Atropine is a Countdown tournament administration system controlled by your web browser. Teleost is a program that continually reads the state of the tournament and updates a window showing standings, results and other information.
The two things you need that might not be installed on your computer already are Python and pygame. Python is the programming language in which Atropine and Teleost are written. pygame is a module for Python which, among other things, gives graphical capabilities to a Python application.
To use Atropine, you need Python 2.x installed. At the time of writing, the latest version of this is 2.7.6. If you are using Windows, you want the "Windows x86 MSI Installer".
To use Teleost, which is the program that displays standings and results on the screen, you need pygame in addition to Python. Go to the pygame download page and download and install the version of pygame compatible with your Python installation. At the time of writing, the latest version of pygame is 1.9.1, and pygame-1.9.1.win32-py2.7.msi is the Windows installer for the specific pygame version compatible with Python 2.7.
After you have installed the prerequisites detailed above, unzip atropine.zip into a directory of your choosing. There are a number of files and directories, but the only ones you need to know about to use Atropine and Teleost are atropine.py and teleost.py.
Atropine is a web server. When you run it, you leave it sitting in the background and then use your web browser to connect to it and administer tournaments. To start atropine, run atropine.py. The Windows Firewall might tell you it has blocked some features of Python and ask you what you want to do about it. You need to allow Python to use at least private networks.
Once atropine.py is running, use your web browser to visit http://localhost:3960. This will redirect you to the home screen.
Decide on a name for your tourney and enter it into the "Tourney name" box. This name must consist only of letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens - no spaces. So "colin2014" is okay, but "Countdown In Lincoln 2014" is not. Then click Create Tourney. When that succeeds, click the "click here to continue" link and you will land on the Tourney Setup page.
If you want to show everyone the standings and results, you'll use Teleost for this. This step isn't necessary to administer a tournament, but if you want to use Teleost then just run teleost.py and enter the name of your tournament when prompted. The Teleost window should then appear. Once it's running and you've got the window positioned where you want it, it shouldn't need any more intervention.
The Tourney Setup page allows you to load the list of players and specify the rules of the tournament. To get back to this page at any time, you can click the Setup link in the sidebar.
A tourney isn't much of a tourney without players. The text area under the heading Player List is where your list of players goes. Put each player name on a separate line, starting with the highest-rated player and finishing with the lowest-rated player. The reason this is one big text box rather than many little text boxes, one for each player, is to make it easier to copy and paste the list of players from somewhere else.
Each player is assigned a rating. If you want to assign a rating to a player, follow their name with a comma and the rating, like this:
Kevin Birks,1850
If any players are not given ratings, ratings are automatically assigned to players with the top player receiving a rating of 2000, the second player 1980, the next player 1960, and so on.
N.B. If you need to add a patzer player (an Apterous Prune) to take the number of players up to a multiple of two or three, give them a rating of zero.
Copy and paste the following example players into the player list box.
Kevin Birks Jonathan Rawlplug Dark Meeks Giles Huc-Things Ed McBellface Admiral Glad Jack Worzel Some Hurst Some Other Hurst Randy Prat David B Barnyard Apterous Prune,0
Then click Save Player List.
The Tourney Setup stage is also where you can specify how many players are on a table, and how to rank players, but leave those as the defaults for now.
Once your tourney has some players, you can get on with generating fixtures for the first round. This tutorial will assume a COLIN-style tournament structure: there are three rounds, in each round players are divided into groups of three, and in each group three games are played, with each player playing two games and hosting one.
Click the Generate new round... link in the sidebar. You'll be presented with a list of fixture generators. Click COLIN Fixture Generator. For the first round, this will come back to you with a list of fixtures immediately.
Review the fixtures, then click Accept Fixtures. The fixtures aren't committed until you click this button.
You should then see a page telling you the fixtures were added successfully. Click the View games link to go to the score editor.
The score editor is the page you'll be using the most. There is one for every round, and you can get to the score editor for a particular round by clicking the link with that round's name in the sidebar, e.g. "Round 1".
When a game is finished and you have the score, type it in the corresponding box and click Save or press ENTER.
Normally a score is two numbers separated by a hyphen, e.g. 56-52, but the score editor is pretty permissive with what it will accept as a score. As long as it looks like a number, followed by something that isn't a number, followed by another number, it'll accept it. If you enter something it doesn't understand, a suitable admonishment will appear in the "Remarks" column for that game.
If a game was won on a tiebreak, include an asterisk (*) in the score. This can go anywhere in the score text apart from in the middle of a number. Points scored on tiebreaks do not count towards a player's total.
Remember to click Save (or press ENTER) after entering a result. If you change a score box and don't save it, its background will turn yellow to warn you that it hasn't been saved. Scores are not written to the database until you save them. If you try to navigate away from the page when there are unsaved results, a box will appear warning you that you're about to lose work.
If you've got Teleost open, you'll find that when you enter the first result the display switches to showing the standings table and a scrolling window for the latest results.
When you've entered all results for one round and you're ready to generate fixtures for the next round, click Generate new round... as before. This time, if you click COLIN Fixture Generator you'll be asked a question before proceeding. The COLIN fixture generator needs to group together players with similar performance, ensuring players don't play anyone they've already played in the tourney. This is rather complicated, so you can specify a time limit after which it will give you the best grouping it has found up to that point. The default is 15 seconds.
Therefore, when you click the Generate Fixtures button for round 2 onwards, it may take a few seconds to bring you the fixtures. With our example of 12 players it should be very quick, but in larger tournaments the fixtures will take longer to generate.
The Display Control link in the sidebar takes you to a menu asking which screen you want Teleost to show. It does no harm to leave it on the default setting "Auto", but if you want the Teleost window to show a particular screen, you can select it and click Apply Settings. Teleost will then show only that screen until you specify otherwise.
In Auto mode, Teleost uses the following rules to decide which screen to show:
In Auto mode, Teleost never shows the Records or Overachievers screens, so if you want to show those you need to switch to them manually using the Display Control menu.