flounder
04-10-2006, 09:53 PM
I've been working on a utility to export BBCF players into an FOF draft file, and it's finally reached the point where I could use some user input. This is the first time I've written software for other people to use, so this could get pretty rough. I'm confident, though, that if we keep our wits about us we can get through this with minimal loss of life.
The utility gets the BBCF stats from the HTML files generated for the league website which means that the process is a bit convoluted. I've tried to make it as streamlined as possible, but it's still complex. Hopefully, it's not too much trouble.
You can find the utility at my website at http://www.drflounder.com/bbcf . Please send feedback to the email given at that site or just PM me here. I would welcome all comments about the program, especially about the program stability and the player distribution. Source code is included in the distribution so if any veteran coders want to poke through it and give me tips they would be greatly appreciated.
I would like to thank Cap Ologist, twothree, and nilodor for their help with the FOF draft file rating distribution and Richards for creating his Fictional Player factory that I used to compare my draft classes to. I'd also like to thank 21C for the SQL query that generates the draft class and Greg Stelmack for his Extractor utility I used to get ratings data back out of FOF. Most of all, I'd like to thank Jim and Arlie for writing two great games that hopefully will taste great together.
Installation
Just unzip the file into the directory of your choice. When prompted to in the instructions, double click on the BBCFDraftExport.exe file.
In order for the program to work, you will need Icy's Real College Pack (at least the pstats.dat file) available at
http://www.greydogsoftware.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9935 . You will also need to make sure that the "Overall Rating Format" and the "Skills Rating Format" in BBCF are set to 1-100. You can change them in the Game Options screen.
Instructions
1. At some point during the regular season in BBCF (after the preseason, but before you click the "Advance Stage" button after the bowl games) you need to create a league website. Go under the options menu on the left in BBCF. Under "WEBSITE" click "Update team reports", then "Create website", and finally "Update player cards". Updating the player cards can take a while (~10 minutes). MAKE SURE THAT UNDER THE "GAME OPTIONS" SCREEN THAT BOTH OVERALL RATING FORMAT AND SKILLS RATING FORMAT ARE SET TO BE 1-100 BEFORE CREATING THE WEBSITE.
2. Proceed through the offseason until the underclassmen that are declaring for the draft are announced (Week 12 during recruiting). At that point, save your game.
3. Run the BBCFDraftExport.exe executable.
4. Click the button labelled "BBCF Save Directory". A dialog box showing the directories in your /GDS/Bowl Bound College Football/saves directory will be shown. They will be named according to the save name given in the BBCF Game options screen. Select the directory which corresponds to the save game you want to export.
5. Enter the year in the box below "Draft Year". This will be the year that just finished. So to export players whose senior season was 2005, enter 2005 in this box.
6. Click the "Export FOF Draft File" box. The program will ask you where you want to save the .csv file. The default is the FOF universe directory.
7. Watch the red bar move across the screen. When the "Creating Draft File" box disappears, the program is finished. Close it. On my computer, which is moderately out of date, this takes about 2-3 minutes.
8. Open the FOF Draft File Generator program that came with FOF2k4. (All of the default directory choices for this version are in the Front Office Football 2004 directory. Make sure you're choosing the right file and saving the result into the FOF2k7 directory.) Click "Generate Draft File". The program will ask you where you saved the .csv file. Navigate to it and select it. Save the .faf file generated.
9. In the FOF postseason, before free agency begins, there will be a button at the top of the screen labelled "Import Draft". Click it and find the .faf file generated in step 8.
10. Enjoy the juicy BBCF/FOF player goodness (hopefully).
Known Issues/Limitations
1. Player stats at this point are based entirely on the BBCF current rating. Getting the FOF stats to mirror the BBCF stats in a way which gives a good player distribution has proven to be a big challenge. This is what I'm devoting almost all of my development time to.
2. The ratings from BBCF are filtered through your scout's perception. Not having access to the real ratings in the save file, there's nothing I can do about that.
3. Right now there are no stats included in the draft file. I'll work on that once I get the player distribution ironed out.
4. pstats.dat files which are significantly different from Icy's Real Player File will not work. If minor modifications have been made (one team replaced by another) it may still work. You will need to modify the colleges.txt file included with BBCFExport in the following way. Open the FOF draft file generator program and click on the "College List" button. A list of colleges and their FOF ID will be given. Find the ID for your new college, or if it isn't in there, pick another college's ID. Open the colleges.txt file and add the following line to the end:
College ID , College Name exactly as it appears in the pstats.dat file
This should work, but I haven't tested it out yet. Consider custom pstats.dat file support to be highly experimental.
5. At this point it doesn't matter at what point during the season you create the league website as long as it's not during the offseason. If stats ever get included, you will have to create it right after the last week of bowls so all games' stats are included.
6. Florida Atlantic and Florida International don't seem to be in the FOF college list, so all graduates of those schools get an honorary transfer to Florida A&M.
7. Hometowns are gleaned from the team roster files. However, some players hometown is only listed as their state (NY instead of New York, NY). Right now, those players are assigned a hometown of 'Outside the US'. This will be fixed eventually.
8. Volatility is calculated as follows. There are three factors.
The first is based on Work Ethic/Discipline. Players in the top half of the draft (or so) with high ratings in Work Ethic and Discipline have a lower volatility. Players in the lower half of the draft with high ratings in Work Ethic and Discipline have a higher volatility. This is intended to represent slacker superstars in college having a greater chance of busting and hard working, but less talented players having a greater chance of blossoming.
The second is based on school prestige. Players from big schools have lower volatility than players from small schools. Since I don't have access to the current prestige values in the save game file, this is based on the school's starting prestige.
The third is a random factor. Underclassmen have a higher range of random values than seniors do.
Right now I think this system gives top players too high a volatility rating so I would welcome feedback on this.
9. Top players' Solecismic test scores are definitely too high. This is based on the BBCF intelligence rating and most of those ratings are high for top players. Other than disregarding the BBCF ratings, I don't know what to do about this.
10. This program can run while BBCF is running in the background, but I wouldn't try to actually use BBCF while this program is running. Database conficts could occur.
11. I haven't run into any problems in testing, but still don't use this program on any BBCF or FOF careers that you care about unless everything is backed up.
12. If the player cards were to update after the season was finished, but before you run the export utility, that would be very bad. I'm not sure what exactly triggers a player card update, so try to do the export as soon after the underclassmen declare as possible.
The utility gets the BBCF stats from the HTML files generated for the league website which means that the process is a bit convoluted. I've tried to make it as streamlined as possible, but it's still complex. Hopefully, it's not too much trouble.
You can find the utility at my website at http://www.drflounder.com/bbcf . Please send feedback to the email given at that site or just PM me here. I would welcome all comments about the program, especially about the program stability and the player distribution. Source code is included in the distribution so if any veteran coders want to poke through it and give me tips they would be greatly appreciated.
I would like to thank Cap Ologist, twothree, and nilodor for their help with the FOF draft file rating distribution and Richards for creating his Fictional Player factory that I used to compare my draft classes to. I'd also like to thank 21C for the SQL query that generates the draft class and Greg Stelmack for his Extractor utility I used to get ratings data back out of FOF. Most of all, I'd like to thank Jim and Arlie for writing two great games that hopefully will taste great together.
Installation
Just unzip the file into the directory of your choice. When prompted to in the instructions, double click on the BBCFDraftExport.exe file.
In order for the program to work, you will need Icy's Real College Pack (at least the pstats.dat file) available at
http://www.greydogsoftware.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9935 . You will also need to make sure that the "Overall Rating Format" and the "Skills Rating Format" in BBCF are set to 1-100. You can change them in the Game Options screen.
Instructions
1. At some point during the regular season in BBCF (after the preseason, but before you click the "Advance Stage" button after the bowl games) you need to create a league website. Go under the options menu on the left in BBCF. Under "WEBSITE" click "Update team reports", then "Create website", and finally "Update player cards". Updating the player cards can take a while (~10 minutes). MAKE SURE THAT UNDER THE "GAME OPTIONS" SCREEN THAT BOTH OVERALL RATING FORMAT AND SKILLS RATING FORMAT ARE SET TO BE 1-100 BEFORE CREATING THE WEBSITE.
2. Proceed through the offseason until the underclassmen that are declaring for the draft are announced (Week 12 during recruiting). At that point, save your game.
3. Run the BBCFDraftExport.exe executable.
4. Click the button labelled "BBCF Save Directory". A dialog box showing the directories in your /GDS/Bowl Bound College Football/saves directory will be shown. They will be named according to the save name given in the BBCF Game options screen. Select the directory which corresponds to the save game you want to export.
5. Enter the year in the box below "Draft Year". This will be the year that just finished. So to export players whose senior season was 2005, enter 2005 in this box.
6. Click the "Export FOF Draft File" box. The program will ask you where you want to save the .csv file. The default is the FOF universe directory.
7. Watch the red bar move across the screen. When the "Creating Draft File" box disappears, the program is finished. Close it. On my computer, which is moderately out of date, this takes about 2-3 minutes.
8. Open the FOF Draft File Generator program that came with FOF2k4. (All of the default directory choices for this version are in the Front Office Football 2004 directory. Make sure you're choosing the right file and saving the result into the FOF2k7 directory.) Click "Generate Draft File". The program will ask you where you saved the .csv file. Navigate to it and select it. Save the .faf file generated.
9. In the FOF postseason, before free agency begins, there will be a button at the top of the screen labelled "Import Draft". Click it and find the .faf file generated in step 8.
10. Enjoy the juicy BBCF/FOF player goodness (hopefully).
Known Issues/Limitations
1. Player stats at this point are based entirely on the BBCF current rating. Getting the FOF stats to mirror the BBCF stats in a way which gives a good player distribution has proven to be a big challenge. This is what I'm devoting almost all of my development time to.
2. The ratings from BBCF are filtered through your scout's perception. Not having access to the real ratings in the save file, there's nothing I can do about that.
3. Right now there are no stats included in the draft file. I'll work on that once I get the player distribution ironed out.
4. pstats.dat files which are significantly different from Icy's Real Player File will not work. If minor modifications have been made (one team replaced by another) it may still work. You will need to modify the colleges.txt file included with BBCFExport in the following way. Open the FOF draft file generator program and click on the "College List" button. A list of colleges and their FOF ID will be given. Find the ID for your new college, or if it isn't in there, pick another college's ID. Open the colleges.txt file and add the following line to the end:
College ID , College Name exactly as it appears in the pstats.dat file
This should work, but I haven't tested it out yet. Consider custom pstats.dat file support to be highly experimental.
5. At this point it doesn't matter at what point during the season you create the league website as long as it's not during the offseason. If stats ever get included, you will have to create it right after the last week of bowls so all games' stats are included.
6. Florida Atlantic and Florida International don't seem to be in the FOF college list, so all graduates of those schools get an honorary transfer to Florida A&M.
7. Hometowns are gleaned from the team roster files. However, some players hometown is only listed as their state (NY instead of New York, NY). Right now, those players are assigned a hometown of 'Outside the US'. This will be fixed eventually.
8. Volatility is calculated as follows. There are three factors.
The first is based on Work Ethic/Discipline. Players in the top half of the draft (or so) with high ratings in Work Ethic and Discipline have a lower volatility. Players in the lower half of the draft with high ratings in Work Ethic and Discipline have a higher volatility. This is intended to represent slacker superstars in college having a greater chance of busting and hard working, but less talented players having a greater chance of blossoming.
The second is based on school prestige. Players from big schools have lower volatility than players from small schools. Since I don't have access to the current prestige values in the save game file, this is based on the school's starting prestige.
The third is a random factor. Underclassmen have a higher range of random values than seniors do.
Right now I think this system gives top players too high a volatility rating so I would welcome feedback on this.
9. Top players' Solecismic test scores are definitely too high. This is based on the BBCF intelligence rating and most of those ratings are high for top players. Other than disregarding the BBCF ratings, I don't know what to do about this.
10. This program can run while BBCF is running in the background, but I wouldn't try to actually use BBCF while this program is running. Database conficts could occur.
11. I haven't run into any problems in testing, but still don't use this program on any BBCF or FOF careers that you care about unless everything is backed up.
12. If the player cards were to update after the season was finished, but before you run the export utility, that would be very bad. I'm not sure what exactly triggers a player card update, so try to do the export as soon after the underclassmen declare as possible.