Corrupted database in historical post patch 2.9

[Canuck82]

I am through to the 1939 season, and noticed that the new players coming in have different first names that in many cases include Question marks (?) in the first names like Bi?yk Mosienko (instead of Bill).

The last name are right, but the game seems to be generating alot of weird names....

Prior to the patch it was working fine....

[JeffR]

Third report of something similar to this, so it looks like something's gone wrong with the minor changes to the name database and it affected the way historical saves are importing names in new years. Definitely isn't happening to new ones, but we'll investigate ASAP. Doesn't necessarily mean the historical saves are permanently broken, it may be fixable by replacing the names.dat file in the save with a different one, but exactly how to do that will depend on what we find.

[Thundercrack]

Originally Posted by JeffR

Third report of something similar to this, so it looks like something's gone wrong with the minor changes to the name database and it affected the way historical saves are importing names in new years. Definitely isn't happening to new ones, but we'll investigate ASAP. Doesn't necessarily mean the historical saves are permanently broken, it may be fixable by replacing the names.dat file in the save with a different one, but exactly how to do that will depend on what we find.

hope the saved games are able to be fixed, was enjoying my league. Unplayable now.

[JeffR]

Bad news on this front, unfortunately. It looks like a change I made in the names database conflicted with the way the names data file in historical updates every July, so if you have a saved historical game from before the current patch, most of the names for new rookies will get distorted.

It isn't something that we can revert back, and the workarounds I hoped might fix the saves don't, since it basically gets re-broken every year. So the only way to fix the problem would be to edit the incoming group of players manually every year, which wouldn't be much fun when you start getting up into the later years when you're looking at hundreds of players annually.

My apologies for breaking your saves like that, this one is entirely on me. I made a change that should've been held back for an update where we'd have to render old saves unusable for another (and presumably much better) reason. I won't make this mistake again.

[julius]

Sorry to hear this Jeff. I have a league that I downloaded to your ftp site because I kept receiving an "invalid database" message. It also contains some corrupted names. Should I assume this is the reason? Does this also affect any quickstart leagues/files that were created before this change was made to the names database? Or is it necessary to start from scratch in all cases? Just trying to retain some of my editing work.

[julius]

Jeff, I just started a new NHL league to check this (current 2015 rosters), but using the search function just briefly it was easy to see many players with the same corrupted names (using"?"in place of letters). This suggests the issue is also found in current NHL games (not only historical), and also in any new leagues that are created going forward? I am not sure what it does for custom leagues. If so, this requires a software fix-simply restarting won't do it.

[Duranium]

Originally Posted by julius

Jeff, I just started a new NHL league to check this (current 2015 rosters), but using the search function just briefly it was easy to see many players with the same corrupted names (using"?"in place of letters). This suggests the issue is also found in current NHL games (not only historical), and also in any new leagues that are created going forward? I am not sure what it does for custom leagues. If so, this requires a software fix-simply restarting won't do it.

5 pages with '?' in their names and oddly most of them have latvian nationality

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by julius

Jeff, I just started a new NHL league to check this (current 2015 rosters), but using the search function just briefly it was easy to see many players with the same corrupted names (using"?"in place of letters). This suggests the issue is also found in current NHL games (not only historical), and also in any new leagues that are created going forward? I am not sure what it does for custom leagues. If so, this requires a software fix-simply restarting won't do it.

No, that's a separate issue, some special characters in certain languages (primarily Czech and Slovak) are getting replaced by ? in some parts of the game right now. The historical issue is mismatching the real player names to the names database, so "Bobby Orr", for example, becomes "Bobby Otter." It's limited to historical only because of the way historical processes the addition of new players each year, the modern and custom games don't do it the same way.

[Mark42661]

Originally Posted by JeffR

No, that's a separate issue, some special characters in certain languages (primarily Czech and Slovak) are getting replaced by ? in some parts of the game right now. The historical issue is mismatching the real player names to the names database, so "Bobby Orr", for example, becomes "Bobby Otter." It's limited to historical only because of the way historical processes the addition of new players each year, the modern and custom games don't do it the same way.

I want to start a new historical league beginning in the 1930s. Do these issues mean that the names will be messed up unless I wait for a patch to fix it? Seems like getting this fixed should be a very high priority.

It sounds like neither historical or modern leagues are playable right now (unless we want the names all messed up.) Is that right?