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Emne: Interview with Jukka Sireni - The Versant Viper |
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#1 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:36:31
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JH: Hi! For anyone who doesn't know who you are, can you give us your full name, occupation and what hobbies do you have?
JS: I'm Jukka Petteri Sireni, an unemployed mathematician. I graduated 1,5 years ago from the University if Helsnki, but since I was lazy when studying and am still lazy, I haven't found a job. Currently most of my hobbies, work and life are GPRO related, but apart from that I watch cycling and other sports from TV, and cycle and play billiards occasionally also myself.
JH: Ooh! Billiards, an interesting sport of rmyself! Do you play snooker then? If so, what is your highest break? :D
JS: Occasionally yes. Though my highest break is only 18 (blue+pink+black). But I play only an hour in a week. I have thought about starting to play more, but as said, I'm lazy. And I probably wouldn't be happy for my progress either as I'm rather demanding.
JH: Ah, yes I am a perfectionist myself, so I want to do the best I can. My highest is 104, although I haven't played in 6 years now haha.
So, how did you find GPRO, and what made you continue playing on here?
JS: There was a thread about GPRO in Finnish F1-Forum. It's such long time ago that I don't even remember what made me race more than 1 race. Anyway, this was the first racing manager game I have ever played, but I had wanted to try on for a longer time. In the beginning I wasn't using as much time as I do now, but slowly I became more and more addicted both to the game and the silly games.
JH: Literally how I started! (except for being on a Finnish forum! :D)
So, how did you find your first seasons racing in GPRO? Was it easy or did you find it difficult to understand?
JS: I think it wasn't too confusing. Reading through the whole Finnish thread helped though. There were Jari and Heidi and other smart people discussing and sharing some small tips.
Though I have to say that my way of setuping my car was quite appalling in the first races. And in the first race I had read that you very rarely need 280 litres, so I put about that. The problem was just that it was Monaco, so I almost did a stop less than I had planned. But generally it went well, like my 40 straight points finishes starting in my first season show. Generally GPRO was quite a bit easier then. Had I used more risks and known more about track-to-track wear I could have promoted straight to Master at least.
JH: Help from other players definitely helped myself when I was racing all those years ago. This brings me neatly to the next question about teams.
How did joining Ajaa para Gewinnen come about? From what I can see, they were in some sort of decline, with most of their core members leaving and their position in the team standings plummeting?
JS: I think I was just applying to decent looking teams that had open spots. I think I applied to Gulf Porsche too. But I really don't remember too well. I guess I liked Ajaa para Gewinnen's name. It wasn't the best of teams, but not the worst either. And I got to Versant through it. It was folding in the end of season 14 and I think it was Boden Ebery who said that I should apply to Versant and he was about to do so too. Though I'm not sure if they just wanted to get rid of me as Boden never joined Versant.
JH: So how did applying for Versant go?
JS: I remember even less from that. I guess I wrote a good enough application to get accepted. But Versant was also going through a transition from The Twilight Zone, so it probably didn't need to be that good. A bit later we even needed to sign Ernesto Brito to keep our team forum alive. Then when we were back to full force again we needed to kick him away, even though I think he was made clear when being signed that the signing wouldn't last long.
JH: Ahh yes. forgot about the Twilight Zone! :D
Did you ever think you will be staying at this team for as long as you have (over 40 seasons!)?
JS: Probably not. I think i my first applications I wrote that it would be nice to get into Master one day, so most likely I wasn't even thinking this far. I have had some interesting offers, but I have never managed to leave Versant. And it seems that I didn't need another team to win the title. Though team title would be nice too, but I'd rather win it with a team that I have been buidling instead of joining a "ready" team. But who knows what will happen. Maybe I will pull a Rosberg and retire (soon) after my title.
JH: Noo, don't retire! You got so much more to play for now after your first one!
Did you ever think Versant was going to be as big of a team as they are now? What attributed to the success?
JS: Currently we are quite solidly and constantly just behind the best teams. I think I could have just believed that, but probably not for team title, which we haven't achieved yet, or that someone of us would win Elite.
For success I think big parts are good planning and data collection that enables good enough formulae for the planner. For those quite a big part was Matthew Standen's shortish stint in the team. Before that our data collection was pretty crap, but he got me and Norman Dilthey to code an automatic data collection. He also brought the planner to the team, for which I have then made a better version and improved it's formulae.
And I think we have had a rather good team spirit and smart enough people to play the game decently. And at least my playing style, that I have tried to spread for the team, is such that it doesn't have much cooling down seasons, so it obviously helps performing in team standings.
JH: Speaking of titles, do you think that Versant will win a Team Championship in the near future?
JS: There are lots of good teams and we haven't made any plans at it, so it's a bit about luck that we have enough members having their promotion or at least very strong retention seasons and also no other team having an amazing season at the same time. But I think we are slowly progressing towards the point when we can regularly challenge the very top teams.
JH: You have been Top 20 for the last 10-15 seasons, the championship will come that's for sure!
Let's go back to your GPRO career. Prior to your last season. you had been "seen" to be struggling in Elite, constantly going to Elite and dropping down to Master after a few seasons. Why is that?
JS: It's probably at least partly due we not having too much Elite experience. Also quite many of my promotions have been unplanned. Master is just quite tricky to do well, but not too well.
In the first time I didn't even try to retain and second time I offered 4M for the driver, so I didn't have money for much else. I don't actually remember why I never picked good tyres in my 3rd stint in Elite. I think I did quite reasonably with Yokos and Avonns though, but didn't have enough sponsors and success to build my package. Generally top Master is a better place to be than constant mid Elite. A few season in mid Elite might work if you had some sponsors coming in the future and driver in training though.
The 4th time in Elite was the first time I had good sponsors, money, good untrainables and some idea what to do. But I just wasn't quite good and lucky enough for the title and I made bad decisions with sponsors, so I thought it would be better to relegate and build package in Master. Actually I still don't know how to deal with sponsors in Elite as I'm still with the sponsors and negotiations that I came from Master with.
I actually thought that I didn't have enough money yet, especially since I lost a tight sponsor fight, but since no one seemed to want to promote, I did and the rest is history. I will probably still struggle though. Maybe OBPs for the championship and the rest time in Master is my way to play this.
JH: Hmm, Master sounds very interesting! Never realised sponsors were hard at the higher stages!
Now, the Elite championship. Am I right in saying you are the first driver to win an Elite championship straight after a Master promotion?
JS: Yes, I think you are right. I was also the least expected champion based on Max's top 10 quotes. They are not available for season 1 though. I forgot to do the Max's top 10, but I probably wouldn't have put myself in top 3 either. I picked Bridgerocks mostly due to I thought they would give me most consistent results, but it seems that they were consistent enough for the title.
JH: Haha very nice!
So do you think you will be able to win the Elite championship again?
JS: Energy has mixed up things, so maybe it's possible. I think there are a few better managers than me, so if everyone is having their championship trying season, it's quite unlikely though. But of course that never happens, so with good package and a little luck it could happen.
There are other GPRO related challenges too, so maybe I become a super-Rookie, or try the Elit1st. Or maybe I indeed pull a Rosberg and host only silly games and do something else.
JH: The Elit1st challenge is very interesting. Maybe you should try it due to the fact that there had been so many changes since the last time it happened.
Let us talk about your Silly Games hosting! How did Ultimate Sports Challenge come about?
JS: I had played some silly games in the past, but the first one I really liked was Gunter Bosman's Tour de France 2010 challenge. Then when I heard that Gunter wouldn't continue it, i thought that maybe I could try hosting it. And to market it somehow, I decided to continue Jeff Pumphrey's Ultimate Sports Fan Challenge. So without Gunter's cycling challenge there might not be the USFC or maybe not any games hosted by me.
JH: Glad that you took the cycling challenge and made this huge silly game!
Was it tough hosting this sort of game, knowing that you have multiple sports to do, as well as keeping up with the scores for the Ultimate table?
JS: Cycling Grand Tour challenges take some time, though Gunter had a nice spreadsheet, which I changed slightly to my liking. The most other challenges for USFC are quite quick to host and calculate scores. At first I kept scores manually, which took some time and needed some accuracy, but nowadays I have improved it so that I can copy paste the names and just add their positions and I get points calculated automatically. Though now a small problem is that if there are mistyped names, someone may get their results split.
JH: As you all know, my silly games hosting is atrocious, so for you to be able to host multiple minigames within a big game is wonderful.
Finally, I want to talk about the new race screen! How did this come about?
JS: I don't remember where I got the first idea. Maybe I wanted to test my coding skills. Anyway, I made the first version, where the cars went over a red eye looking circle and the data was spidered from the race replays, Jonathan Beagles wanted to use it for F1 Revisited, so I modified it a bit for that, but then it was forgotten for a while.
Then another game that I'm playing started to develop something similar (they are a bit ahead in track drawings, but far behind in coding at the moment), so I got an idea to use an image instead of drawn track and started to develop it further. At first I used to 200*200 track images from GPRO enlarged to 700*700 (dot mode) and 2800*2800 (car mode). It looked quite horrible, but Vlad liked it and I got "hired".
I have to say that it is by far better than I ever had thought would be possible. But little by little I managed to add functionalities to it and it became what it currently is. If someone looks at the code though, it looks quite horrible as it has grown from 200-300 lines to 5000 lines and it was never really planned on the way.
JH: I never liked the idea of coding, but glad to know that the beta of this race screen is up and running this season! Makes me want to race again!
What are the future plans of the race screen? 3d models? Cockpit view?
JS: With my programming skills there wouldn't be a computer that would run 3d models or cockpit view. :) Even now it's quite on the limit on slower devices that it can run fast enough to look good.
The latest introduction to the viewer is the possibility for cars to give way of passing car if the driving line is so close to the edge of the track that the passing car would need to go off from track. Before this was avoided by always having the driving line quite center of the track, so there was always room to pass on both sides. Now I can make more natural looking driving lines. But there is still a small problem in overtakes that sometimes when there are lots of overtakes the cars overlap, so I would like to get rid from that as much as possible. Also, now the cars can go only 3 wide in overtaking, so 4 wide possibility would look cool.
JH: Very interesting indeed!
Well, many thanks for letting me interview you! Definitely one of the more interesting people to interview, and congratulations on your Elite Championship last season! Hoping that you have many more to come (ie don't retire! :D)
I have someone already lined up for the next interview! Watch out for that in the next few days/week :)
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#2 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:37:30
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#3 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:38:04
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Quote ( Onur Guardian @ May 26th 2017,16:37:30 ) welldone ;)
I am surprised it took you less than a minute to read that :D
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#4 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:42:15
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Quote ( Jun Ho @ May 26th 2017,16:38:04 ) Quote ( Onur Guardian @ May 26th 2017,16:37:30 )
welldone ;)
I am surprised it took you less than a minute to read that :D
i didnt, but no need to read to give u a welldone :)
i ll read when i find free time.
( 104 break? realy? u deserved an interview for this only ) :))
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#5 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:45:32
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Quote ( Onur Guardian @ May 26th 2017,16:42:15 ) 104 break? realy? u deserved an interview for this only
was when my opponent smashed the balls apart, with easy close positioning for pink/black.
My next highest break was 54, so it was a complete fluke that I got that break in the first place :D
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#6 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:55:02
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Nice one, Its great to read stuffs like that! :)
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#7 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 16:56:05
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it is desirable to make reference to the Manager and the team. )
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#8 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 17:01:06
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Amzing work again Jun! Very fun reading ;)
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#9 Skrevet maj 26 2017, 17:01:23
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Thanks for the interview, a great read :)
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Jukka will win on pips this season, you heard it hear 1st :)
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Nice to see Matt standen getting the credit he deserves. By far the best manager ive been in the same team as.
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Another great interview Jun, keep them coming :)
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Thanks everyone! I have another interview in the works, but might post that a bit later as 3 in 3 days might be a bit overkill :D
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2 interviews in 1 day?! Wow!
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