Suggestions: Tools and Functions

[battists]

This suggestion thread is designed to collect suggestions for the next version of OOTP, on the following topic:

Tools and Functions

Includes
- Any tools or functions used in the game, such as the almanac, backup functions, resetting salaries, etc.

Excludes
- Online-specific tools should go in the online thread

Instructions
We will use this thread to collect suggestions on the above topic. Later on, we hope to present this information back to the community in a way that would allow you to vote and prioritize certain features.

If you would like to participate, here are the rules!

1. Only 1 suggestion per post.
2. Suggestions must be on-topic for the thread.
3. Constructive, non-inflammatory suggestions only.
4. No comments on others' suggestions are necessary. That means, we don't need 15 posts in the thread saying "Great idea!" or "I agree!"
5. Please don't link to other forum threads as your way of making suggestions. ("My suggestion can be found HERE.") If it's important enough to you that you want it in this thread, then it should be important enough to put it in the format I've asked for here!
6. You can certainly post suggestions that conflict with or build upon earlier suggestions.
7. Mockups are welcomed, they really help Markus see what you're interested in accomplishing.

Format for Suggestions

Suggestion
What is your suggestion? Be as specific as possible; include the screen you're talking about, if applicable.

Reason
Why do you think this is important? If this is to correct what you perceive as a problem in OOTP 2007, what is that problem? Be as specific as possible.

Priority
In your opinion, how important is this suggestion?
High (MUST have), Medium (should have), Low (nice to have))


Handy Cut-and-Paste Suggestion Form:

Suggestion


Reason


Priority


Thanks for participating!

Steve

[Raidergoo]

Suggestion
Data dumps with no ratings for online league GM's. Allows you to use all of Anderson Utility tools.

Reason
Because only the commissioner can do this now right now.

Priority
High

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Re-import of the dumped csv's to allow mass editing.

Reason

Because people like the idea, and it'll take me a while after the release to update my code (unless a beta tester provides sample data - :flyingpig: )

Priority

High

[Comedian2004]

Suggestion
The csv files that contain career statistics for players be broke into two files. One that contains active players and one that contains retired players.

Reason

Because in leagues that are very old (many years of playing, like 1901-2000), the file is so large that it takes to long to load if you JUST want active players data. You have to load in the entire file.

Priority

High

[Comedian2004]

Suggestion
The teams.csv file only contains the active teams, make it contain all the teams ever, like it use to.

Reason
So, when you look at another CSV file that contains a team reference, you get the current team. If that team that you are trying to reference does not exist, you get no team name. The data structure is broke.

Priority

Higher

[ifspuds]

Not sure if this is the place, but since we're talking about data export...

Suggestion
Provide an in-game tool that will dump data (standings, league leaders, rosters, so on) to text files in bbcode format. In other words, properly spaced columns inside code tags.

Reason
Very useful for communicating these things via the forums, especially for dynasty writers but also for people who just want to provide the information to readers without having to post screenshots.

Priority
For me? Very high. It'd be an enormous time-saver.

In general, probably a medium-low to medium.

[Raidergoo]

Suggestion
Stat editor

Reason
To fix the two season's worth of stat errors when a player is unretired. it would be nice to have a simple fix to repair bug damage.

Priority
High

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Output all CSVs correctly

Reason

I have had a few people say that they can't get the teams importer to work and on investigation it has been down to the CSV not having enough fields in it from the 16th item onwards.

Priority

Medium

[battists]

Suggestion
Improve the in-game backup function, or remove it entirely.

Reason
Currently, the in-game backup feature only backs up the .dat files. While that is all that is required to open a saved game, the truth is that without all of the associated txt files that store transaction information, etc., your league gets pretty much hosed if you restore just the .dat files.

Therefore, I would recommend that we either develop an in-game backup function that backs up ALL of the key files for a league, or eliminate the in-game backup entirely.

Personally, my recommendation would be to remove of it. I can't think of any games I've played before that have in-game backup features.

Priority
Medium

[Tony M]

Suggestion

If it doesn't serve any purpose (and in all the games I've run I've never seen anything in it), remove the three large chunks of blank data that get saved with every league.

Reason

There are three sections of what appear to be just blank filler per league. After the first draft-order section there are 248000 blank bytes, after the draft-pick trades and second draft-order section there is another 247997 blank bytes and after the third draft-order section there is another 248000 blank bytes.

It may well be that they have data in them and I've just never run a game with a setup that causes it to be filled.

If not, for every league that is created there are 743,997 bytes of data that aren't used. With a standard MLB setup consisting of 17 leagues, that amounts to just over 12Mb of space not being used.

Granted, most people in online leagues have broadband and 3/4Mb of blank zips down fairly well, but if it's not used for anything, it might as well be got rid of.

Priority

High if it is just filler, Non-existent if it is used

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Store contract history, injury history, trade history and movement history against a player in the players.dat file.

Reason

As stated by battists above, the in-game backup feature only does a certain amount. Some things are recorded only in the text files and not in the database.

It should be possible to implement a new structure in the player record and put it after the Leaderboard structures to record these four items. If the text files are lost they could be recreated from the file.

The contract structure could be based on the structure already present in a player record with the addition of a field for the date it was signed.

The injury structure would consist of date injury occurred, injury id, DL15 flag, DL60 flag, DTD flag, CEI flag, SEI flag, expected recovery time, date injury finished.

The trade structure would be similar to that in the trades.dat file listing the date of the trade, other team and all the players, cash and draft-picks included in it. If by default the game stored all transactions for all the time, this structure could just be a link to that trade ID

The movement structure would list all roster moves the player made. Date of move, from team id, to team id, type of move (eg, purchased, optioned, promoted, demoted, placed on active roster, placed on waivers, placed on DFA, etc)

Priority

Medium-High (would build in more resilience for backups)

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Remove the Year field from the team and coach and league history structures for batting and pitching stats.

Reason

The fielding and financial structures in these files' history doesn't have the year in them, and given that the history structure appears to be keyed on the year id, it's duplication of data. If you're looking at the team history for 2007, it's a good guess that the batting stats will be for 2007 and it doesn't need to tell you that again.

Priority

Medium-High

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Remove the hard-codedness for 39 innings in a game summary

Reason

If for some reason a game goes beyond 39 innings, the box score gets messed up as the game just keeps reading through world.dat regardless of the structure so you can start to see the home team's innings scores appearing in the away team's innings scores.

It is hard coded to 39 innings, so for 99% of games there are 60 innings saved that aren't being used. The number of innings the game lasted for are saved in the structure so it could easily be a variable length.

If the average length of a game in a standard MLB setup was 10 innings (highly unlikely) there's another 750Kb of disk space being used to store the 11-39th innings of the 13000+ matches.

Priority

Medium

[Tony M]

Suggestion

More space saving. Team IDs and Nation IDs and League IDs and Division IDs are all 32-bit integers. The first two (or three could easily be 16-bit integers) and the last one needs only be a byte

Reason

The game allows for 16777216 teams, with a 16 bit field it would still allow 65535 teams to be created (that is the equivalent of 13 leagues with 2 subleagues each of 50 divisions of 50 teams). I can't imagine anyone getting close to 65,000 teams.

The same goes for nations - there's around 220 in the game at the moment. It is fairly possible to take that above 256 but yet again it's unlikely you'll have more than 65535.

League IDs could easily be a byte, though you could have someone wanting to run 256 leagues in their game.

Division IDs do only need to be a byte as the game limits you to only having 50.

This would free up a lot of space across the board as the first three fields certainly do appear in a lot of places.

Priority

Medium

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Allow Game Batting, Game Pitching and Game Fielding statistics to be stored for more than the current season

Reason

The same structure is used for Career Batting and Game Batting and for Career Pitching and Game Pitching and Fielding is just a career record. Allow the user to determine whether they want to keep Game Batting/Pitching/Fielding statistics for more than the current season. This would allow splits and double splits to be more in-depth

Priority

Medium

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by ifspuds

Not sure if this is the place, but since we're talking about data export...

Suggestion
Provide an in-game tool that will dump data (standings, league leaders, rosters, so on) to text files in bbcode format. In other words, properly spaced columns inside code tags.

Reason
Very useful for communicating these things via the forums, especially for dynasty writers but also for people who just want to provide the information to readers without having to post screenshots.

Priority
For me? Very high. It'd be an enormous time-saver.

In general, probably a medium-low to medium.

I would actually put this as medium-high. It would help tremendously with dynasty thread reports.

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Make the roster lists in teams.dat variable length

Reason

The four roster lists for every team are fixed length arrays of player IDs, with a possible 200 in each list. Apart from the lowest level of minors, the game won't allow more than 50 on an active or secondary roster.

Having a count field followed by the relevant IDs would be a more efficient way of dealing with this.

Priority

Medium-Low

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Remove the following fields from the Batting History database for teams, coaches and leagues

AVG, OBP, SLG, RC, RC/27, ISO, TAVG, OPS, SB%

Remove the following fields from the Pitching History database for teams, coaches and leagues

Runs/9, AVG, OBP, SLG, OPS, Hits/9, K/9, HR/9, BB/9, CG%, QS%, RS/G, SV%, BS%, GF%, ERA, P/I, K/BB, W%, WHIP, GB%, BABIP

Reason

They're all derivable from the other fields stored in that section of statistics, and can be calculated quickly to appear in the CSV files.

Priority

Medium-Low

[battists]

Suggestion
Create a special SQL export of scouting reports of players from each team. That is, each team's scout's reports on each player.

If this could be done, a utility could be written by someone in the community to allow online league owners to log into an application and see their scouting reports.

Reason
Currently, in online leagues, scouting has made the HTML pages almost useless, because when you look at the HTML, you can only see the SISA scouting, which is wildly inaccurate. Online leagues need SOME way to get access to their scouted ratings in the HTML world, or they lose a lot of flexibility to participate in their leagues when away from the game.

Priority
Medium, High for online leagues

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Replace the IP and IPF fields with an OUTS field

Reason

Storing the IP value in two different fields seems wasteful when there is a much neater value ready for this. OUTS = 3 * IP + IPF

Priority

Medium-Low