EDIT: This utility is now available here:
https://github.com/BinaryDigit09/FOFDraftRosterUtil
Click the green "Clone or Download" button and choose "Download ZIP." The downloaded zip file will contain a "FOFDraftRosterUtil-master" folder, and inside there should be a FOFDraftRosterUtil folder. That's the folder you need. Put it anywhere you want. Refer to the README.TXT and /help/FOFDRUtilHelp.docx files for more instructions. I'll keep an eye on this thread periodically, so if you encounter any issues then post them here and I'll try to help. I hope you like it!
Hi,
I'm a programmer, and I love Front Office Football. So naturally when I learned about the Excel-hell that's involved when trying to create a custom roster or draft class, I thought it'd be fun to make a utility program that does all the hard work. So instead of dealing with a ton of raw numbers in a spreadsheet (many of which are tricky and tedious to convert), you could simply select teams, cities, colleges, etc. from dropdown menus.
I have the roster stuff totally working, and the draft side is going to be very similar, so it's a good time to ask what features would be helpful in a tool like this? Here's what it can do so far:
- Create a roster with a specified number of players. The players are randomly assigned reasonable defaults for all attributes (skills as well as birthday, home town, contract, etc.). You can drag sliders to specify the percentages of rare superstars, elite starters, roster filler, etc. that will be created. Teams do a round-robin draft to pick the best available player of need, and are randomly assigned to be 3-4 or 4-3 defense so they draft DLs and DBs accordingly. When the Position Distribution minimums are met for all teams, all the remaining players become free agents.
- Add, edit, or delete any player in the roster. The Add and Edit screens give total control over every possible field and attribute. You can change the player's name, team, position, draft round/pick selected, skills, contract details, all 87 fields the game supports. You could give a QB excellent long snapping skills if you wanted to.
- Save the roster in CSV format and automatically launch the game's PlayerFile.exe tool to convert the CSV into the game's FDT format.
- Load a previously-saved roster from a CSV file.
- Works with both FOF7 and FOF8.
Some possibly cool things that can be done with this:
- Load the game's default players.csv roster file, create and add yourself as an elite superstar QB on your favorite team, and watch yourself single-handedly turn the franchise around. Or not?
- Maintain your own up-to-date NFL roster and share it with others.
- Create a roster or draft with specific skill levels for all players to experiment with the game's simulation engine or combine numbers generator.
Here's what I cannot make it do (or haven't figured out how):
- I cannot load, edit, or save an existing in-game roster. The utility can create a draft file that can be imported to an existing roster (during Pre-Free Agency), but it can only create rosters that are imported as alternative player files when creating a new game.
- I cannot set the player skills to an exact value, but it gets pretty close. The game expects values from 0-9 in the CSV and it makes random adjustments up/down to arrive at the final skill level. The only exception seems to be an "Overall" rating that's never shown in-game but appears to be heavily used for current and future skill levels in-game.
- I cannot seem to keep the game from adding its own random roster-filler free agents, and signing/cutting players to/from the teams they had been assigned to in the CSV. Even when the CSV has the maximum 2500 players. Even when the CSV players that were cut are better than the FAs the game created and replaced them with. Fortunately it doesn't seem to touch the human player's team, only the AI-controlled teams. And it's only like 5 or 6 guys per team.
So anyway, I looked around and didn't see any other utilities that do this. Is there any sort of demand for it? If so, what would you like it to be able to do? Specifically things like being able to tweak the stats on 1700+ players without having to do them one-by-one. Need to stay within reason of course, extra-fancy things like automatically pulling updated rosters from the NFL's website wouldn't be feasible. I attached a few screenshots for reference.