Referee For Fun v0.3.2 — reviews that play like the broadcast

Reviews that play like the broadcast.

A challenge is now played out on the court. When a player challenges a line call, the court empties and you get a wide shot of the empty hall. The ball flies its path again in slow motion, drawing a yellow trail, and the camera chases it down the court. Halfway through, the picture cuts to the arena's big screen with the replay playing on it. Then the camera dives to straight above the spot where the ball landed, with the line beside the mark. The OFFICIAL REVIEW pill at the foot of the screen flips over to IN or OUT. It works in all six sports, at the top two venues of each.

The hall waits with you. The crowd claps in time while the replay plays, draws breath as the camera drops onto the mark, and reacts to the answer.

The replays at the final whistle of your worst calls now play the same way.

Fixed: table tennis points that froze. A return hit from behind the end of the table could drop through the floor, and the point then hung for 22 seconds before the game called it. It happened in about one rally in four.

The trailer has been re-recorded on this build.

macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. It is not signed by a registered developer, so macOS stops the first launch: on macOS 15 and later open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on macOS 11–14, right-click the app and choose Open. Step by step: https://referee-for-fun.pages.dev/#install
Windows: one .exe, nothing to install.

The venue names and sponsors at the events are invented; the buildings are borrowed from real ones.

Referee For Fun v0.3.1 — a crowd that moves like people

A crowd that moves like people.

The stands no longer move as one. Everybody in the crowd used to jump on the same frame, to the same height, and land together. Now each person reacts in their own way: some jump once, some bounce two or three times, some just get up and clap, a few are late, and they sit back down one by one. When the hall stands over a bad call, people sway and turn to each other, and give up at different times. Between rallies, people turn to the person next to them and lean in, so nobody in the stands is frozen.

The trailer has been re-recorded on this build.

macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. It is not signed by a registered developer, so macOS stops the first launch: on macOS 15 and later open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on macOS 11–14, right-click the app and choose Open. Step by step: https://juslangit.github.io/referee-for-fun/#install
Windows: one .exe, nothing to install.

The venue names and sponsors at the events are invented; the buildings are borrowed from real ones.

Referee For Fun v0.3.0 — real people, in real places

Real people, in real places.

Every sport has somewhere to be played. The courts used to sit in grey boxes, under a painted sky. Now every venue is a building modelled for the game, with the crowd seated on its own steps:

• Badminton climbs from a community hall with two courts and wooden bleachers to an arena drawn from the Axiata Arena: two tiers of blue seats, glass suites, a black steel roof with catwalks, and a screen cube over the floor carrying the score.
• Volleyball goes from the same kind of hall to an exhibition hall fitted out for the Games, after MITEC: telescopic stands, long-span trusses and drapes across the ends.
• Sepak takraw ends in a hall drawn from Stadium Titiwangsa, with a songket mural over the end wall.
• Table tennis ends in a round bowl under a dome, after Malawati Stadium.
• Tennis is an open-air stadium under a photographed sky, at every rung.
• Beach volleyball is played under a photographed beach sky, the sea in front of the chair, with scaffold grandstands either side.

The bottom rungs are a dewan — painted walls, louvred windows, fans, a stage — and the arena is what you climb to.

Realistic players, officials and crowd replace the old ones, with rackets, balls and a tournament chair to match, and every sport has a stroke for every situation: thirty-odd clips each, chosen by where the ball is against the body.

macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. It is not signed by a registered developer, so macOS stops the first launch: on macOS 15 and later open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on macOS 11–14, right-click the app and choose Open. Step by step: https://juslangit.github.io/referee-for-fun/#install
Windows: one .exe, nothing to install.

The venue names and sponsors at the events are invented; the buildings are borrowed from real ones.

Referee For Fun v0.2.1 — the hall faces the right way

Mostly one embarrassing fix and two real ones.

The crowd was facing the wrong way. Both of it. The seats were a quarter turn out and the people sitting in them had their backs to the play — two errors that had been hiding each other since the crowd was replaced. A hall facing away, in chairs facing away, reads as merely odd rather than wrong. Fixing one made the other obvious within the hour.

A challenge could start after you had already been thrown off, which put the review card on top of the end-of-match replay: the verdict of one call over the ball-tracking of another. The trailer is what caught it.

A credits screen, on the title menu. Every 3D model in this game is Creative Commons Attribution, where naming the author is a condition of the licence, and the game named nobody. The list is generated from the models themselves now, so one that arrives credits itself.

A setting for how much of the hall to draw — Everything, Lighter, Lightest. It drops the haze, then the lamp shadows, and thins the crowd. At the international final that is 84 fps against 72, with nearly half the draw calls. It never touches the court, the lines or the ball: a graphics setting that changes how hard the game is to referee is not a graphics setting.

The trailer is attached and has been recut against the fixed hall.

macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. Ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs right-click → Open.
Windows: one .exe, nothing to install.

Referee For Fun v0.2.0 — the hall

A day of work on the room the match is played in.

The nets are nets. Every sport's net was two solid boxes — a white bar with nothing under it. They are now a tiled cord texture at the spacing each sport's rules fix: badminton and sepak takraw 18 mm, indoor and beach volleyball 100 mm, tennis 40 mm, table tennis 12.5 mm. You look through the net at the rally the way an umpire does.

The stands are stands. The audience seat was a 7,404-triangle model thrown away down to 12% of itself to afford 312 of them, which left a white lump with no seat and no back. It is now an 80-triangle tip-up arena chair kept whole, bolted square to the row — and the crowd sits in it, getting to its feet only to react. The hall lost 19–37% of its triangles in the process.

Tennis and table tennis are lit like the rest. They were the last two halls on a flat rig — one light over a high ambient, which is a room with the strip lights on. Both are on the shared truss now, with real lamps over the court.

The line judge puts their arms down. After an OUT the arms stayed out for the rest of the match, in every sport, since the signal was written.

Credits. Every 3D model in this game is Creative Commons Attribution, where naming the author is a condition of the licence. There is a CREDITS screen on the title menu now, and it names all sixteen.

Also: the umpire's chair no longer faces the back wall in cutscenes.

macOS: open the .dmg and drag the app to Applications. It is ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs right-click → Open.
Windows: one .exe, nothing to install.

Referee For Fun v0.1.0 — testing build

First public build. Six sports from the umpire's chair: badminton, beach volleyball, indoor volleyball, tennis, table tennis and sepak takraw.

This is a testing build. It has been played, but not widely, and there are known rough edges — tennis and table tennis are still flatly lit.

Downloads

• macOS — Referee For Fun.dmg (universal, Apple Silicon and Intel). Unsigned: right-click the app and choose Open the first time.
• Windows — Referee For Fun.exe (single file, no installer). SmartScreen will warn you; choose More info -> Run anyway.

Keyboard and mouse or gamepad. Single player.