Cato Converter Instructions
 

That's a lot of words!

P.S. You should thank Cato, too.

May I just say how very classy it is that you're letting folks use the demo for this.

Just to verify -

This should work even if I've played numerous seasons with my league since converting to OOTP 2007, correct?

Steve made a few edits, but my original draft was approximately 2,000. To think I ever complained about writing essays that long in school... ;)

Yes. The league I did most of my own testing of the converter on has been using OOTP2006/7 for over three seasons.

- Kai

Sweet, thanks!

Steve, Kai,
Just need a quick FYI for myself.

If I wanted to import the history of my legacy 6.5 league (1968-2006 converted up to OOTP2007 for the most recent season) I would first need to run catobase on each of those 39 6.5 legacy seasons, then run to conversion tool and then import it into my league using OOTP8. Or can I get away with running catabase on just the 2006 season?

You'd want to run Cato on each of the 39 seasons, I'm afraid (which means you'll need the end-of-season league file {the one where the "Proceed to Next Season" button appears} for each season). Part of the reason Cato was created in the first place was to store data that OOTP "forgot" after every season. Your 2006 league file, for instance, doesn't have a clue what anyone's fielding stats were for 2005 and earlier. Or, more critically, what the final standings were for previous seasons. :rolleyes:

The converter itself would work with only the one season of data, but you'd only get full information for that single season, which isn't really all that much of a boost.

- Kai

True. I'd want to bring in the whole history. I know cato is a bit of a PITA to do, but that would be incredibly cool and I can finally stop harassing Marcus about it.

Luckily, I had the foresight to back up my end of season files every year starting from 1970 onward, so this is entirely possible. If not time consuming, no? I'd have to think anyone who already has a catobase of their league is in great shape now with this update.

It will take a bit of time, yes, since running Cato will take a bit for each season.

Also, this may or may not help you (and you may or may not want to go to the effort ;)), but once you've got all your seasons in Cato and used Ryan's converter to get them into CSV format, if you still have your Almanacs from 1968-1969, you can, if you want, manually add the data for those seasons into the CSVs before you import them into OOTP. That can be really time-consuming (I just did it for four seasons of a twenty-team league), but it will give you a complete history when you're done.

- Kai

Well, I gave this several tries, and here are things not covered in Steve's initial post that I've run into:

- If you have "previous" seasons in Cato (for example, if the league started in 2000 but Cato was first ran in 2005), players will appear to have been playing for the same team as they did in the first Cato year (at least if there's no correlating team abbreviation). For example, let's say From 2002 to 2004, Jim Blake played for Santa Cruz. In 2005, Santa Cruz stopped existing and Blake went to play for Milwaukee. Prior to import, his 2002-2004 stats appeared to have been played for a team called "Total", and clicking on it will link to the index page of the league's history. After import, Black will appear to have played for Milwaukee from 2002 to 2004. If you click on Milwaukee's 2004 stats, for example, it will list all players that played for Milwaukee in 2005, but with their 2004 stats when they were playing elsewhere.

- Upon first loading the converted file in OOTP 2007, images showed up incorrectly, if at all. I restarted OOTP, and they were fine. I did again, and they were still fine. However, news stories have disappeared. I had made an exact copy of all the files included in my original folder.

- Statistics that did not exist in 6.5 do not get added retroactively. For example, VORP, OSLG, etc. I didn't expect them to, but some might, especially since some, like OSLG, "pollute" the leaderboard.

I'm a little confused by your description here. You say you have previous seasons "in" Cato, but that you only started using it in 2005. Obviously, the converter is only going to work properly for seasons that are in your Cato database, which starts with the year that you first used Cato.

If you want the import process to bring in information from seasons before you were using Catobase, you'd need to manually add that information to the CSVs generated by Ryan's utility before importing those CSVs into OOTP.

Clarification: has all record of the news stories vanished completely, or do you have a whole bunch of "blank" stories (there are listings for the supposed stories in the game, but the subject line/contents are empty)?

- Kai

Believe it or not, that was the clarified, or second draft :p.

I wasn't surprised at all that the data for non-Cato years wasn't imported properly - I was surprised, however, to see it was misappropriated to the team they played for subsequently, especially since OOTP previously treated "orphan" years (seasons played on franchises that no longer existed at the moment of conversion).

I wanted to stay general to deal with the problem itself, but I'll describe my actual situation, hopefully it'll be clear enough. I started a league in 2002, simmed three seasons (in order to have stats before the initial draft), reset everything and drafted in 2005. So, from the teams that played in 2002-2004, none played afterwards, they were all deleted and they had no link to 2005 and after. So, 2005 was the league's first "official" year. When I converted from 6.5, OOTP read these years as "pre" years as well, displaying no team name next to the player's 2002-2004 seasons. However, after importing, a player that played for a fake team from 2002-2004 is shown as having played these years for the same team they played in 2005... when the team didn't even exist back then. Clicking on the 2002 line will give the team's 2005 roster with their 2002 stats, even though the players didn't play on the same team.

Basically, my point is that regular conversion from 6.5 treated "orphaned" years as... well.. just that. Cato treated "orphaned" years as "unknown". But importing Cato in OOTP8 treated "orphaned" years as actual seasons that didn't exist.

How foolish of me :). The stories are blank, whether it's the manager news, league news or team news (the displayed player pictures are consistent with what the news stories were, however).

That may not be the worst thing ever as that's two season with just eight teams, not the 30 of 2006. May depend on the time/effort involved in the other 37 seasons though. I'm contemplating just scrapping the league and restarting it in OOTP8 Maybe I'll try 1970 and see how it goes.

Wow.

Very nice of you to let us use this with the demo. Consider me flabbergasted.

Running Cato isn't that bad. I think you only really have to 'alter' one or two files for each season, even using the most recent version of OOTP (but there's probably still a thread about it stickied in the OOTP6 forums somewhere, so refer to that).

Most of the time is going to be simply in the running of Cato itself, which you don't have to watch. Just start it going and do something else for however long it takes to process the data.

I don't think you're going to be able to fix this, at least not the way you want to. The original behaviour you describe - treating the seasons as "orphaned" - was never a deliberate feature. It was an unfortunate consequence of the limitations of OOTP6. OOTP2007 would have liked to assign teams to those years but, since OOTP6 didn't remember details like franchise locations from previous seasons, it had no idea what team to assign.

Certainly, the behaviour you're seeing now is inaccurate, but trying to get back to the previous one is simply trying to replace one glitch with another glitch.

The real "fix" would be to add information to the TeamFranchises.csv and Teams.csv for those initial clubs and seasons (thus making them part of your real history, though you'd be able to have OOTP8/2007 treat them as Inactive Franchises). By teaching the game what clubs existed in those years, it ought to be able to assign truly correct teams to players' stats from those years.

Of course, as I've just been saying to DesertFox, manually adding data to the CSVs is a bit time consuming and labour intensive, so it's up to you to decide whether the current inaccuracies are worth the effort to fix.

OK, the fact that you're seeing listings where news items should be suggests that your messages.dat is intact. I've only ever encountered the "blank stories" issue when a league's \messages folder is empty or missing files. Were the news stories still present when you looked at the league in OOTP8 (i.e., before bringing it back to OOTP2007)? And, I know you said you made an exact copy, but are the contents of the \messages folder the same in both places?

- Kai

Thanks for the insight on this Kai. One of the nicer parts of the OOTP experience is being able to chat with people about things like this.

Anyone ever find out what happened to Jeff?

Steve, Kai, Markus
Another quick question. Could I (in theory) catobase my 6.5 league, convert it to OOTP format using the tool and then use that as a db to import historical rookies if I were to do a replay of my 6.5 league in OOTP8? Basically I want to reboot the league. but reuse my players but wish to avoid having to type them all in every draft. Does this produce a db compatible with that functionality?

Honestly, I have absolutely NO idea. But, the great thing is, you can try it and let us know! :D

Seriously, though, Ryan W's tool basically converts Cato data into pseudo-Lahman format, so it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Ryan W. might be able to answer this better than I can.