Naming convention of player pics: There's gotta be a better way

[Vikke]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

I don't follow hockey at all, but I would have to wonder, how many players on the same team in any given year have the same exact name?
I've done thousands of pics for baseball, the MLB, All Minor lgs. and about 9,000 for 300 ncaa teams and I've yet to find 2 players on the same team with the same name, but that may be different with the foreign hockey teams.
If it's not many, then I would use player name_team name_year as the naming convention for photos. Just a thought.

So what happens in year 2 when 25% of the players change teams? Do you have to rename all the pictures?

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by Vikke

So what happens in year 2 when 25% of the players change teams? Do you have to rename all the pictures?

Or traded in game? That'd likely be a problem too, unfortunately.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Bluenoser

So that's one example. I didn't say it never happens, but once certainly isn't the norm.

11 Martin Svobodas, 18 Alexander Erikssons, 13 Jason Smiths, 7 Joni Virtanens, 8 Sergei Ivanovs, 5 Christian Müllers, 21 Johan Karlssons...that's just from a very quick glance through the Eliteprospects database, which for the most part only extends back to players active in the last decade. The common Swedish last names alone typically have a dozen or more cases each of 5+ guys with the same first name.

The point I'm trying to make here is this - don't ignore your community because something is easier to do another way. OOTP got to where it is in large part because of the community. When you say things like Using middle names may be convenient for people building picture sets remember who those people are.

You've amputated the second half of that sentence where I say it comes at the expense of researchers. You're asking us to complicate the task of one group of volunteers to make something more convenient for another one - and there doesn't even seem to be consensus among the people editing pictures that changing the naming convention would be easier for them. I'm not ignoring the community, I'm trying to do what's sensible for the largest group of users. You may not agree with the decision, but that's hardly grounds for claiming I'm ignoring the community.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by Vikke

So what happens in year 2 when 25% of the players change teams? Do you have to rename all the pictures?

He's got year at the end, so presumably it'd be looking at the history for that year. But adding team+year to the name is even more typing than adding the birthdate.

[Bluenoser]

Originally Posted by JeffR

11 Martin Svobodas, 18 Alexander Erikssons, 13 Jason Smiths, 7 Joni Virtanens, 8 Sergei Ivanovs, 5 Christian Müllers, 21 Johan Karlssons...that's just from a very quick glance through the Eliteprospects database, which for the most part only extends back to players active in the last decade. The common Swedish last names alone typically have a dozen or more cases each of 5+ guys with the same first name.



You've amputated the second half of that sentence where I say it comes at the expense of researchers. You're asking us to complicate the task of one group of volunteers to make something more convenient for another one - and there doesn't even seem to be consensus among the people editing pictures that changing the naming convention would be easier for them. I'm not ignoring the community, I'm trying to do what's sensible for the largest group of users. You may not agree with the decision, but that's hardly grounds for claiming I'm ignoring the community.

I'm not claiming you're ignoring the community, I apologize if it came across that way. I'm suggesting to work with them.

What I'm curious about is, how does OOTP manage to do it?

OOTP Baseball worlds can be quite large. It is obvious that FHM Hockey worlds will be quite large too.

OOTP has managed to accomplish the naming convention problem fairly well, so what is the secret? Is it not something that could be applied to FHM? Yes, there are duplicate names at times, but for the most part it works. All I'm saying is look at how OOTP does it and see if it can be applied here.

[Bigrod]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Or traded in game? That'd likely be a problem too, unfortunately.

Nope, if you're gonna have real life pics, you're gonna need to update them anyway so the jersey's match the new team. There's a great freeware renaming program that handles that job real nice. If they're facegens it doesn't matter as they change unis automatically. That's if this game works similar to ootp.
For ootp, I check the transactions once a week and update the pics if my source has updated them.
Real pics are always gonna be a problem when players are traded in the game and there's nothing that can be done about that no matter how you name it. Unless of course you want to edit it in a paint program which isn't difficult at all.
Now for players on the same team the next year you just rename the plaer pic to joe_smith_boston_bruins_2012-2013 and so on. For historical players, you already know how many years that pic applies so you name it accordingly.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by Bluenoser

I'm not claiming you're ignoring the community, I apologize if it came across that way. I'm suggesting to work with them.

What I'm curious about is, how does OOTP manage to do it?

OOTP Baseball worlds can be quite large. It is obvious that FHM Hockey worlds will be quite large too.

OOTP has managed to accomplish the naming convention problem fairly well, so what is the secret? Is it not something that could be applied to FHM? Yes, there are duplicate names at times, but for the most part it works. All I'm saying is look at how OOTP does it and see if it can be applied here.

I've tried to address that. The default OOTP worlds aren't that large. So to Markus, it works fine because he's only dealing with MLB and historical MLB really. The few issues that pop up there are already renamed in the official db's and everything works out more or less ok.

But once you get much beyond the 20000 or so MLB and MLB historical players that come in a basic OOTP world and start adding Japan, Korea, Cuba, Europe, Independents and the NCAA... More and more issues with using the middle name start to pop up. At that point, it becomes clear, that the OOTP way of doing things really doesn't work that well.

Considering the the basic db for EHM will bear much more similarity to the kind of expanded OOTP universe I'm talking about than the basic OOTP db that comes with the game, you'd see the same types of issues there too. And the European tendency toward duplicated names and difficulty finding middle initials simply makes things far, far worse.

[silvam14]

How about make having the birthdate at the end optional? After all if I had to go back and change 100 filenames to add the birthdays because of name conflicts, that is still much less time consuming than having to do it for thousands.

So he game looks for a picture by player name, if it sees more than one name, it looks for the birthdate.

And for people like me who plays mostly just NHL, it seems unnecessary punishment to use the birthdays given the lack of duplicate names.

[Lukas Berger]

I'd imagine that could work pretty well.

[herzkine]

All in all id sum this up: The current format is not perfect but the best possible. So why waste time on changing a things that works into somehtign that might give more issues and definately only costs time.

[silvam14]

Originally Posted by herzkine

All in all id sum this up: The current format is not perfect but the best possible. So why waste time on changing a things that works into somehtign that might give more issues and definately only costs time.

Makes sense, it also makes sense for me not to waste my time having to look up each players birthday to make a custom mod. No biggie

[batdad]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

I don't follow hockey at all, but I would have to wonder, how many players on the same team in any given year have the same exact name?
I've done thousands of pics for baseball, the MLB, All Minor lgs. and about 9,000 for 300 ncaa teams and I've yet to find 2 players on the same team with the same name, but that may be different with the foreign hockey teams.
If it's not many, then I would use player name_team name_year as the naming convention for photos. Just a thought.

Example 1: Greg Adams, Greg Adams ....and middle initial was used for one of them back in the day. Greg C Adams. Vancouver Canucks in 1988-89. Greg Adams became known as Gus. Greg C...as Greg C.

But for me the DOB is the way to go. Too many different naming conventions in different areas of the world....as the pain of identifier numbers changing DB to DB would be a nightmare. At least the DOB remains the same. Unless of course you are making a CHANGE START DATE Patch, and all kinds of crazy insane stuff like in EHM.

[Djungelurban]

Originally Posted by silvam14

Makes sense, it also makes sense for me not to waste my time having to look up each players birthday to make a custom mod. No biggie

I can't imagine it taking more than 10-15 seconds per player though...

[fireholder]

definitely date of birth.

i reckon baseball doesn't have nearly as many foreign implications for most users? fantasy or fictional, sure, but as Jeff already said, what do we do with 18 Alexander Erikssons? What if half don't have a middle name?

Hockey is the only sport I follow. I watch baseball with my grandfather (I caretake for him) but I play, watch, and experience hockey. Middle names in hockey would be strange.

[Primis]

Originally Posted by Djungelurban

Weren't there two Cory Stillman and two Petr Sykora playing in the NHL at the same time a few years back? And for example, there are 19 Johan Andersson that has been registered as playing a game this season over on eliteprospects. 19... Adding DoB is essential.

Yeah... A bit of background.... If you go back to the original freeware EHM (prior to Riz signing on with SI) guys like Smetana, Tom, and Jayzin Smith making rosters ran into this issue, and in fact Petr Sykora was the first big one IIRC. Mike Green was another (the currents Caps' d-man, and then a prospect C that never panned out really but i think is kicking around in the minors still).

The freeware had no built-in way of distinguishing between the two really for pictures and the like. So the temporary fix was to add an extra space for one between first and last name, so you ended up with "Petr Sykora" and "Mike Green" for example. The DB also maxed out at 3500 players (quite small actually now).

I also know that at one point as recently as this year/season there were two different Kevin Bakers floating around the ECHL as forwards and one of them (the older) officially (not just in video games) has taken to being called "Kevin R. Baker" in order to distinguish them apart. I also recall reading a story recently about (I think) Vancouver drafting (I think) a Swedish center years ago only to find out there was another Swedish center with the exact same name and they'd drafted the wrong one because they weren't paying close enough attention to the details of the paperwork.

When SI launched NHL:EHM they added the birthdate convention to player photos, to help distinguish. If you poke around hockeydb.com enough you'll even find that birth year or birth month wouldn't be enough, in some cases there are players with the same name that are the same age/have same birth year even.

There just really isn't a better convention to distinguish. When the DB's get large enough you'll get name conflicts otherwise. If you want a pain, imagine trying to fix player photos when your game start-date is hardcoded into the .EXE and you're still trying to properly emulate current player ages and aging with updated DB's (like has been going on with EHM DB's for years now).

[archibalduk]

Originally Posted by JeffR

You're asking us to complicate the task of one group of volunteers to make something more convenient for another one - and there doesn't even seem to be consensus among the people editing pictures that changing the naming convention would be easier for them.

Absolutely. It has worked the past 9 years with EHM no real problems. Until now, I've never seen any complaints about it. For EHM 2007 alone there are over 100 facepacks created by users (approx 100,000 images at my estimate) - so the DOB file name convention hasn't really been much of an obstacle there (nor was it for EHM 2004 and 2005).

It'd be an impossible task to research middle names for any league other than NHL players. And nobody refers to hockey players using their middle name.

Originally Posted by Bigrod

Nope, if you're gonna have real life pics, you're gonna need to update them anyway so the jersey's match the new team.

It depends on how the pics look. If they're in the style like the one below, there's no real need to update them following a trade:

[justafan]

Originally Posted by silvam14

How about make having the birthdate at the end optional? After all if I had to go back and change 100 filenames to add the birthdays because of name conflicts, that is still much less time consuming than having to do it for thousands.

So he game looks for a picture by player name, if it sees more than one name, it looks for the birthdate.

And for people like me who plays mostly just NHL, it seems unnecessary punishment to use the birthdays given the lack of duplicate names.

I'm with silvam14 on this one.

Just because there may be a few players with the same name, you want all that extra work? It make no sense.

OOTP does it right!!!

[geckon]

I agree with archibalduk and JeffR (and others). It makes no sense to rely on middle names when it comes to hockey and European players.

[no way]

Originally Posted by geckon

I agree with archibalduk and JeffR (and others). It makes no sense to rely on middle names when it comes to hockey and European players.

Well I don't know one czech player with middle name, so from my point it's useless therefor I must agree with archibalduk and JeffR as well.

[Primis]

Originally Posted by justafan

I'm with silvam14 on this one.

Just because there may be a few players with the same name, you want all that extra work? It make no sense.

OOTP does it right!!!

Well that's just it: there's not a "a few". This isn't your baseball universe. This is the hockey universe, and there a couple of nationalities in particular where the same names appear over and over again. As I mentioned before above it's not unheard of to have two players with the exact same name and nationality draft eligible at the same time even and it's tripped up NHL teams in real life before.

In the freeware EHM days in a DB of 3500 players max you'd still have maybe 3 or 4 conflicts. EHM 2007's DB's could get much, much bigger, and as you add in European leagues and the like the chances of name conflicts don't just steadily grow evenly, they increase on an upward curve.


I'd like to ask all OOTPers to please do one thing regarding FHM: At least listen to the longtime EHMers. Most of the EHMers that will show up here have been doing hockey management sim stuff for about as long as the OOTP series has been around and there's no need to reinvent the wheel just to make it fit the baseball way. Some of the names you'll see on this FHM board (and that I've already seen post here) are people that helped work on the original freeware EHM back around 2000, and then on up through EHM 2007. Others have run online leagues, helped keep updated rosters (freeware EHM still has up-to-date rosters available for download through the community if that tells you anything, to say nothing of the impressive EHM 2007 updates still current and the historical mods available), and helped create game patches and utilities from scratch.

Many of the EHM users and fans have had to creatively tackle problems OOTPers couldn't dream of because OOTP isn't quite so hardcoded and limited. There's a wealth of knowledge longtime EHMers can share through frustration and experience.

If you start using phrases "But OOTP does/is..." hold on for a second, because that's the exact sort of thing that got SI into some trouble making the NHL EHM series and trying to apply CM/FM's soccer logic to it, because soccer isn't hockey either.

Different sports are different universes.