Figuring Out Team IDs, little rant

[bstar]

I have not been able to figure out how to build my custom universe for the life of me.

I guess my use case is weird, but here it is... I have a csv file with about 50 players that I import into a new universe that span many teams, I just let the rest of the players randomly generate- awesome feature. Unfortunately, getting these players assigned to the correct teams has been impossible.

The problem is that I built all custom team names with custom city names. I renamed minor cities that had weather that matched the new locations I created. As a result, all of the 1-30 location IDs are F'd up. I can't figure out what the IDs are to use to assign the players to. A few players assign correctly, but the rest of the players are just assigned to random teams.

Are there any utilities to fix this? I really want to start a new universe that starts at a very specific date with all players as rookies. I can do this, but I simply can't get my custom players assigned to the correct teams because I don't know the correct team IDs.

This goes into a longer rant of some mind boggling coding decisions that have been made in this game. The simulation engine is amazing, the sheer amount of data is amazing but the rest of the game feels like a bad practical joke. I'm not talking about the forgettable visuals, I'm talking about every window being blocking, dialogs being blocking, obvious player editing features missing in game, pathetic html generation, etc. The fact that I have this team ID issue is confirmation that there are some serious design flaws here.

Anyway, somehelp would be greatly appreciated. I love this game in many ways, I've easily sunk in a couple hundred hours, which makes these frustrations that much worse- I want to play this game! Jim, this game needs to be much better, these issues are pure laziness.

[corbes]

I don't entirely understand what you've done with the team names. However, an example of the original team IDs are here: CCFL Owner/Team List

You'd have to correlate whatever it is you've done with that list. If you changed the name of the Cincinnati Bengals to the Arendelle Elsas, then the Elsas are team ID 6.

[bstar]

Originally Posted by corbes

I don't entirely understand what you've done with the team names. However, an example of the original team IDs are here: CCFL Owner/Team List

You'd have to correlate whatever it is you've done with that list. If you changed the name of the Cincinnati Bengals to the Arendelle Elsas, then the Elsas are team ID 6.

I've already tried this, the ID seems to be bound to the city your team is associated with. So if you choose Tulsa, it's anyone's guess what ID that is. Those ID mappings seem to only work with the default cities. I think what I need is a list of all usable cities in the game and their respective IDs which would essentially just expand the list you linked to.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by bstar

I think what I need is a list of all usable cities in the game and their respective IDs which would essentially just expand the list you linked to.

You're right. There needs to be a list of all usable cities. Ideally, it ought to be in the Player File Generator that you are using to try to do what you're doing.

Oh, wait...



*shurg*

[Ben E Lou]

Dola:

You might also need to read the Help File about cities, city affiliations, etc.

[alrith72]

Not related to this post in anything but the tiniest way but when you post Ben what does *shurg* mean at the end of some of your posts?

[bstar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

You're right. There needs to be a list of all usable cities. Ideally, it ought to be in the Player File Generator that you are using to try to do what you're doing.

Oh, wait...

*shurg*

Ben, you seriously think I wouldn't have already looked at that list? The numbers in that list are just indexes for randomly generating the player's hometown.

[cuervo72]

Hmm - Cities.csv was one of the files that Interrogator dumped, which I believe was the usable cities list rather than the hometown list. My cities were always altered for MP play, but if you ran the util against a pristine FOF2k7 universe it should grab the indexes and the rest of these:

Index Name Abbrev Population Growth AvgIncome PovertyLevel EntertainmentPct SeptHigh SeptLow SeptHumid DecHigh DecLow DecHumid 90DegDays SnowDays StormDays Elevation Long Lat HasTeam TrendSet Region WantsTeam

I've always wanted the game locations to be more customizable in-game - especially in leagues where new owners "move" their teams, but the underlying cities don't really change except for superficially. So you have situations where "Charleston" is playing games in the middle of Minnesota.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by bstar

Ben, you seriously think I wouldn't have already looked at that list?

i don't know you from Adam. After 16+ years at The Sideline/FOFC, the answer to your question is "absolutely." I've seen too many obvious things overlooked not to assume the worst until given a reason to think otherwise.

The numbers in that list are just indexes for randomly generating the player's hometown.

then see my second post

[cuervo72]

Oh, the other thing you can do - and this might be a pain in the ass - is to go inside the C:\Program Files\Solecismic Software\Front Office Football Seven\pictures directory and take a look at all the banX.bmp files. The numbers should correlate with the city in the image, so 0 = Akron, 1 = Albany, 2 = Albuquerque, etc.

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Dola:

You might also need to read the Help File about cities, city affiliations, etc.

Pertaining to the help search - why does it beep at me like I'm doing something wrong whenever I click (or scroll to a new line, even) on a topic? I feel like the game is yelling at me.

[Ben E Lou]

Actually my guess is that the FOFL's issue is probably the same one as this dude's: the city affiliations were not changed at the start. I had to change every one of them in FOFL and IHOF on my local machine to use Greg's stuff that pulled directly from FOF.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Pertaining to the help search - why does it beep at me like I'm doing something wrong whenever I click (or scroll to a new line, even) on a topic? I feel like the game is yelling at me.

Beep? Never seen that. What Windows version? (I know that the latest Help File is optimized for Vista/7/something. No idea if there might be weirdness with other versions.)

[cuervo72]

I think we had this discussion when we converted, and concluded that changing the affiliations wouldn't really change anything with FOFL as the cities were already baked into the game file. (And actually Edit City Affiliations is greened out for me in FOFL, the most I could do is Edit City Names).

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Beep? Never seen that. What Windows version? (I know that the latest Help File is optimized for Vista/7/something. No idea if there might be weirdness with other versions.)

Vista SP2. I click ?, type cities for the keyword, then each entry on the list (A Random Start to Each Game, Almanac Window, City Affiliations Screen, etc) gives me a chime whenever I focus on it. Maybe I have something screwy in my sound settings.

[Ben E Lou]

You have to do if before you load the league iirc (like open game...edit affiliations..load league) Away from FOF right now, but I think that part is specific in the file.

[Ben E Lou]

Oh yeah. I think we determined around the conversion that there wasn't a good reason to be bothered with doing it now. I only did it for the Stelmack tools like Extender--the ones that you probably never used.

[bstar]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Oh, the other thing you can do - and this might be a pain in the ass - is to go inside the C:\Program Files\Solecismic Software\Front Office Football Seven\pictures directory and take a look at all the banX.bmp files. The numbers should correlate with the city in the image, so 0 = Akron, 1 = Albany, 2 = Albuquerque, etc.

I tried this at one point, unfortunately these numbers do not correlate either. For instance, In my league Jacksonville is 13, ban13 file is Bakersville.

[bstar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Actually my guess is that the FOFL's issue is probably the same one as this dude's: the city affiliations were not changed at the start. I had to change every one of them in FOFL and IHOF on my local machine to use Greg's stuff that pulled directly from FOF.

I did change mine at the start, but that was after a bunch of missteps, so who knows what I did to the db. It's very easy to get really weird results if you edit these things in different places. For instance, I compiled my own player csv, but if I use the same name of an existing league (expecting it to overwrite) I get a weird combination of the wrong city names but correct team names.

Also, if I have a player id dupe in the csv or some other typo the results can be extremely unpredictable, there's no data validations. I've worked through these issues so they are not a problem anymore, but it wasn't easy.

[bstar]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Hmm - Cities.csv was one of the files that Interrogator dumped, which I believe was the usable cities list rather than the hometown list.

Any idea where I can find this? This might get me going.

[gstelmack]

C:\Program Files (x86)\Solecismic Software\Front Office Football Seven\datafile

teams.txt:

Team List

The following numbers are used to represent each team in the player file. When a player isn't on a team roster, use 99 in the Team Number field (Column N). When a player was never drafted, use 0 in the drafting team field (Column R).

1 - Arizona
2 - Atlanta
3 - Baltimore
4 - Buffalo
5 - Carolina
...

If you moved a team to a new city, the team index remains the same, but the team info bits in the data file point to the new city. So you have to remember what team you moved to where.

[aston217]

Originally Posted by cuervo72

Pertaining to the help search - why does it beep at me like I'm doing something wrong whenever I click (or scroll to a new line, even) on a topic? I feel like the game is yelling at me.

Haha! Yeah, I've had to disable Windows Sounds from the volume menu because of FOF.

(Sorry, I've got nothing to add otherwise to this thread. Hope you wrangle through the technical stumbles and get it working)

[bstar]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

If you moved a team to a new city, the team index remains the same, but the team info bits in the data file point to the new city. So you have to remember what team you moved to where.

This is not true, at least not for my universe. I created a csv with 32 players (Name: player1-32) and assigned them to team IDs 1-32 respectively. About half of the players were assigned to teams consistently, the rest are completely random- this is probably due to the fact I renamed some of the default cities as well as some of the minor cities.

I'm just going to start over, there are serious issues with this process so I'm just going to rename the default cities. I really appreciate all of the suggestions. I understand I was a bit harsh in my rant, but I have not spent a trivial amount of time trying to get this working.