OOTP FaceTool

[Scott Vibert]

outstanding can't wait.

[Carplos]

Originally Posted by Layton is my Homeboy

Hello all.

Taking a break from coding to give an update on version 1.0 progress.

Things are moving along very nicely, and I can't see any reason that I shouldn't be able to get it out by the end of the week. I haven't moved to the actual photo creation part yet (oddly enough, that is by far the easiest part,) by I'm almost done the tedious, boring, difficult database work.

Here is a list of features, additions, and fixes that you can expect in version 1.0:

• Uniforms for all MLB Teams (including home, away, and in most cases, alternates)
• Ability to assign a custom uniform to any team in your universe (format needs to be PNG, 90 px X 135 px, transparent background)
• Auto-detection of MLB teams (so, if you have a team called "Toronto Blue Jays" it will automatically assign the real Blue Jays home jersey to that team)
• Previewing custom uniforms to see if they will look good when used to generate photos
• Higher quality photos (I've switched from BMP to PNG format, allowing significantly higher quality images, and slightly less processing time)
• Team-at-a-time photo creation
• Minimum AB and IP qualifiers (cut down on processing time by limiting photo creation to only players with enough big league experience)
• A help file (very helpful)
• Ability to lock/unlock photos for editing
• Accessories now position- and handedness- specific (for example, the bat on the right side will only appear if a player is a right-handed batter)
• Ability to install new accessories (bats, etc.) and control which players are eligible to have that accessory (righty, lefty, both and pitcher, batter, both)
• Ability to change frequency of accessories
• Facial hair added to some players' photos
• Ability to change facial hair style frequencies (including "none")
• Support for modified nations.txt files (in the Beta, you had to use the original... now, if you use the original, you get a detailed ethnicity breakdown for each nation... if you've modified your nations.txt file, then the program auto-detects the file and assigns each nation's ethnicity data based on the "region" value. This means that if you have a custom nations.txt file, your ethnicity data will be lower quality, but it will at least be supported)
• Ability to change nations-to-ethnicity percentages (these control how like a player from country X is to be of ethnicity Y.) This is especially handy if you are using a modified nations.txt file
• An error log file for troubleshooting
• File output format now PNG instead of JPEG
• Most "generic uniforms" are now white with trim in the team's colors
• PNG Logos can be automatically added to generic uniforms (this option can be disabled; also support for JPEG logos has been removed)
• Faces positioned a bit higher in the photo so that players actually have necks now
• Tons of new faces, backgrounds, accessories, and generic uniform styles
• Anything else I can think of and do in a reasonable amount of time

That's awesome! I haven't been able to mess with the beta since I used a modded nations.txt so I'm looking forward to this.

One (hopefully) last inquiry: Do players have hair now (I see facial hair, but not, er, scalp hair.)

[Giants44]

Originally Posted by Layton is my Homeboy

• Uniforms for all MLB Teams (including home, away, and in most cases, alternates)
• Ability to assign a custom uniform to any team in your universe (format needs to be PNG, 90 px X 135 px, transparent background)
• Auto-detection of MLB teams (so, if you have a team called "Toronto Blue Jays" it will automatically assign the real Blue Jays home jersey to that team)
• Previewing custom uniforms to see if they will look good when used to generate photos

All I can say is wow! The beta utility worked very well, but this is out of this world - the only other 3rd party stuff I have ever seen this good was the Teflon stadiums, Layton - you are the man!!! You have increased my interest in this version 10 fold.

[Carplos]

Okay I lied, one more:

if you've modified your nations.txt file, then the program auto-detects the file and assigns each nation's ethnicity data based on the "region" value. This means that if you have a custom nations.txt file, your ethnicity data will be lower quality, but it will at least be supported)

Will this be customizable for those of us who use custom nations.txt or are we stuck with what the program generates for us?

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Carplos

Will this be customizable for those of us who use custom nations.txt or are we stuck with what the program generates for us?

You can change the nations/ethicity data to your liking at any time.

The first time you run the program, it will create a "default" nations table with ethnicity breakdowns for every nation in your nations.txt file (whether it is custom or not.)

You can then change these breakdowns to whatever you like and save your changes. This modified data will now be applied to any saved games for which you generate photos using FaceTool.

The only caveat is that once you have run FaceTool, you will not be able to modify your nations.txt file any further, since the nations table is created the first time you run the utility and isn't re-generated every time you run it.

[Carplos]

The only caveat is that once you have run FaceTool, you will not be able to modify your nations.txt file any further, since the nations table is created the first time you run the utility and isn't re-generated every time you run it.

Eek, that could be a problem...

What happens if you DO use a different nations.txt? (Or rather, a nations.txt which may have added lines/"nations" since previous use?)

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Carplos

Eek, that could be a problem...

What happens if you DO use a different nations.txt? (Or rather, a nations.txt which may have added lines/"nations" since previous use?)

If the program can't find the nation_id for a particular player, it defaults that player's ethnicity to caucasian.

So, if you
a) run FaceTool
b) add a new naiton to your nations.txt file
c) start a new game with a league based in that new nation
d) use FaceTool to create the faces for that saved game

Then pretty much every player in that game will be caucasian.

[Carplos]

Hmph. I'm sure I'll figure out a workaround if I have to. I'm regularly messing with the nations.txt--usually adding regions and/or states as nations when creating leagues.

[Muzamba]

This may be a naive question, but couldn't you simply delete the nations table (assuming it's located in a separate file) and have it regenerated when you run the program again?

[Muzamba]

Another question...

Will we be able to specify a player's ethnicity in player-at-a-time mode? And while on the subject, what other aspects can be specified in this mode, i.e. facial hair, accessories, etc?

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Muzamba

This may be a naive question, but couldn't you simply delete the nations table (assuming it's located in a separate file) and have it regenerated when you run the program again?

I think that would be possible, but I'd have to double-check the start-up code.

Originally Posted by Muzamba

Another question...

Will we be able to specify a player's ethnicity in player-at-a-time mode? And while on the subject, what other aspects can be specified in this mode, i.e. facial hair, accessories, etc?

I'm actually not done working on that screen yet. It will probably be the last one that I do...

[Markus Heinsohn]

Wow, excellent stuff Let me know when 1.0 is ready please!

[tcblcommish]

MArkus, ould this be something that you could include in the 2007 version of the game?

Extreme Props to Layton over this as I think that, to me anyways, this will be the best mod for OOTP since the catobase!!

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Wow, excellent stuff Let me know when 1.0 is ready please!

From the Man himself!

I'll let you know. I was hoping to release it today, but I've hit a bit of an unexpected hitch (which is the only thing guaranteed in programming,) which has delayed things a bit, but hopefully it won't be much longer now.

[Carplos]

Originally Posted by tcblcommish

MArkus, ould this be something that you could include in the 2007 version of the game?

Extreme Props to Layton over this as I think that, to me anyways, this will be the best mod for OOTP since the catobase!!

He'd probably have to license the FaceGen program to use it commercially.

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Carplos

He'd probably have to license the FaceGen program to use it commercially.

If I remember correctly, the FaceGen redistribute lisence is something like $1,000.

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Dola,

Quick update on v1.0 progress. I'm ironing out a couple of kinks, then adding just a couple more feautres, then it'll be done. No timeline to offer though.

I do want to let everyone know that the photo generation process is just a little more than 50 times faster in version 1.0. With the Beta version, it took me about 90 minutes to do about 800 photos (just under 9 per minute.) With version 1.0, I did a small league of 450 in one minue (for about 450 per minute.) By my calculations, that makes version 1.0 about 50.3 times faster.

The tradoff is that there is a longer loading time when you load your saved game. In fact, this process now can take up to 5 minutes in a big leagues that's been simmed several seasons in. The reason for this is that v1.0 has two resource-draining features:
1) Being able to filter by Career AB and Career IP
2) Having retired players get photos assigned based on the team where they had the most ab's/ip's in their career.

Basically, every time you load the saved game up in FaceTool, it has to go through every player in your universe and add up their stats year-by-year. This takes a little while.

So, bottom line:
Version 1.0, a little bit slower to load up, about 50 times faster to run.

[Carplos]

Sorry to be a pain--were you able to look at the code to see if we can delete the stored nations.txt data?

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Carplos

Sorry to be a pain--were you able to look at the code to see if we can delete the stored nations.txt data?

Not at all... sorry I haven't gotten back to you.

Currently, this is not possible, but I will stick a line of code in tonight that should do the trick.

Basically, you will have to go into Control Panel->BDE Administrator and then deleted the "nations.db" table under the "FaceTool1" Alias, then the next time you start FaceTool, it will rebuild the table using your new nations.txt.

[Layton is my Homeboy]

Originally Posted by Muzamba

Another question...

Will we be able to specify a player's ethnicity in player-at-a-time mode? And while on the subject, what other aspects can be specified in this mode, i.e. facial hair, accessories, etc?

Okay, due to a last-minute major bug, I've spent the last little while fixing rather than adding new feautures. However, I think I have it all resolved and I think I can get this thing out by tomorrow (I'm away all weekend, so I really want it to get out before I'm out of town.)

Anyway, in answer to your question, you will be able to edit pretty much anything, including:

• ethnicity
• face id # (so you can actually assign a specific face)
• hair color
• facial hair style
• accessory id

The downside is this: I haven't had time to make this screen at all user friendly. So, basically, you will be faced with a table that lists all of this data. You will first have to update the table, then post the record, then create the new photo.

To make matters worse, everything is stored as integer values. So, for example, in the ethnicity column, you won't actually see "caucasian", instead you'll see the numbers 1 to 4, where
1=caucasian
2=asian
3=african
4=east indian

Bottom line, if you know what you're doing and don't care about how the screen looks, you should be able to do whatever you like.

I also regret to report that, contrary to my initial plan, you will not be able to install accessories, faces, or facial hair components (custom uniforms are still in though.) Unfortunately due to time constraints I really can't work on this program very much after this week, so any features that haven't made it in yet won't for a while (I am planning a v2.0 with coach/personnel photos and tons of other features, but that is a long, long way off.)

On an unrelated note, I just ran through an MLB league, full minors, simmed two years in. I created photos for all players, active or retired, with no qualifiers.

It spit out photos for all 8,849 players in just about half an hour on my old machine running Win 98.