So, I try this every couple of years...

[Syd Thrift]

...and now, the issue to me with not being able to schedule some fighters appears to be that the random fighter generator doesn't check to see someone else in your DB has a given ID before it assigns them - if you generate 4 new fighters, for instance, it will assign them IDs 1-4. Then, when you try to schedule bouts with them, the game will take whoever originally had ID 1, for example, and put them in the bout. You also see this if you try to open a fighter's XML; you'll see the original guy's XML instead.

The problem I'm seeing is (by which I mean, the intractable problem; as a developer I'm always looking for workarounds/unconventional fixes for bugs), the only way we have to change the ID of a fighter would be via a CSV import and that straight up doesn't work. It's "less" of an issue when you delete a bunch of fighters from your DB for some reason or another (for instance, if you get rid of all women, or only use a few of the weight classes) but even that's not anything like a magic bullet and in a sense it might make things worse because you'd be going along thinking your universe is running fine until you hit one of those duplicate IDs, at which point the only real way to work around it is to make another new fighter, delete the new guy you just created, and hope that the new one isn't also duplicated.

This would be, like, a 10 minute fix for anyone who has the source code (fixing the CSV import would do it, as would having the engine generate IDs outside of the range of any existing database); however, nobody seems to and yet somehow it was still ported onto Android...

[pilight]

I don't understand. The RFG doesn't generate ID numbers for fictional fighters.

[Cap]

If I want to add a new boxer to my AU, I go into "MEN" and copy one of them, rename them and tinker with the ratings. Does that mean there are two characters in the database with the same ID number?

Cap

[zyberianwarrior]

what happens is that the RFG at times takes data from a "current" fighter and creates it in the RFG program I just delete them and try again as for the ID number it is always 0. I dunno what I did to fix that (reboot game?) but I haven't seen it in a while its annoying but like i said delete and try again does work.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by pilight

I don't understand. The RFG doesn't generate ID numbers for fictional fighters.

It has to. ID numbers are how fighters are tracked in the game. As it happens, the RFG (by which I mean the one that's included in the game in 2.5 and 2013) just starts with number 1 and goes on up and to hell with anybody with the same ID that's actually in there.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by zyberianwarrior

what happens is that the RFG at times takes data from a "current" fighter and creates it in the RFG program I just delete them and try again as for the ID number it is always 0. I dunno what I did to fix that (reboot game?) but I haven't seen it in a while its annoying but like i said delete and try again does work.

Nah, export the fighters into CSV and you'll see this. The *external* ID is always set to 0 but the very first column, which is I am positive the identifier the game uses to assign fighters to matches, keep statistics, and so on is what is used. And if there are duplicates of this, well, the game gets screwy. It's a really weird and frankly basic problem to have in... any piece of software that people combat a variety of ways (for instance, if your identifier is a GUID instead of an integer, that alone means it's virtually impossible to have two identical primary keys).

The reason the "delete and try again" thing works is that if you create, say, 6 fighters and then delete all of them, the game starts numbering them from 7 on up. If you just so happened to have deleted whichever fighter had ID 2 from the save that you're using, you won't get that duplicate fighter issue and things will proceed normally. So in turn if you happen to have a relatively small database (for instance, heavyweights only), you will probably run into this infrequently enough that you can just delete any randomly generated fighter that duplicates an ID like this (I believe the way you can check is to select the fighter and open their "XML" - if you get a different guy, you've got a duplicate). Or, I guess, if you were to generate, like, 20,000 random fighters and delete all of them, that should make it so that any randomly generated fighter would start with an ID of 20001, which is probably outside of the range of any current guy...

Okay, I've just given myself a brand new thing to try. My guess is, generating 20,000 random fighters will break the game but we'll see!

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Cap

If I want to add a new boxer to my AU, I go into "MEN" and copy one of them, rename them and tinker with the ratings. Does that mean there are two characters in the database with the same ID number?

Cap

The only way I know to tell for sure is to export the players into CSV or XML and look at their IDs. I'm guessing that the game does... something there with the ID; it's not just going to create someone with the exact same one because, well, you'd constantly run into this issue. It either *also* starts incrementing at 1 (which, you'd run into the same issues there) or else it checks the DB for duplicates before assigning the ID.

[Syd Thrift]

quadrola,

This appears to have worked! The IDs are too ungainly to do with what I used to do with them in Excel, but I'm no longer seeing players duplicated in the XML, and exporting the new guys indicates that they have very high IDs, as expected.

[jas80s]

Thanks for looking into this and posting about it, so those of us playing the game from time to time can at least be aware of the potential issue.

But, just to slow down a bit, I have a very, very small uni, but I do use random fighters to create records for other fighters I am using. I have created about 300 random fighters so far.

If I create say, 10000 fighters randomly and then delete them, will that likely solve the problem? I just want to make sure I am following your suggestion. Also, while I haven't seen an issue yet, is there a way I can check if any of the random fighters I have share an ID number with any of the fighters in the game as it stands now?

Thanks, again.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by jas80s

Thanks for looking into this and posting about it, so those of us playing the game from time to time can at least be aware of the potential issue.

But, just to slow down a bit, I have a very, very small uni, but I do use random fighters to create records for other fighters I am using. I have created about 300 random fighters so far.

If I create say, 10000 fighters randomly and then delete them, will that likely solve the problem? I just want to make sure I am following your suggestion. Also, while I haven't seen an issue yet, is there a way I can check if any of the random fighters I have share an ID number with any of the fighters in the game as it stands now?

Thanks, again.

I don’t know that there’s any way to do it on a macro level. Individually you can tell if, when you click on one fighter to put them on a card, another fighter shows up instead, or, when you open the XML, the wrong fighter information appears.

So, when I created and then deleted 20,000 fighters it looks like what happened when I stopped is that it started numbering them in the 27000 range for a little bit... and then started assigning them numbers in the 7000 range. My universe is around 6800 fighters large so I think it may now be doing that “lowest available number” check now. It’s weird; maybe it only kicks in when the ID is of a certain size, I don’t know.

If your universe is small enough, you can probably get away with deleting the fighter with the duplicate ID when it comes. Like I said, IME you can see when this happens pretty much immediately.

I’ve run a year now, month by month, and I haven’t seen this issue since I did that giant create and delete operation.

[zyberianwarrior]

Syd I don't think I am actually understanding this. I have a HUGE universe (ok broke down into 8 weight classes) and create RFG's in fact just created some in bantamweight and under the boxrec.com box it is zero (which tells me its RFG) ALL of my RFG's are this way. As for exporting to csv I don't have a need/use for that so I don't.

Can you elaborate further Syd? Oh and Still waiting for TB 3 (like everyone else)

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by zyberianwarrior

Syd I don't think I am actually understanding this. I have a HUGE universe (ok broke down into 8 weight classes) and create RFG's in fact just created some in bantamweight and under the boxrec.com box it is zero (which tells me its RFG) ALL of my RFG's are this way. As for exporting to csv I don't have a need/use for that so I don't.

Can you elaborate further Syd? Oh and Still waiting for TB 3 (like everyone else)

Export the fighters into a CSV or an XML file. There is an ID field there that you can't edit in the game (which makes sense because if you could edit that you could with one stroke break it). When I ran it, it generated IDs 1-4 for the first four fighters I created, which were duplicate IDs of some very old timey boxers. I created and then deleted 20,000 boxers and have not had this issue since. I export to CSV commonly because I have a spreadsheet that tracks the universe and I can see at a glance that none of the IDs of newly generated fighters are going to impinge on what's in my universe.

[Cap]

Ok. As a test I created a new fighter by copying one from the MEN group and renaming him. The one I copied from was Kevin Tillman. When I exported him to XML along with the new guy and opened up the two files, the number for Tillman on the first line extreme left was 273 while the same number for the new guy was 2949.

No idea if this proves anything.

Cap

[prismark]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

So, when I created and then deleted 20,000 fighters it looks like what happened when I stopped is that it started numbering them in the 27000 range for a little bit... and then started assigning them numbers in the 7000 range. My universe is around 6800 fighters large so I think it may now be doing that “lowest available number” check now. It’s weird; maybe it only kicks in when the ID is of a certain size, I don’t know.

I’ve run a year now, month by month, and I haven’t seen this issue since I did that giant create and delete operation.

Thanks. I also try every few years and hit same issue, the problem I experience is very consistent with the bug you describe. I'll try the workaround.

[Mark42661]

Originally Posted by Cap

Ok. As a test I created a new fighter by copying one from the MEN group and renaming him. The one I copied from was Kevin Tillman. When I exported him to XML along with the new guy and opened up the two files, the number for Tillman on the first line extreme left was 273 while the same number for the new guy was 2949.

No idea if this proves anything.

Cap

I would be interested to know if that proves something. It may have an impact on how I set up my new universe.

[pilight]

I've never mixed fictional fighters with real ones. I guess that's why I've never run across this issue.

[jas80s]

Originally Posted by pilight

I've never mixed fictional fighters with real ones. I guess that's why I've never run across this issue.

If you have RFG fighters in your database, but they are all kept in a separate group. Are you still mixing fighters? I do have auto scheduled fights between fighters in my main group and random fighters, but they are all in a separate group. I am just trying to gauge how much this applies to what I am doing. Thanks for reading.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by jas80s

If you have RFG fighters in your database, but they are all kept in a separate group. Are you still mixing fighters? I do have auto scheduled fights between fighters in my main group and random fighters, but they are all in a separate group. I am just trying to gauge how much this applies to what I am doing. Thanks for reading.

I’m not sure the groups matter; if I were designing the game (and this part isn’t far off from how I’ve designed other apps), I’d always reference the fighter by their ID (which, of course, I’d also take steps to ensure that this as a primary key is unique, perhaps even going to the extent of creating a SQLite or similar database on the backend with primary key uniqueness enforcement rules) (well, TBH in 2020 I’d just use GUIDs; they take up a lot more space than integers do but people tend to have a lot more space in their memory nowadays so that’s not an issue like it used to be). Anything else is going to get really, really unwieldy.

I mean, groups totally do matter in terms of keeping larger universes manageable, don’t get me wrong. Just, from the game’s perspective, they don’t and shouldn’t.

[jas80s]

I hope it's ok, but since a few of us are talking in this thread, I've had something come up where I could use a little help.

I had Universe A going and I completed a couple of tournaments. About this time, I realized there was a slightly larger database out there, so I obtained a copy of that Database and started using it and played a couple of more tournaments, this would be Universe B, which I am using now.

Here's the thing; a few of the fighters (16 to be exact, so not a lot) from the Universe A tournaments are in Universe B with their records and stats intact. However, they have nothing under history. Assuming that there is something I can do, what would be the best way to get the histories of the fighters who fought in Universe A into their fighter file in Universe B.?

This feels like one that can be fixed, but I'm not particularly well versed in the ins and outs of databases and files in this game. Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Well, I tried fixing this by exporting in every form I can, and nothing seems to bring the history data over to the new database. What I find especially weird is that there is even a popup that says, do you want to include the history data in the export? I mean, it even addresses the history data specifically, and then it's not there. Anyway, I am sure the answer lies in exporting the file with the history and then importing it into the new database, and I've tried that. So, I guess I'm out of luck on this one.

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, I think the game has some kind of rather complicated model that it uses for bout history that probably references the actual bouts and opponents, so the only way you'd (theoretically) be able to bring in those 16 guys' complete history is by also importing all the fighters who fought those guys, all the fighters who fought *those* guys, and so on. Of course, there's no mechanism to do even that, but I think you can see why that might be.

One thing you can do is edit the wins and losses from the individual fighter screens. This isn't perfect but the game will use those records to rank guys, at least.