxi (double click on the gomaxi file).

You can find detailed instructions about first time installation, including all the libraries, on the Full Installation page.

Operating Systems

GoMaxi! is being developed under Linux, in its ‘Fedora Linux 7’ incarnation (see the Fedora web site). There are no intended dependecies on this particular linux distribution. All dependencies are against the external libraries. If you manage to install those libraries, either by installing some packages part of your distribution, or third party packages, or by installing from the source archives, you should be able to run GoMaxi successfully.

Python is quite cross-platform. GoMaxi! should run without major problems under other UNIX-like OSes, Windows, MacOS, and any other operating system supported by Python and the external libraries.

I’ve wrote a small piece of code to test your environment to see if Gomaxi! can find all the libraries it needs. Just run envtest.py.

News

Update: 2010-05-22

0.4.14 “Mourinho” is out, celebrating Internazionale F.C. victory of UEFA Champions League. New language supported, Portuguese (how timely), thanks to mangalhone. Also, I’ve made experimental changes to AVG, now the reference event for juniors is the WJC and for masters is the WMC; this change was also suggested by mangalhone.

Update: 2010-04-22

0.4.13 is out. No visible changes. If something wrong happens while parsing the downloaded XML (player list, coach list, weekly tests), the whole XML is written to the log file (gomaxi.log), instead of just reporting the error. This will help tracking down XML relate bugs (or serverside changes). 0.4.13a and 0.4.13b for a while existed and has been tested by some users, with success. At the moment, no major bugs are known. If you find any, please drop me a note.

Update: 2010-04-11

No new release, I just removed any reference to Python 2.5 and SQLAlchemy 0.4 from the installation instructions. While they still work, and there’s no need to upgrade to the next version now, in the future I won’t test my releases against Python 2.5 and SQLAlchemy 0.4. Unless the fix is trivial (and trivially identified) I won’t support those versions. This simplifies a lot the installation procedure as well, now you don’t have to choose between the python 2.5 or python 2.6 paths.

Update: 2010-04-08

0.4.12 is out. What about .11 and .10, you may ask. Well .10 was released in a hurry some time ago, it made its way to the sourceforge download page (so it showed as the latest release) but I forgot to update the web site. It had a trival bug, for new users only. The fix was announced on the MT site forums, a 0.4.11 was cooked but never officially published (although it was published, just not on sourceforge). Other than these two small changes, new stuff was added for those using GoMaxi! as a data collecting tool, but it’s totally invisible to normal GUI users. 0.4.12 instead supports the new XML format (it was a very minor change, but yet a showstopper) used by MT developers. Also, these web pages are organized differently.

Update: 2009-06-25

0.4.9 is out. Sorry guys, bad news. A nasty bug slipped into some of the previuos releases. The one I personally use is a development one which is not all the time the same of a release one. I didn’t have the bug, so I wasn’t able to notice before. Thanks to hammer5680 for reporting the bug. Briefly, a debug flag never meant to go into a release was turned on. The net result is that the weekly tests were being downloaded but not saved on the database. It must have been so for me too at some time, as I just checked and found out the I miss the tests for part of season 17.

Meanwhile the develpoment of external tools based on the GoMaxi! code went on, and some important changes have been made to the code. As a result, this release is somehow dangerous, since it upgrades your database.

So it is strongly recommended that you learn how to keep multiple versions of gomaxi installed at the same time, if you haven’t done so far. Read the installation page, it’s quite easy. Keep your 0.4.8 installation safe, with both the software and the database. Install 0.4.9 and copy (not move) the .db file with your team data. Test it, use it, but keep a backup plan of reverting to 0.4.8 in case disaster occurs. 0.4.9 may simply wipe your team data out.

Update: 2009-04-01

0.4.8 is out. Why not 0.4.7? April’s Fool. 0.4.7 was released some time ago, but never announced. Fixing a stray entity reference in XML files. This is a quick-and-dirty release, I haven’t tested it. Sorry.

Update: 2009-02-01

0.4.6 is out. With a new language, Flemish, thanks to <bertenvanherp at gmail.com>. This release aims at python 2.6.x and SQLAlchemy 0.5.x. Please consider this support still experimental. Keep a working copy of your 0.4.5 installation around. This version has been tested under Windows with Python 2.5 and 2.6, SQLAlchemy 0.4.8 and 0.5.2, under Linux with Python 2.5 and SQLAlchemy 0.5.2 only. SQLAlchemy 0.3.x is no longer supported, sorry. By sure you install the right libraries, for the right python version (those for 2.5 won’t run on 2.6 and vice versa).

Update: 2008-12-11

0.4.5 is out. Two new languages, French and Greek, thanks to cafarnaum <marc.corsini at free.fr> and Zisis <zisistsiro at yahoo.gr>. Translator credits added to the About dialog. Some minor bugfixes.

Update: 2008-10-19

0.4.4 “Blue” is out. This release contains internal updates only, there should be no visible changes. It adds support from some features needed by external programs that use GoMaxi! python modules as a library. These changes are mainly motivated by Bluewairua, hence the nickname of this version. Meanwhile (as you can see) the website/documentation for GoMaxi! has been rewritten using Sphinx. This is the standard look of modern python documentation, and I really like it. The reference competition for the AVG value index has been set to the Italian National Championship (individual), season 14.

Update: 2008-10-06

0.4.3 is out. With polish language available, thanks to elvis1987.

Update: 2008-08-27

0.4.2 is out. A few bugs got fixed.

Update: 2008-08-17

A few changes today:

• AVG now is based on the top 10 performance at the National Championship of Italy, lacking a more suitable competition (such as Olympics). World records (used previously) were getting too far from the average athete.
• at source level, a new file, model.py, now contains all code related to data structures imported from the game and stored in the internal database; maxithlon.py is now more about game mechanics, but the separation isn’t perfect yet; we now support SQLAlchemy version 0.4, version 0.3 is still supported (it’s the one I use, actually) and will be for a while;
• a SourceForge project has been created, please check it out.

Releases

Currently, development stage is alpha, and there are no releases yet. The major version number 0 (such as 0.4.3) stands for that. Next (first) release will be a beta one, with major version number 1. That is, the first beta release will be 1.0.0.

The program is available for testing purposes only. For one, there’s no promise the database format will not change before the beta release, and no migration tools at this stage are planned. Unless you’re fluent in SQL, you may loose the data you download anytime. (If you’re comfortable with SQL, you can migrate/convert the data yourself, since it’s all in a SQLite file). I’m not excluding I’ll work on a migration plan, I’m just not promising it.

That said, Linux and Mac users have no helper application right now, and even an incomplete application is better than nothing.

At this stage, expect quite a few bugs, expecially on untested platforms.

If you still want to give GoMaxi! a try please see the GoMaxi! Download Page at SourceForge.