Rhino Software: An Introduction 

Overview of Products and Services We Offer

Sword of Severnia
Core-group playtesting on Sword of Severnia,
our computer-assisted miniatures wargame is underway and going very well. Rules development on both the basic and advanced rules is about 95% complete. We're hoping to get that final 5% nailed down by the end of the summer (3rd Quarter of 2009). Wish us luck!   

WarBuilder 1.0
Development of WarBuilder is also underway. This software app works hand-in-hand with the Sword of Severnia wargame rules, enabling players to create customized regiments (units of troops)
and characters, generate their point values, assemble those troops into an army, and print custom Regiment Cards and Character Cards containing game stats needed for reference during game-play. 

Future Sword of Severnia Products
Future plans for the Sword of Severnia wargame include:

<> Campaign & Sieges rulebook supplement. Includes rules for siege warfare, naval actions, and a complete system for running wargame campaigns in the fantasy world of Severnia. Also includes an added set of battle scenarios.
<> Battle HQ is a computer-moderated battle manager.
This software allows for a wargame-referee to track troop status, perform quick chart/table and rulebook lookups, record casualties, track victory points, perform automated dice rolling, etc.
<> WarBuilder database updates which include added creatures, magic spells, magic items, sample armies, and legendary characters.
<> Scenario Builder application which is focused on scenario creation and includes simple drag & drop battlefield-map creation tools. 

You can read more about the development of Sword of Severnia by visiting designer Steve Severino's blog (Six Sided Rhinoceros). Click on the Sword of Severnia link under the Posts By Category section in the right-hand margin of the blog.  

Business Transition
This year, Rhino Software was transitioned from a full-time business to a part-time business. The main reason for this change is that our company President and Chief Software Architect, Steve Severino,
has decided to head back to the corporate world to work full-time for a software consulting company.

All parts of the business will be affected in significant ways due to the transition. Starting immediately, we will no longer offer any custom software development or consulting services. Although it's not prudent to say never, it's highly unlikely that Rhino Hockey will be published anytime soon or that we'll resume our NHL stats service.

Our current plans are to continue to support Rhino Baseball, and we plan to run our Baseball Stats Service this season. Things could change on this front in 2010. We'll keep you posted.

With regards to the Baseball Stats Service, stats files will now be posted to the website around 5 PM every Sunday, rather than on Mondays at 1 PM EST like in prior years. This means that stat-weeks will now run from Sunday thru Saturday this season.
 

Tech Support Changes
We'll still offer free technical support to our end-users for simple quick-to-resolve questions, but resolution times will now be in the range of 3-to-4 business days rather than a 24-hour response time window that was typical in past years. Also, we no longer have the resources to simply give away free technical support for everything. So starting immediately, advanced support requests (those where we're asked to fix someone's database to correct data mistakes) will now incur a small $15 to $25 support fee depending on the complexity of the work required. Pre-payment via PayPal is required before this type of custom tech-service work can begin.

Future Plans
With our move to a part-time development business, we're no longer shooting for a 1st Half 2009 release of Sword of Severnia and its accompanying WarBuilder software. That was overly optimistic anyway with a game of this complexity.

The Sword of Severnia wargame is our #1 priority in terms of development projects. We'll keep you posted as to our progress and firm up release dates as we get closer to the finish-line. Right now, we're shooting for a 1st Quarter 2010 release if at all possible, but that timeline is currently being re-evaluated by lead game-designer Steve Severino and his focus group of playtesters and project development assistants. 

Our company's long-term goal is to move away from seasonal sports products and into the realm of hobby games that can be released any time of the year, are far-less demanding from a customer support perspective, and enable us to compete in a niche that's more viable for a micro-business such as ours.

The simple facts are that fantasy sports products not only demand a VERY HIGH degree of customer support (which is a money loser for every company), but they've also become very BIG BUSINESS. Fantasy sports is no longer the small niche that it was back when we started in the mid-1990's. We've become a tiny fish in a very big pond, and simply have no way of competing against media giants such as CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, and MLB.com. While we're truly thankful for all of the customers who have purchased, used, and loved our baseball software/stats over
the past 10 years, the simple truth is that our business-model doesn't generate nearly enough revenue to make a fantasy sports focused company a viable long-term business.

So as the times change, we must change along with them. Without a doubt, 2009 will be the most CRITICAL YEAR in our small company's history. With the horrible US economy sure to impact our business just like everything else, the future is in doubt, even with our scaled-back operations. We're cautiously optimistic. We hope that our existing customers and new faces who are just discovering Rhino Software for the very first time, will continue to support us so that we can continue bringing you more fun stuff to play with.

Rhino Baseball -- Draft Prep Article
An article was posted on Six Sided Rhinoceros (Steve's blog) on March 21 about the draft prep and draft tracking tools within Rhino Baseball. You might find it enjoyable. Check it out!

Rhino Baseball 6.67 -- Spring Edition 2009
The Spring Edition of Rhino Baseball (version 6.67) was just released on Friday Night, March 6. This new edition of the software/database includes updated MLB player info for 2009, Minor League stats for over 200 prospects, and of course the Final 2008 major league player stats. 

Final MLB Stats 2008 (batting, pitching, and games-by-position)

Final MLB Stats (3 Years) - 2006 thru 2008 seasons (batting, pitching, and games-by-position)

Final MLB Stats (5 Years) - 2004 thru 2008 seasons (batting, pitching, and games-by-position)

Final NHL Stats 2006-2007 (skaters and goalies)

Final NHL Stats (3 Years) - 2004, 2006, and 2007 seasons (skaters and goalies)

It All Began With Rhino Baseball

Since 1998, we've been selling Rhino Baseball Deluxe to diehard fantasy baseball enthusiasts. What is Rhino Baseball? Simply put, it's the only all-inclusive fantasy baseball software for your Windows PC.

Rhino Baseball is used for managing your fantasy league rosters, computing fantasy stats and team point standings, calculating projected player stats and rotisserie dollar values, planning for your draft, analyzing your freeze lists, tracking players taken and still available during a live rotisserie auction or draft, evaluating fantasy team stats and scores, analyzing fantasy trades and in-season player values, and generating a wide variety of stats/analysis reports.

In short, Rhino Baseball covers every facet of fantasy baseball in one comprehensive software program.

    > Rhino Baseball Deluxe: Fantasy Baseball League Manager,
       Draft Software, and Weekly Stats Service 
    > Rhino Baseball Draft Magic: Fantasy Baseball Draft Software
 

We Publish Sports Statistics Too!

Rhino Software also provides fantasy sports gamers with a reliable, reasonably priced, weekly Stats Service for downloading files containing Major League Baseball player stats and NHL Hockey player stats.

    > Baseball Stats Service: Download Weekly Stats Files
       containing MLB Player Stats
 

We're Branching Out into Tabletop Games

Outside of the fantasy sports realm, we are currently developing a computer-assisted fantasy wargame for miniatures wargamers and toy soldier enthusiasts. We're hoping to have the game finished sometime during 2008.  
 

Business Software & Utilities

In addition to fantasy sports and games software, Rhino Software also develops and publishes applications used by small businesses.

Our popular Rhino Viewer software is a terrific program for viewing and manipulating full-color PSR reports. PSR reports, also commonly known as Powersoft reports, are created by 3rd-party database applications that were designed and written in PowerBuilder. Bundled with the PSR report viewer is our companion PSR-to-HTML Converter utility, which enables you to convert PSR reports into simple HTML web pages that can be viewed in a standard web browser. 

    > Rhino Viewer: View, Filter, Sort, Print, and manipulate
       data-rich PSR reports
 

What Makes Us Different?

You'll find that our software products are loaded with cool features that nobody else in the industry offers, and we provide a level of sophistication that our imitators have yet to capture in their own products. When you think Rhino Software, think comprehensive. Our software is packed with an array of powerful features that will save you time, deliver the insightful information that you need to outsmart your competition, and make your hobbies more fun.

For instance, take a look at the features of Rhino Baseball that make it unique from everything else on the market.
 

First Class Customer Support 

At Rhino Software, we back up our products and services with timely, helpful, and personal customer support directly from our software developers. That's right, there's no going through a 3rd-party or an inexperienced support technician who doesn't know how to effectively answer your questions or doesn't speak English very well. When you need help, you can relax in knowing that our skilled staff is willing and able to deliver the answers and solutions you need. 

If you're stuck on a problem that you can't figure out on your own, please don't simply sit there and spin your wheels, send email to support@rhinosoftware.com and we'll do our best to help you out.

We strive to answer all technical support request emails within 2 business days, although we usually answer the vast majority of questions in less than 24 hours.

The reason that we handle questions via email rather than over the phone is because it gets our customers to more clearly describe their question/problem. It also gives us time to consider it carefully and do any investigation if necessary, and allows us to write a detailed answer/solution that you'll have a hard-copy of and can re-read again later on if needed.

Sometimes we will arrange to talk with you over the phone if we feel that will simplify things, but your initial contact with tech support should always be made via email.

Please keep in mind that we keep normal business hours (Monday-thru-Friday, 9 AM-to-5 PM EST), so if you contact us outside of normal working hours you're not likely to get a response from us until the next business day in most cases.      

At Rhino Software, we pride ourselves in providing you with prompt and easy-to-understand answers to your technical questions and problems. As one of our customers once told us, "I've contacted a lot of software companies for help in the past, and you guys are the only ones who always give me answers that really work." That's one of the big benefits of using software from a small company like ours; you get technical help directly from the people who designed and wrote your software, and not from some hired technician who has been trained to give you canned answers and who doesn't really know the inner-workings of the product you're asking about.

In addition to the personalized email support we provide, you can also go the self-help route and check out our online FAQ page, and registered customers can go to our Downloads page to access the latest maintenance upgrade files for the software products they're using.

To find out more about Rhino Software's customer support options and policies, please visit our Support page.
 

Our Company and Some Technical Stuff

Rhino Software is a small, independent software development and consulting company located in central Pennsylvania just outside of Harrisburg, the state capital.

Our company's specialty is developing desktop database and client/server applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system (Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP).

We currently create and sell software to 3 distinct audiences: fantasy sports enthusiasts, hobby gamers who play board games and miniature wargames, and small business owners.

We approach every software project with a few simple goals in mind. First, we want to provide you with imaginative software that's both reliable and easy-to-use. Secondly, we strive to give you the tools to run your games, clubs, or small business more efficiently and with less effort. And third, we aim to create products that provide you with insightful, high-quality information that helps you get more enjoyment out of your hobby, win your fantasy leagues, and make your business more profitable.

Our main development tool of choice is PowerBuilder, the market-leading 4GL rapid-application development language created by Sybase. Rhino Software's software development chief, Steve Severino, has over 14 years of experience developing software applications using PowerBuilder. The unparalleled strengths of PowerBuilder's versatile scripting language, object-oriented development environment, and proprietary datawindow feature for accessing and displaying database information make it the perfect tool for developing robust, state-of-the-art database applications for customers and businesses of all shapes and sizes.   

We also use a mixture of the PHP scripting language, MySQL database, and PowerBuilder browser plug-in components to create web-based database applications that run on Linux and Unix-based web servers. 

The President of Rhino Software is Steve Severino. If you have any questions about our company, web site, or our development services and prices, feel free to email Steve.
For additional details about our company (including contact information) please check the About Us page.