Newb Questions

[jmuelly]

So I’ve enjoyed my limited time a lot this far. I’m left with a few questions, I’m sure morewill populate. I have to admit I’ve beenquite a bit overwhelmed, the game is incredibly deep! Sorry for so many ?, really trying to learn to get the most from this game. I'm a longtime MLB Show user, but this appears to very easily beripping my excitement for the Show away with its total control and unpredictableoutcomes.

-Face gen…Is there a way to get minor leaguers included? Also how about giving my manager a face, even if a generic facegen?

-Will OD rosters have rating changes (minor or major?) forprospects or just roster designations?

-Scouting reports are only available by request or am Imissing something?

-Is there a way to gather more trade options for a playerthan 1 for 1 swaps?

-Where can I view my current coaching staff? I see where I can hire but I’d like to viewmy staff at all levels.

-Prior to beginning a season I am informed I do not havecoaches for select positions in my system. I turned minor league hire/fire to my assistant GM but it seemed as ifhe didn’t hire anyone. Maybe I missedit. For starters I’m delegating most myminor league work promotion and what not to the assistant gm while I focus onthe MLB level and rosters moves through the organization. I feel most GMs would do the same as well, Idoubt many GMs control every facet of their club.

-Is my PC or a normal expectation that advancing a day takes15-20 seconds often?

[Griever20]

-Face gen…Is there a way to get minor leaguers included? Also how about giving my manager a face, even if a generic facegen?

Game -> Game Settings, then on the upper left you click on Players & FaceGen
On the right side side of the screen the facegen setting should appear. If you activate Player Pictures for All Players, you should be fine.

-Will OD rosters have rating changes (minor or major?) forprospects or just roster designations?
With the 'patches' the OD rosters and ratings may change, but it takes a newly created game with the new patch for those to take effect.

-Is there a way to gather more trade options for a playerthan 1 for 1 swaps?

Yes! Click on the League name on top -> Transactions and then Player Trade. You can select the team you want to trade with on the right can can make trades with up to five players on each side + cash considerations and draft picks if you enable that in the options.

-Where can I view my current coaching staff? I see where I can hire but I’d like to viewmy staff at all levels.

Click on the team name on top -> Front Office, and then there is a button for Personnel. There are all coaches listed, and if you need one, you can click on the red message on the right and you land right on the Available Personnel page

-Prior to beginning a season I am informed I do not havecoaches for select positions in my system. I turned minor league hire/fire to my assistant GM but it seemed as ifhe didn’t hire anyone. Maybe I missedit. For starters I’m delegating most myminor league work promotion and what not to the assistant gm while I focus onthe MLB level and rosters moves through the organization. I feel most GMs would do the same as well, Idoubt many GMs control every facet of their club.

Click on your manager name on top -> team control settings
On the left, there is a list of things you do and your assistant GM does. One thing to consider, it may take some time for the minor league coaches to actually sign the contracts.

-Is my PC or a normal expectation that advancing a day takes15-20 seconds often?

Can definitly be normal as the game simulates all minor league games and some player development stuff!

So, welcome to OOTP and enjoy the game !

[TGH-Adfabre]

-Is my PC or a normal expectation that advancing a day takes15-20 seconds often?

I use my task manager and turn off processes in the background. You may have enough RAM but a conflicting program can slow things down.

[TrashcanMan]

I run the game off my 500gb SSD drive and it is really fast 3-5 seconds tops on weekly sims.

[NoOne]

edit: if it is set to asst gm to control that task and nothing is happening: if oyu have "prevent ai from making roster changes" check box ticked in team settings (visible in commissioner mode only), then i believe that setting trumps other settings. e.g. i turned sign MiL free agents on and my minor leagues do not automatically sign MiL FA to fill roster because i keep that checkbox named above activated.

if it is nearing the end of a trade deadline or something, maybe it should slow down.

point of reference on a HDD: if i turn off asthetic stuff i think 1 year takes ~4mins. with voting and other stuff turned back on, i think it takes 5-6mins for an entire year. this is mlb only, not a full world of leagues.

so, 15-20s sounds really bad for 1 day, unless you have a dinosaur for a computer and you have every single world league active and all sorts of 'extras' like voting ASG/HoF/baseball cards generated etc.

RAM will not be a problem unless you are running out of it. extra ram does nothing for speed. i don't believe this program will allocate more than 1-1.5gb of ram. task manager will tell you if it's running out of space and swapping data constantly... if not, this is not the bottleneck for you.

you can load task manager then click performance. on that screen, click view, then enable "Show Kernal Times" -- it will be represented in the cpu% bar as an orange-ish overlay. if it's going bat-sh^t crazy, you cpu is the bottleneck.

reducing background programs and service may help - if they are resource hogs or you have 20 3rd party BS loading with windows. turning off a few minor windows service won't do much. turn off any "real-time" software like Antivirus software... it's just a placebo effect, anyway. (do not turn off firewall!)

'17 has multiprocessor support form what i read. you can try assigning the process affinity to a core and see if that fixes it? right click it in taskmanager.


if it is a hdd, defrag that ootp saved directory, or just do the whole hdd. (some programs can target a directory, which will save you time)

(****do not defrag an SSD, it will hurt your drive over its lifetime, rather than help anything at all. no moving parts = no need to degrag. it actually hurts it because it will cause uneven use - some storage areas of the ssd will age faster than others if you defrag****)

[Matt Arnold]

Sim speed is also heavily dependant on the number of leagues and teams in use. Unless if you have a really powerful computer, it's worth it to think about your universe. Do you care about the US independent leagues, or having the Cuban or Japanese leagues in the game? If not, it might be worth it to turn them off. Even something as simple as disabling finances or trading in those leagues could let them sim in the background faster if you still want them in the universe.

[24Rocks]

To add to what Matt said

If you have those league just to have them and you don't ever expect to control a team in those leagues you might want to turn the tracked stats detail down to low so the game doesn't waist time keeping stats you don't want/will never see.

You can find this in Settings>league settings>stats & AI

Doing this REALLY helped me with my long time league sim times.

[jmuelly]

I'm not exactly a computer wiz. I'm running on about a 5 year old HP with a 2.4 ghz I5 processor and 8gb of ram.

As for hard drive I'm unsure. It's an HP Pavillion DM4 1165dx.

4-5 minutes for an entire season, geez feel it would take me an hour to do such a thing.

Edit: only running MLB leagues

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by NoOne

edit: if it is set to asst gm to control that task and nothing is happening: if oyu have "prevent ai from making roster changes" check box ticked in team settings (visible in commissioner mode only), then i believe that setting trumps other settings. e.g. i turned sign MiL free agents on and my minor leagues do not automatically sign MiL FA to fill roster because i keep that checkbox named above activated.

if it is nearing the end of a trade deadline or something, maybe it should slow down.

point of reference on a HDD: if i turn off asthetic stuff i think 1 year takes ~4mins. with voting and other stuff turned back on, i think it takes 5-6mins for an entire year. this is mlb only, not a full world of leagues.

so, 15-20s sounds really bad for 1 day, unless you have a dinosaur for a computer and you have every single world league active and all sorts of 'extras' like voting ASG/HoF/baseball cards generated etc.

RAM will not be a problem unless you are running out of it. extra ram does nothing for speed. i don't believe this program will allocate more than 1-1.5gb of ram. task manager will tell you if it's running out of space and swapping data constantly... if not, this is not the bottleneck for you.

you can load task manager then click performance. on that screen, click view, then enable "Show Kernal Times" -- it will be represented in the cpu% bar as an orange-ish overlay. if it's going bat-sh^t crazy, you cpu is the bottleneck.

reducing background programs and service may help - if they are resource hogs or you have 20 3rd party BS loading with windows. turning off a few minor windows service won't do much. turn off any "real-time" software like Antivirus software... it's just a placebo effect, anyway. (do not turn off firewall!)

'17 has multiprocessor support form what i read. you can try assigning the process affinity to a core and see if that fixes it? right click it in taskmanager.


if it is a hdd, defrag that ootp saved directory, or just do the whole hdd. (some programs can target a directory, which will save you time)

(****do not defrag an SSD, it will hurt your drive over its lifetime, rather than help anything at all. no moving parts = no need to degrag. it actually hurts it because it will cause uneven use - some storage areas of the ssd will age faster than others if you defrag****)

PC talk is alot of gibberish for me. I'm on Windows 10, I am not seeing where to select see kernels in the performance screen.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by TrashcanMan

I run the game off my 500gb SSD drive and it is really fast 3-5 seconds tops on weekly sims.

I use an SSD as well and it's just whoosh. Highly recommended.

[jmuelly]

I tried a simulation last night Id estimate a full season would take me about an hour to simulate. Watching task manager my processor and ram aren't even near 50% maxed out. Disc drive is usually in the 40-50% range.

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by jmuelly

I tried a simulation last night Id estimate a full season would take me about an hour to simulate. Watching task manager my processor and ram aren't even near 50% maxed out. Disc drive is usually in the 40-50% range.

Depending on everything going on, we won't always max out the processor. If you are concerned, one thing you can check is the number of threads we are using (in your File->Settings options dialog), and make sure that lines up with the number of cores (plus hyperthreading) on your box. It's possible some systems might not report things properly to us. You can always play around with those numbers and you might find a setting that works better on your particular system.

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Depending on everything going on, we won't always max out the processor. If you are concerned, one thing you can check is the number of threads we are using (in your File->Settings options dialog), and make sure that lines up with the number of cores (plus hyperthreading) on your box. It's possible some systems might not report things properly to us. You can always play around with those numbers and you might find a setting that works better on your particular system.

I'm not very computer savvy. In all honesty I use my PC strictly for paying bills and minor web browsing, this year however I am diving into OOTP as well.


So there is an actual location that I can setup to enhance for my system? Is there a tutorial or guidance?

Alls I know is I have roughly a 5 year old I5 2.4 GHZ processor with 8gb Ram running windows 10. Short of that I'm clueless.

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by jmuelly

I'm not very computer savvy. In all honesty I use my PC strictly for paying bills and minor web browsing, this year however I am diving into OOTP as well.


So there is an actual location that I can setup to enhance for my system? Is there a tutorial or guidance?

Alls I know is I have roughly a 5 year old I5 2.4 GHZ processor with 8gb Ram running windows 10. Short of that I'm clueless.

No worries. The advice I gave before was more the advanced user, and even for them, I imagine the defaults should work fine 99% of the time.

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

No worries. The advice I gave before was more the advanced user, and even for them, I imagine the defaults should work fine 99% of the time.

Is there anyway to improve my in game simulation speeds? I plan to run MLB only league. I'll probably sim a week to a month at a time.


Any options that could be turned off to assist speeds? Each time I fire it up I find something new, that I hadn't seen before so eventually I'm sure I'll find some of this on my own.


The game itself is great, just deflating a bit when I get stuck in slow progressions.


Greatly appreciate the support, from what I've seen yourself and Markus are very committed to your work. I understand why OOTP has continued to grow! I'm hooked.

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by jmuelly

Is there anyway to improve my in game simulation speeds? I plan to run MLB only league. I'll probably sim a week to a month at a time.


Any options that could be turned off to assist speeds? Each time I fire it up I find something new, that I hadn't seen before so eventually I'm sure I'll find some of this on my own.


The game itself is great, just deflating a bit when I get stuck in slow progressions.


Greatly appreciate the support, from what I've seen yourself and Markus are very committed to your work. I understand why OOTP has continued to grow! I'm hooked.

The main things that affect speed are the number of teams and leagues in your world. So if you're concerned about speed, make sure you're not using leagues you don't care as much about. Even something as simple as dropping some of the low rookie leagues can have an effect.

That's probably the biggest change you can make. You can also do stuff like mass delete/retire excess free agents if they tend to build up in your game. Trading, waivers, free agents all take sim time, but most people don't tend to like to disable them

The other things that take time are box score/game log/game recaps/wpa graph generation. Make sure those are set according to what you use them for.

But mainly I'd look into the leagues. I do think that too many people open the quickstart assuming that's the best way to get going, not realizing that it has a ton of independent leagues in there that all need to sign player, trade with each other, and sim games out.

[pstrickert]

Also be sure to disable baseball cards in: Game > Game Settings > Players & Facegen. At least for me, creating baseball cards really slows down the game.

[progen]

If we choose not to have say, the Cuban and Japanese leagues included, will we still see players from those leagues available at some point to draft or sign as free agents? I didn't think that was possible without including them in my universe, so that's why I do it when creating the game.

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by pstrickert

Also be sure to disable baseball cards in: Game > Game Settings > Players & Facegen. At least for me, creating baseball cards really slows down the game.

disable face gen entirely? or just cards?

[pstrickert]

Just baseball cards.