Help with Backup/ transferring players from one game to another

[rutgers77]

so basically my main save I have been working on for years got corrupted but only slightly. It just ended a season in june and added new games to the schedule starting in June and basically wanted me to just pretend the prior few months did not happen and a new season woulds be starting in June and going to December. But everything else in the game is fine. I have a recentish back-up from 6 months ago in real life time. I was wondering if there is away for me to transfer the messages/ player data/ any other data from my more recent save to my older back up. I have been playing this save since ootp 16 and have imported it all the way through OOtp 21 so it would be great if someone could help

[Charlie Hough]

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to do what you're asking. And if you were trying to merge more recent data with an older save, I think you'd end up with major issues anyway. You can try submitting a bug report in the bugs forum and uploading a copy of your saved game to see if there's anything OOTP Developments can do to salvage it.

Otherwise, this is a painful lesson in the importance of backing up your game every time you save or auto-save. Thankfully I've never had a save become corrupted or stop working, but I save a backup of my game and sync that to the cloud every time I save.

[rutgers77]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to do what you're asking. And if you were trying to merge more recent data with an older save, I think you'd end up with major issues anyway. You can try submitting a bug report in the bugs forum and uploading a copy of your saved game to see if there's anything OOTP Developments can do to salvage it.

Otherwise, this is a painful lesson in the importance of backing up your game every time you save or auto-save. Thankfully I've never had a save become corrupted or stop working, but I save a backup of my game and sync that to the cloud every time I save.

Thanks for the reply. I was able to get all the right messages in. However when I tried to get the correct players in all there names got changed. SO it seems that at least some of this is possible.

[ALB123]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to do what you're asking. And if you were trying to merge more recent data with an older save, I think you'd end up with major issues anyway. You can try submitting a bug report in the bugs forum and uploading a copy of your saved game to see if there's anything OOTP Developments can do to salvage it.

Otherwise, this is a painful lesson in the importance of backing up your game every time you save or auto-save. Thankfully I've never had a save become corrupted or stop working, but I save a backup of my game and sync that to the cloud every time I save.

If you make a backup every 2 weeks during the season the backup process is super quick. When you wait 3-4 months to do a backup, the process is much slower. That's a very good reason to listen to Charlie's advice.

I wish I had always done it that way as my main saved game has/had corruption issues that forced me to delete entire leagues - thankfully, they were the Japanese & Korean leagues...not the MLB or its affiliates.

[rutgers77]

Originally Posted by ALB123

If you make a backup every 2 weeks during the season the backup process is super quick. When you wait 3-4 months to do a backup, the process is much slower. That's a very good reason to listen to Charlie's advice.

I wish I had always done it that way as my main saved game has/had corruption issues that forced me to delete entire leagues - thankfully, they were the Japanese & Korean leagues...not the MLB or its affiliates.

Do you have any idea which data file (.dat file) in the folders controls the standings and schedules. I think I can fix it if I can move that file from the backup to the current version but not sure which one that is.

[rutgers77]

Does anyone have any idea which data file (.dat file) in the folders controls the standings and schedules? I think I can fix it if I can move that file from the backup to the current version but not sure which one that is.

[Matt Arnold]

Unfortunately, that's not really how things can be done. The world.dat file contains the vast majority of the schedule/game state, but you can't just move some pieces but not all of it around.

In essense, the .dat files do not really work in any real sense to plug and play them. Some (faces.dat, parks.dat) are a little easier to delete or move around, since they store essentially peripheral stuff to the core game, but you 99.9999% of the time need your world.dat, teams.dat, players.dat, etc... to all match from the same save, or else you will absolutely get players who end up lost in the shuffle (because you have added or removed players, but team rosters don't know about them, for example).

I don't know exactly what happened in your game, or what state it is in, but I would suggest probably keeping the current file and just trying to manually adjust whatever you can to try to get it working. Maybe simply playing this new season out will more or less work, or perhaps you can just manually edit the schedule to delete all the games, and then reschedule them for the new time next year. While that may cause some issues (I guess players would gain service time for 6 months over the winter without games being played or something), maybe in your case that would still work?

I can't really give more advice without knowing a little more about what state your game is in, and how it shifted on you. So perhaps detailing things a little more could give another hint to get around it.

[rutgers77]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Unfortunately, that's not really how things can be done. The world.dat file contains the vast majority of the schedule/game state, but you can't just move some pieces but not all of it around.

In essense, the .dat files do not really work in any real sense to plug and play them. Some (faces.dat, parks.dat) are a little easier to delete or move around, since they store essentially peripheral stuff to the core game, but you 99.9999% of the time need your world.dat, teams.dat, players.dat, etc... to all match from the same save, or else you will absolutely get players who end up lost in the shuffle (because you have added or removed players, but team rosters don't know about them, for example).

I don't know exactly what happened in your game, or what state it is in, but I would suggest probably keeping the current file and just trying to manually adjust whatever you can to try to get it working. Maybe simply playing this new season out will more or less work, or perhaps you can just manually edit the schedule to delete all the games, and then reschedule them for the new time next year. While that may cause some issues (I guess players would gain service time for 6 months over the winter without games being played or something), maybe in your case that would still work?

I can't really give more advice without knowing a little more about what state your game is in, and how it shifted on you. So perhaps detailing things a little more could give another hint to get around it.

Thanks for the response Matt. How about the players.dat? Basically I have gotten everything to be back to NORMAL in MY BACKUP File besides the edits I made to a bunch of players since the last autosave. If it take the players.dat from the busted game and put it in the backup will that work?

Basically, in my original game I am playing along, everything is normal I go to sim a day and it says that the league structure in a certain minor league changed and I need to generate a schedule or things can go awry when simming. SO i stop simming I go to the minor league I double check it is the minor league 5x and I go to edit league structure than generate new schedule. The schedule generates, but when I go back to the home page I see my game against the Pirates for tommorow is no longer there, neither is the box score from my game today. I then exit the game thinking it is just a glitch because you can't even edit the schedule during the season through options, only in the preseason. Anyway i reload the game and see it still doesn't have those games, I turn autosave off there examine my team (The mets schedule) It has deleted all the day games from march to june 15 that were played, and has a new season starting June 18 of 162 games going until December. The options for major league baseball now say the mandatory start date is June 18, which cannot be edited as the season has started. Additionally the standings say I am still 47-12 which was my record at the time. I sim a few days until the 18th, the standings then reset and all teams in MLB become 0-0. No other leagues were effected, nothing else happened.

Basically, my two different situations right now are I successfully fixed everything in the BACKUP to work besides about 3,000 edits I made to various players. It would take me many hours to do it again. The players are as they should be and up to date with the edits in the original game. The original game has everything fine besides the new schedule/ standings changing. So I would like to either have the players file with all edits move from the orginial to the backup or move the standings/ schedule from the backup to the original. Either one of those things would get me back to normal. Please let me know if either is possible and how to go about it.

Happy to answer any other questions you may have about the game if you need more information.

[Matt Arnold]

Copying the players.dat (and retired.dat) to the old file *might* work, but it's definitely going to lead to some problems. Anyone who changed teams between the dates is almost guaranteed to have some weird issues happen with them, not to mention that stuff like player ages/development obviously will all be as of the new dates. There's certainly no guarantees that stuff like scouting reports will show correctly (may need to also copy over scouting.dat?). Not sure what other files would also need to be copied over, and what problems you'll get. Copying over the players file the players will almost certainly include all their stats and information for the time between the saves too, so certainly if you have progressed you will see some weird issues (players may have double stats some years).

Now, that being said, there are various functions in the league setup that might be able to help. For example, there are import/export functions for rosters and stats which won't copy all the information that swapping the old players.dat would do. So you might be able to get a good amount of what you want by exporting the rosters from the new file, and then importing it into the old save. You may choose to do some manual editing on the roster export if you want to adjust stuff like contracts, teams, etc... back to the same as it was in the old setup, but depending exactly on what edits you did, it may help.

[rutgers77]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Copying the players.dat (and retired.dat) to the old file *might* work, but it's definitely going to lead to some problems. Anyone who changed teams between the dates is almost guaranteed to have some weird issues happen with them, not to mention that stuff like player ages/development obviously will all be as of the new dates. There's certainly no guarantees that stuff like scouting reports will show correctly (may need to also copy over scouting.dat?). Not sure what other files would also need to be copied over, and what problems you'll get. Copying over the players file the players will almost certainly include all their stats and information for the time between the saves too, so certainly if you have progressed you will see some weird issues (players may have double stats some years).

Now, that being said, there are various functions in the league setup that might be able to help. For example, there are import/export functions for rosters and stats which won't copy all the information that swapping the old players.dat would do. So you might be able to get a good amount of what you want by exporting the rosters from the new file, and then importing it into the old save. You may choose to do some manual editing on the roster export if you want to adjust stuff like contracts, teams, etc... back to the same as it was in the old setup, but depending exactly on what edits you did, it may help.

Hi Matt, Thanks so much for your help I was able to replace the Original Game's world.dat file with that of the backup and it worked!! Since the backup I had only made TONS OF edits to players and played a couple of days so I am just back a couple of days but everything else is intact. SO appreciative for all your assitance.