APF Editor - #1 Player Names

[KingJavo]

This thread will be the first of many to organize things I'm trying to do in my new editor.

This one in particular is related to editing Player names. I'll post things already found and we can go from there.

The intent is to ONLY include things related to the research and discovery of Player Names in this thread.

[KingJavo]

First legend player on a CPU Team (Mark Smith, Scorpions) offset = 0000D180

First created player on a created team offset = 000829F0

First legend player on a created team offset = 000843E0

It's not that simple, unfortunately.

This is what a normal cell of player data looks like inside a hex editor:



The color-coded areas contain most of a player's information:

Attributes, abilities, position, jersey number, facial structure, tier, shoe type, face mask type, birth year -- all of this stuff is already present in FlyingFinn's editor.

But if all you do is change a player's first and last name, none of the numbers inside that data cell will change.

Best I can tell, the only numbers in one of those cells that have anything to do with the player's name are the two boxes near the top of the data set that I've stenciled in a black outline.

If you mess with those two boxes and manually change their values, you can reset a players name so that it's completely blank, and then you'll be able to retype it from scratch inside the game's regular player editing screen.

Changing the name length won't have any affect on a player's data cell. I can change someone like "David Hawthorne" to "Al Bundy" and his cell will still look identical in hex code.

The only way that the values in the stenciled black boxes will change is if you go into a hex editor and change them manually. They don't seem to react to any changes that you make in FlyingFinn's editor or any changes that you make from the in-game player editor.

So let's say "David Hawthorne" was originally "00 19 72 47 00 19 72 65"

Then I decide that I want to reset his name and change him to "00 19 71 46 00 19 71 64" which causes his name to show up as blank in the game.

When I go into the in-game player editor screen and rename him to something like "Randal Graves" his code would still read "00 19 71 46 00 19 71 64" when I bring that roster file back into a hex editor.

These are the only other places I know of in the roster file where player names are listed:

offset 00208730 through offset 0020FFF0 (legends and generics)

offset 0021200 through offset 00222000 (legends and generics)

offset 00222020 through offset 00222560 (created players)

If you change the names there by entering new hex values, the new name has to have the same amount of letters as the old name, otherwise the file won't work.

If you use this method, it also only changes a player's displayed name. The announcers will still refer to the athlete's original name in the play-by-play commentary.

I never figured out how to change a player's play-by-play name using hex editing.

The character restrictions only apply to the names that appear from offset 00208730 through offset 00222560. That is one method of changing names from within a hex editor.

The other method I've used to change names is just doing it normally from inside APF 2K8's player edit screen. There are no character restrictions there.


Quote:

This is very confusing and I could use help nailing down the research already done so I can begin coding. Making sense of this stuff with caps, legends, etc and the number of teams you can have total and the way apf restricts things make my mind burn.

You can only have 8 user-created teams. Their players will appear from offset 000829F0 until offset 0009EE90.

The players from the remaining 24 CPU teams are listed from offset 0000D180 until offset 0005ECC0.

Quote:

Along with how many hex values are in each player's section of attributes.

It varies depending on the type of player your looking at. Created players usually have larger data cells than legends and generics. The reason is that created players have different facial structures than legends and generics. Other than the face section, their data blocks will be the same size.

You can tell where one player cell ends and another begins by looking for the strings of 00s and FFs in the hex code.

Here's what a generic player's cell looks like:



You can tell he's a generic player because of the hex code 84 at offset 00087A60. 84 = generic, 05 = created player, 04 = legend.

The player directly above that generic is a legend on the same team:



Even though the legend has 00s instead of 7Fs for his facial data, that block is still the same size.

The image I posted on page one shows what a created player looks like:



The "green" facial data block for a created player is much larger and full of different 7x and 8x values.

[KingJavo]

I've figured out how the Player Name Attributes point to the actual Text names in the file.

Here, I've set Mike Golic's first name to Joey Barret's last name. Golic's player attributes actually share Mike Haynes first name instead of creating his own. If you look at Golic's name in the name bank section (offset 2135839) you won't see his first name only his last.

This is because his first name attribute is pointing to the Mike in Mike Haynes section.

[KingJavo]

JYoung or anyone else who can answer this question, is there any issue with freezes etc if you mess with the Text in the Legend names section.

Offset 2135839

I added a new name for Mike Golic there and it worked fine in game. Only problem is you lose the Team/Years part in game.

Does this matter to anyone? If not, then I may just allow the editor to rename names and not reuse names, but there is much more to think through as I progress through different players in the game.

This will take more than 1 week because of my schedule and the complexity, but I don't think it will take much longer to be honest. I just need to get the editor code pulling in names and then determining if the names are being shared or not. I may just allow an overwrite of names even if their shared to start with because resusing names will take more time to code and one of the more difficult parts is detecting who is sharing when you load up a Roster file.

Does anyone have any opinion on what the requirement can be for changing names?

[jyoung]

Some of the player names are definitely linked.

You'll notice this sometimes (but not always) after you rename legends who happen to share names with other players in the game.

But the bigger issue in APF 2K8 is how the pool of generic players isn't large enough to have unique generics at every position on every team. So a generic possession wide receiver like Emanuel Husak might appear on 4 or 5 teams in the game. And when you edit his name on 1 team, it also changes his name on all the other teams he's on.

That's why I used to employ the technique of "resetting" a player's name by turning it completely blank before I renamed him if I noticed that he had a linked name. Doing so would remove the link. The problem with this technique was that it also corrupted that spot in the names database the moment I "hit reset." And whenever I did that to a player, his play-by-play name would no longer function, and the announcers would just refer to him forevermore by his jersey number.

That crude method wouldn't cause any hard system freezes, but it would lead to some annoying superficial flaws. And you could still take rosters that had been edited that way online, which was always important to me.

So basically, I would suggest designing the editor in such a way that edited first/last names can no no longer be used by other players. Otherwise, it will create a lot of problems on the roster if edited names remain reusable.

I'd much rather have "Mike Golic" turn into "**blank** Golic" instead of becoming "Richard Golic" after I change "Mike Haynes" to "Richard Sherman."

[Jermaine76]

You change the names of any player and you won't be able to play online. So I assume this will be for offline only, right?

[KingJavo]

Quote: Originally Posted by Jermaine76

You change the names of any player and you won't be able to play online. So I assume this will be for offline only, right?

Unless we can uncover how to properly change a player's name without breaking online.

I'm trying to do this for at least offline as online is unpredictable and I would need help researching what we can and can't get away with online.

[KingJavo]

Thx for the reply JYoung. The player links are all based on pointers in the file.

So in Golic's case his first name was based on offsets which pointed to that other name. If we wanted to break the link as you call it, we would need to make room in the file for him to have his own first name.

If I put his first name next to his last name then I eat into his team yes history text. I can either do that or try to find other areas we can link to without stepping on there bio text.

What do you think?