OOTP 9 Manual Thread
 

Hi folks,

I wanted to post a quick note about the in-game help and online manual. I'm embarrassed to admit that it's not nearly as complete as I'd hoped it would be. :( I had some real-life stuff get in the way, and just wasn't able to get it done in time. So, it's likely you will come across pages in the online manual / in-game help that are missing content. I'm continuing to work my way through these things as fast as I can, and I appreciate your patience. In the meantime, the beta team folks will be doing their best to help answer any questions you may have.

In the mean time, there are a few pieces of good news:

• If you have your preferences set to "always download," then you will constantly get the updated online help files, so that as I add more and more content, you will receive it seamlessly.
• In many cases, OOTP 8 had similar functionality. You can always refer to the OOTP 8 manual if you're just looking to get a general sense of how things work.

Again, I apologize whole-heartedly. You can't imagine how much it drives me nuts to have the help go out in an incomplete state... I hope you won't see it as a reflection on Markus and Andreas!

Steve

Don't worry Steve, you do an amazing job! :) Thanks for all you do buddy!

I second this, Steve you are the glue buddy!!

Great job Steve.

Is the manual inluced in the game download?

Thanks for the update.

Unlike last year, we haven't created a PDF manual. The entire manual is online at OOTP Baseball Manual - OOTP 9.

However, the content is also included in the game, so if you hit F1, you'll be able to see all of the content.

But, as I mentioned, still working on that content. :(

I need some time to adjust to this.

I'm always online these days. Do I really need the manual in file form?

For now, I am greatly relieved to at least find it has search capability.

The scouting & personnel page still refers to OOTP8 stuff...i'm trying to figure out why I can't set my scouting budget over 1mill when the league avg is 2mill...

Please release a PDF version if possible. There is no replacement for a properly written manual that I can sit and read when I don't have online access.

Strongly agreed.

No problem, but I would suggest that you give a little priority to the new features first (like ball location), and I hope a PDF version will eventually be made available when the manual is finished. Thanks for your efforts.

That online manual is really pretty nifty, but yeah, I'd still like a pdf too.

Snow man, could you please post this over in tech support? I'm tackling the scouting piece tonight, I hope. Apologies again...

Good suggestion, and working on it... :@@:

I'll save the PDF discussion for a later time, if that's OK!

I agree.

Thanks, this is the one I'm most looking forward to. In prior versions of the game international scouting was basically free, or at least, wealthier teams had no advantage. But this apparently will no longer be true?

One suggestion I have would be to devote significant space in the manual to the ABA quickstart.

As I understand it, a major reason behind having this nicely-developed out-of-the-box playing mode was to provide an easier point of entry for more novice players. (Which I still kinda consider myself to be, even though OOTP 9 is my third purchase in the series, going back to the "Season Ticket Baseball" days. There's just so much here!) There should be a friendly introduction to the quickstart that is written with this in mind, covering, for instance:

* Some notes on how the quickstart was designed
* Suggestions on how to start playing the quickstart (setting up the human manager, deciding what role to assume with what team, etc.)
* Notes on the features that have been turned on, or turned off, by default

Really, anything that reduces the "cool...but gosh, what do I do now?" effect--at each point along the way, from the first time the game is launched, to the point where a newbie starts to feel a little comfortable and more than a little hooked--would be a big help I think.

That's a great idea. A long time ago I had a walkthrough, and a season-long walkthrough using the ABA league would be awesome.

I'll think about that (in all of my spare time).

Scouting isn't done yet, unfortunately.

No problem on the PDF. By the way, when is Markus going to give you your raise?

On a MacBook Pro running OOTP at 1440x900 the online help text does not stay in the game's browser. Meaning the right side of the sentence is cut off a bit as it goes past the margins of the window.

I've got the same issue on both the Windows XP machines I'm using; in both cases the OOTP window is set to 1152x864.

Why was it designed?

I put this together after the concept of having a totally modded league file was batted around in the OOTP 2007 Beta process. It was not acted upon then, as we had bigger fish to fry. The idea was one of about 500 topics for discussion when a group on OOTP players gathered in suburban Philadelphia one evening with battists and Andreas Raht. The idea was floated again during this beta, too.

No one really picked the ball up on this one or was assigned the task. I just told battists that I was going to do it, and went and did it.

I had the idea of creating a league with all uniforms and logos custom made, but in a way that would allow them to be shipped with the game itself. This meant fairly generic logos. I also had the idea of adding a bunch of board members into the file as players.

About 30-45 minutes after deciding to do this, I had a poll up about the issue, to determine some of the factors. The league size was set at 16 teams, and 3 levels of minors, because I did not want to go the modders and ask for 128 sets of uniforms. The public was given a sketch of the idea, and they voted on the league name and the cities.

I picked the team names to speed things up to get information to the modders ASAP. Justafan and No Pepper came up with some wonderful stuff for the uniforms, logos, and then Sitting Duck helped rename the files to add team and text colors to the file without me having to manually key in those factors.

I think the graphics for the ABA are top notch, despite me crippling their creativity with the specification that no pre-existing copyrighted material could be used. I made it extra hard on the modders. They really came through.

Team names were selected by my whim in the majors after asking board members for suggestions. Several were used. I really like the pun used for the Detroit Bears, as Motown is home to the real-world Lions and Tigers. The GHL names were picked by reading information about each Canadian city on wikipedia, and on the city website operated by the various governments. The
Texas team names were offered up by Texan members of the boards. The Southern California league set up was extremely heavily based on a suggestion by The Wolf. I changed that just slightly after making a Google Map of his suggestion, and I was not happy about the way some stuff bunched up.

Southern California League map on Google.

South Texas League on Google.

Golden Horseshoe League on Google.

If you zoom in on each one of these locations to the street level, you'll see where each team plays its home games. I used Google maps to help me place the teams into different leagues based on geography.

ABA serves a couple of masters. One of the reasons behind the set was to show off the features of the game for use in screenshots and manuals. You saw that towards the end with some of the pictures that Markus posted. When Markus uses some of the real-world graphics mods for screenshots, it's dancing on thin ice with MLB. When Markus uses the default generic graphics and colors that the game uses for screenshots, it really is not putting the best foot forward for the game. The same thing applies for the manual. I hope to see some of the graphics in the manual be generated by using the ABA.

The public chose 1961 as the date for the game start. I always assumed that the game would start in 1961, then I would sim it 10 years to build history, then I'd zip it up to be shipped in OOTP 9. Then, someone (Moorsemoose, I think) asked a brilliant question to see if the quickstart would start in 1951, sim 10 years, and start in 1961, or start in 1961, sim 10 seasons, then ship in the year 1971. I polled that too, and the 1951 start was selected.

The ABA starts with 1951 real world finances and stat values, and will update itself using MLB data. That means that people that start in 1961 will start to see their offensive totals go into the tank.

Hidden players are on. I like that feature.

Free agency is off. Free agency should be turned on in 20 years or so.

There's no expansion. You have to do that manually.

Ghost players are on. I don't like managing a bunch of future used car salesmen in A ball.

I renamed all of the stadiums in the file, and made sure that all of those stadiums with retractable roofs, domes, and astroturf (except one...you'll have to find it, and baseball history fans should have a good laugh about it) at all levels. I also modified the capacity of each stadium, making them smaller.

Ratings were set at 1-100, because I wanted to.

I am sure there's more...

The scouting portion of the manual has been substantially updated.

Please let me know if I missed anything. There's one or two things I also want to add, but I'm waiting for some confirmations of things from "the man."

That's some great information, Raidergoo. Thank you--and thanks for doing such a great job on the ABA. I like the attention to detail, the pleasing graphics, and the believable settings. It's good enough that I don't feel compelled to start from scratch and create my own league right away, but rather can just jump in and enjoy.

And that's a big thing. The quickstarts in last year's game didn't appeal to me, so I decided to come up with my own creation instead--only I got bogged down, not having the time and the expertise to get it done according to my own exacting standards. Thank you for saving me from that fate this year.

Unlike you, I do enjoy the perverse pleasures of managing future used-car salesmen in A ball, so when I started up the ABA, I accepted the computer's offer to take the helm at Santa Ana, and turned off ghost players. The head office didn't send me enough starting pitching, but I oughtn't complain...the first opponent on my schedule had a ton of pitching, but only two catchers and a second baseman for position players. I won the first game (with a walk-off double in the 11th) thanks in large part to two errors committed by the middle reliever they pressed into service as shortstop. What fun!

The player trade section of the manual has been updated.

Still banging away!

I have to say, now that I've been using it a while, the online manual is pretty cool. Especially for the restoration of hyperlinked topics. The search function also works well. If it means those can be provided and the manual itself can be easily updated this way, then I'm for it.

I do share the concerns of those who would like a PDF copy, however, in that sometime in the future when I need help, the web site could be down, or gone. My solution to that will be to make PDF copies of the new topics and other online screens that vary substantially from the OOTP 2007/8 manual and add them to the end of that, sort of like an addendum.

Thanks for the update.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Steve, do you still have the 'How to play out a game' section on your to do list? Last night I was having problems trying to manage a spring training game, and there were some errors in that section of the manual, so I assume it hasn't been updated from version 8 yet.

First of all, the graphic you have with the arrow pointing to the 'play next game' line on the manager home page is very neat, but (at least in spring training, at least in the Mac version) no such 'play next game' line appears on my manager's home page.

Second, I was following the hyperlinks, trying to learn how to manage a game in version 9, when I came to a busted link. Confusingly, the game then asked me to add my own link to the 'not found' page. Since I have no idea how to hyperlink anything, I declined. I also never found the information I needed.

I find this whole hyperlink thing confusing. I would much rather be able to read through a manual page by page than to HAVE TO change pages by clicking on a hyperlink. Having the option to jump around can be very cool when you know exactly what you're looking for, but when you're kind of searching hopelessly (as I often do), you have no idea whether you've covered all of the ways off the page you started with. Then, the link takes you to multiple other links, some of which cross over, and you just have no idea whether or not you've missed something.

Oh, and what if what you want is on the other side of a busted link? Pages, please.

A search function would also be very nice. For instance, I was leafing through the manual yesterday trying to find if there was any more information on bookmarks, but after ten minutes of frustration still couldn't find it (if it's there).

:confused:

Oh. So the manual website does have a search function. Good! That will make it much more helpful to me.

I guess I was completely overlooking the "open the online version in your browser" link from the in-game help--which lacks a search. (I kept clicking "Open in External Browser", but of course that just re-opened the same page from the local in-game help file.)

Believe me, Search was the first thing I looked for when I found out about the change, followed by hyperlinks. Thanks for reminding me about that in-game capability for accessing the manual; I've been going the long way around.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's all on my list, hence the OP. :(

The Play This Game link only appears for Regular Season/Postseason games, unfortunately. (Something I've been begging Markus to fix, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet.)

I'm sorry that you're running into that kind of stuff. Now that the patch is out I will continue trying to fix those things. :(

Steve, it's all good. I'm off to add some Spring Training suggestions to the OotPB10 wish list.

Steve -

Is there a proscribed procedure for reporting Manual typos, missing/misspelled words, etc? Of should we keep them to ourselves? :)

DZ

Ooh, I'll follow you, I have some of my own! :)

Here is fine. At the end of the URL for each page in the manual is a page name (page=scouting or some such). It would help if you let me know the page name where you saw the problem...

Thanks!

Did somebody already mention that page=in_game_reports still talks about SION?

Also, "Link Bar" on page=history_reports is itself a broken link.

I'll post more as I see them. They are going to look random, because I'm just looking at sections here and there, not reading from top to bottom.

Much appreciated! Don't bother posting anything else in the in-game reports section, though. I've deliberately left that for last, because they haven't changed much, other than cosmetically!

Incomplete sentence: page=add_edit_managers.

End of first paragraph reads: "As we mentioned earlier, a manager is the ."

DZ

Fixed, thanks!

Offline version of manual?
 

How large is the complete set of linked HTML pages in the manual plus images?

I'm thinking it might be nice to have it accessible without going online (read on laptop during road trips, etc.). That would, in fact, be better than a PDF file. One of the reasons I love to tinker about with Perl is because the standard distribution comes with a great HTML file containing everything you need to know.

Andreas is going to work on an option to print the whole thing, but that might wait until I'm actually done with the darned thing.

Meanwhile, if it's your OOTP computer it already IS on there! You have a complete local copy of the manual inside the game!

I suspected this, but there are a LOT of files in that folder and it took me a while to find the 'toc'. Good job. Much reading ahead... :)

The manual that shipped with the game, does this get updated as you update the online manual?

If not, will we eventually be able to download an updated PDF version?

I don't want to print the manual by any means, but it's nice to have available on my laptop for when I'm travelling (which I do a lot of) and don't have internet connectivity.

Thanks

Well, uh, I wasn't expecting you to browse through the files, I guess. What I meant was, if you go to the Help menu in-game and select Index, that's the same "toc"!

It does, depending on your settings in Game Preferences under "Online Settings" (or online something, I don't have the game in front of me right now.)

By default it's set to "update older files" which means that it will update files that have changed and are more than a week old. If you have a persistent internet connection, you can change it to "download always," which makes the help open a tiny bit slower, but will ensure you get new pages as soon as they are available when you try to open them.

Thanks,

Steve

So it only updates pages if you try to open them? Are the help files also going to be part of patches?

Curses! My damn work internet filter blocks the manual, I was hoping to read it at work today.