challenge rules

Fishsim.net ( FS2 ) challenges - Help

Introduction

Welcome to the fishsim.net challenge help section. The purpose of the challenges on fishsim.net is to provide ever-lasting fun and friendly competition for Fishsim 2 users. All of the challenges are fully automated and will run forever continually updating as more anglers get involved.

The venues hosted on fishsim.net are also guaranteed to be available forever and provide a set of diverse venues which should always provide a new challenge or record to beat. For these reasons, these venues are the only ones used in all the challenges.

Named Fish Challenge ** NEW **

This challenge involves catching as many named fish out of the Noir Lac venue as you can in a lifetime. It runs forever and continually updates as more people submit thier catchlog.dat files containing captures of carp and catfish from the noir lac venue. The size of each fish is not so relevant, the main aim is to catch all 182 named fish there.

.. Good luck..

Trophy Fishsim

These challenges/matches follow closely to a Bass style tourney, where anglers are given a time period ( in this case 24 hours ) to get out there and bring back there five biggest catches of the day. At the end of the day, the angler with the largest total weight of fish is declared the winner.

At midnight GMT the page will automatically update supplying a new venue and fish species for the daily match, in the example below, anglers can fish any peg on the River Wensum on May the 7th 2005, and the winner will be the angler who submits the largest weight in perch of his/her top five fish. You must set the date in Fishsim 2 to be the same as the one displayed on the match page.

To submit fish, you do this in the standard way by submitting your catchlog.dat file. Note, you do not have to submit all fish in one go, you can submit progressively throughout the day, the site and scripts will automatically select your top five fish.

The scripts also keep a league table of anglers showing how well each is doing in all matches competed in so far. The league positions are based on a points system for each match :

1st=15 pts, 2nd=10 pts, 3rd=8 pts, 4th=6 pts, 5th=5 pts, 6th=4 pts, 7th=3 pts, 8th=2 pts, 9th onwards = 1 pt

There is also an extra 5 points available to any angler(s) who catch(es) the biggest fish in the daily challenge, this is denoted by a +5 by the anglers points total.

The league table shows the anglers in positional order along with the number of matches entered (pld), number of wins, second and third places, as well as the points total achieved so far. The league is reset at the end of each month.

Species challenge

The fishsim.net species challenge is a fully automated system which allows anglers from all over the world to send in there specimen catches to be compared against each other. The aim is to catch as many of the listed species, on the listed venues, above the required size if possible.

The front page allows you to send in a file called catchlog.dat which is created by fishsim version 2.11 onwards, and stores information on all the fish caught in the previous 24 hours on your computer. By submitting this file automatically, the catches can be analysed to update the various tables and include your results. These results along with all other anglers, instantly update the main page to show how well you and others are doing.

On the main page there are three columns, Anglers, Venues, and Species tables ( image below ).

The Anglers column shows all anglers who have submitted catches in the past, in order of performance. The first column (All) displays how many of the target species the angler has caught so far within. The next column (Qual) displays how many species within the required weight the angler has caught so far, the required weight for each species can be seen in the species tables section (below). The final column (Task) shows how many tasks the angler has competed so far, you can find out the current task each angler is on by clicking on the anglers name and viewing the task instructions displayed at the bottom of the page.

The Venues column shows a list of allowed venues which any of the species can be caught on. If All venues is listed any venue is considered valid.

The Species tables column, contains a list of the target species that need to be caught, as well as the minimum size required. There is also a column showing the biggest caught so far and the angler who caught that fish. You can click on a species name and view each anglers biggest catch of that species to date in order.

There are two seperate species challenges available, the standard challenge allows you to fish any date you like to get your catches, whereas with the more difficult real date challenge you have to fish the current GMT ( Greenwich mean time) date ( displayed on the page ), to have catches accepted.

Troubleshooting

Note: only catchlog.dat files of 100,000 bytes ( ~100 Kb ) and under can be processed, this is well within 24 hour catch limits, if not, please read below :

By default the catchlog.dat file is set to store all catches from the previous 24 hours of fishing. This means if you do a lot of fishing, it can quickly build up to the 100,000 byte limit that the scripts place on, so the solution is to reduce the number of hours it logs.

To do this :

Open the INF folder and then the app.ini file.

In there find the [App] section and under there add the line : Loghours=3

This will reduce the logging time to catches caught within the last 3 hours of fishing, and reduce the size of the log file + speed up the process of submission and also decrease the load on the server running the scripts.

As some extra info, this is how FS2 implements the catchlog system :

- When FS2 starts up it examines the "loghours" line in the app.ini file ( as above )

- It then clears out all catches caught that are outside this time compared to present time.

( Note this only happens when FS2 starts up, not when it exits, so if you fish for say 10 hours solid, and have the loghours=3 line in, you will still have 10 hours worth of catches until FS2 is restarted.