Great Game! Anybody working on NFL League?

[GFeros]

Hello all, I got the game- just want to say I think it's great coming from the old FBPRO days. Congrats to Dave and his team. Is anyone working on the 32 teams for the NFL. I read in previous posts that some members are willing to undertake this, maybe creating 1-3 teams a piece. Im in the process of learning how to do all this. The first team I will be creating are the Dolphins.

[Marauders]

The problem with having many people edit a few teams is that there is no basis for knowing which players should get which skill attributes.
 
 

[simmer]

I think we should use the skill attributes from the website Sports.espn.go.com(ESPN Madden player ratings). All interested could contribute. Also there is a website called Sports Gamers.com playbooks. This has the latest plays for each NFL team. This would also be a project in a half to complete. But, the season is a year away.

[GFeros]

Thanks for the info, I'll check out those web sites.

[elmerlee]

Simmer could you post the link to those websites as they should actually be input?

[quixian]

I, for one, would volunteer to assist in populating a shared general .mdb file with a correct team roster should some standard ratings be agreed upon as a group.  Now that there's a good standalone player editor out there thanks to JD, this looks like it might be a doable project.  Assuming we divvy up the data entry by divisions, I don't think it would take very long at all, relatively speaking.  I'd prefer to handle the NFC South if such a project comes together.

[GFeros]

I think this will be a great start to really get this game going.  I know for a fact, if we could get NFL League going for Maximum Football- the sales will improve dramatically.  I feel it is a needed boost to launch this game even if its thru third party due to licensing, etc.  And what better than from true die hard fans.

[quixian]

Here's a link I found after a quick search for Madden player ratings, looks like this might work if we can all decide on the ratings fields and how to match them up to the player ratings in Max FB:
 
http://www.sportsgamer.com/games/madden08/roster/team/49ers/
 
There may be a full excel sheet out there or something, but the page at this link could work.

[GFeros]

Checked out the site- Looks good, I think Ill start with these ratings.

[VCFL Commish]

quixian
 where were you when I did the NFL DB.What I could do is use Fpxpress to make a table to put it into a db then merge it into the db I made.
 First the VCFL DB has to be done

[GFeros]

Go for it! [&o]

[quixian]

VCFL Commish - I must have missed your previous work on a NFL DB.  Thanks for the heads up - I found your db in this thread:  tm.asp?m=1572130&mpage=2

The league.mdb file from the thread in question looks like a solid base to work off of.  Not sure if the Madden ratings would necessarily provide as good of gameplay as the VPNFL ratings in the long run, but they should give a good starting point attribute-wise.  I'll do a comparison of the Madden ratings vs the MaxFB ratings (surprised I haven't done that already!), and will see what Madden roster attribute fields should match up with what MaxFB attribute fields.  I'll also scout around for an existing excel or mdb file of the Madden ratings to see if we can simplify the process further.

[quixian]

After some additional scrutiny, I'm not sure the ratings at the first link I posted would be of much use - they are from the next-gen version of Madden and as such there are few common attribute fields between players of different positions.

I was able to locate an excel sheet of the Madden 07 roster from the PC, and attached a copy of it to this post (as a txt file, rename to .zip to open with Winzip or Winrar to view). Based upon the attributes in Madden, I think we can match up the attributes something along these lines in MaxFB:

MAX FB Ratings ---> Madden Ratings

SPEED ---> SPD
STRENGTH ---> STR
AGILITY ---> AGI
INTELLIGENCE ---> AWR
ENDURANCE ---> STA
DISCIPLINE ---> ?? **Could use AWR minus 10-15 PTS**
BLOCKING ---> AVG of PBK and RBK
BLOCK AVOIDANCE ---> BLOCKSHED
PASS STRENGTH ---> THP
PASS ACCURACY ---> THA
POCKET PASSER ---> ?? **Could use base of 100, then reduce by avg of SPD & AGI ratings**
CATCHING ---> CTH
HANDS ---> ?? **Could use CTH rating a 2nd time**
COVERAGE ---> AVG of MANCOVERAGE and ZONECOVERAGE
KICK STRENGTH ---> KPW
KICK ACCURACY ---> KPA

I'm going to go ahead and manually edit the players using the outline above for a few teams tomorrow and see how long it takes. VCFL Commish's NFL mdb file is already chock full of accurate data on the players so it really shouldn't be a big task to complete. If all goes well, maybe I can test the rosters in game and see if there are any ratings that may adversely affect gameplay. Those can later be globally tweaked with JD's editor if needed. Could be a good start for a completed NFL project at some point down the road, complete with team specific plays as simmer suggested above.

[quixian]

A brief update - I completed editing one team last night with the excel sheet attributes and tested in a scrimmage game for a half.  I imagine it will take about 30 minutes or so to edit a team once I get used to the process.  At minimum, I'd like to edit one division completely and test those teams over a series of games before I do any further editing.
 
Player uniform names in the db will need to be changed to uppercase letters, but since JD is working on adding this process to the player editor, I won't mess with changing these yet.
 
By testing in coach mode games, I'm hoping that the attributes will work in MaxFB with minimal additional editing, either globally with the editor or via minor changes to the constants.dat file.  The results from one half of play in the scrimmage were....interesting... and merit further analysis.

[GFeros]

Nice work Quixian.

[jdhalfrack]

Hey guys, I hope that you can get this put together! To make life a little easier (I hope), I am adding a roster exporter/importer to my next release. This will allow someone to export a roster into .csv format and import roster from the same format. I'm not sure if this will really help or not, but I hope so!

JD

[GFeros]

Great jdhalfrack! I downloaded editor and am starting to familiarize with it. Thanks for all you work.

[quixian]

Thanks JD, an import function really opens up the potential to streamline the roster editing process even further.
 
I'm guessing that I can just export any player with v1.6 to a .csv file to figure out the correct field order to use in a .csv file to import.  This way, I can save the .csv file to be imported with the fields in the proper order right off the bat and start testing the import function right away.
 
Looking forward to the new version, to say the least.  Will post more feedback on 1.6 in the thread for that once I've gotten to test the import functions.  Your work is much appreciated - Thanks again!

[jdhalfrack]

Here's an example of an exported Roster file for you to check out. This is basically what the roster files will look like when you export them (except there are some options you can chose before exporting).

JD

--> Change the extension to ".csv" for it to open in Excel <--

[quixian]

Great, the file looks exactly like I hoped, actually - which is is a good thing.&nbsp; [:)]&nbsp; If we can conveivably import/export by team or even one player at a time, that would be huge.&nbsp; Generating the random stat range for individual attributes as shown in the thread for the editor is a wonderful feature too - it takes too long to generate draft classes and players using the in-game tools, which makes testing the effects of certain attributes on gameplay far more tedious than it needs to be.

Between the editor and the playbook enhancements that have been proposed, it really makes things easier for those of us who don't have the greatest programming skills in the world to tweak the game to our liking.