Nations.txt re-import mod (use at own risk)

[Tony M]

I've just created a simple front-end program that will re-import the nations.txt into an existing game.

Download it from http://www.bourtonville.co.uk/OOTPEditor1005.zip

Notes:

1. This program makes changes to world.dat, nations2.dat and ethnicities.dat - it creates a backup of each of them when it's run so if it does mess up, use the latest backup of each to let the game continue
2. It doesn't allow for adding or deleting of nations from the game yet. It will replace the details for each nation id from the same line in the nations.txt. You can alter any of the columns in nations.txt (name, level, ethnicity splits) and these will be saved to the database. If you add a new nation id that doesn't already exist it'll be ignored. If you add the nation in game you should then be able to add it to nations.txt
3. Changes to cities are not loaded as the cities.txt does not have an ID field in it and altering the number of cities could lead to teams and players coming from strange places.
4. It doesn't check if the percentages add up to 100
5. Always take a copy of your nations.txt and ethnicities.txt before changing them
6. You must not be in the game you want to alter when running this due to the auto-save on exit functionality. Save your game when you want to make the changes, and exit OOTP, then run the update and restart OOTP.


Installing.

Download the zip in the message and unzip to a folder. Go to that folder and double click OOTPEditor.application (you will need the .NET Framework v2 to run this)

There are two text boxes - the top one is the saved game directory that you want to alter (click on the ... to the right to open a folder dialog), and the bottom one is the text file directory (normally My Documents\Sports Interactive\OOTP Baseball 2007\data\database - ie where the nations.txt files etc are)

Then click on Import Nations to import nations.txt to alter the nations2.dat and world.dat (this will affect future name creation), or Import Ethnicities to import ethnicities.txt to alter the ethnicities.dat file.

Future enhancements.

1. Ability to re-import names. Have tried to do this, but the default names text files have problems in them that mess up when you read them in (for example there are two Beau's in language set 0, and St. Andrew only has one number in the names.txt and is therefore either lacking a frequency or a nameset id)
2. Ability to add/remove nations. This would involve going through all the players, teams and staff and making sure that they didn't belong to a non-existent place (though where you would move them to as a default is a different question)
3. Picking up files based on the year of simulation. The world.dat has the current simulation date in it, so it could be enhanced to look for files such as nations_1901.txt, nations_1902.txt, etc...

[Tony M]

dola,

any problems with it drop me a PM. The error checking is very basic at the moment.

[Hammer755]

I'm really looking forward to trying this out. It seems like all of my fictional league ideas require at least one of these files to change through time.

Thanks for making it happen!

[Mel Ott]

Aweome. Thanks for the mod!

[Tony M]

Having sussed the overall layout for players and teams out as well, the layout for coaches and retired should be similar, it would be possible to implement a nation split / merge functionality.

I invisage a screen for splitting where you choose the nation to be split and it gives you a list of the cities and you choose which cities are to be moved to the new nation and then it goes through all the players, coaches, retired players and teams and any that have city as either their location or birth place and they get moved to the new nation (potentially leaving their second nation as the original one).

Merging a country would simply involve asking which country you want it merged into.

The only shame is that history of changes wouldn't be recorded

[fhomess]

Just out of curiosity, if I'm only changing 1 or 2 countries, is there any advantage to using this mod over using the in-game nation editor?

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by fhomess

Just out of curiosity, if I'm only changing 1 or 2 countries, is there any advantage to using this mod over using the in-game nation editor?

The ingame nation editor only gives you a choice of 17 languages but the nations.txt/ethnicity.txt file has 40 name sets. If you have a look at Vietnam for example, nations.txt says the names are 100% from nameset 38 (Vietnamese)

Go to the nation editor in OOTP for Vietnam and it says 100% English. So if you wanted to model an immigration to Vietnam and wanted to change it to 98% Vietnamese you can't select Vietnamese from the drop down list.

[Tony M]

Apologies to anyone with an online league who has tried this. It won't work. Having trawled through all the game setup options I've found some more strings in the initial section of world.dat.

I'm building them in today and should have it fixed by the end of the day.

It's been sent to PadresFan and is also available at

http://www.bourtonville.co.uk/OOTPEditor1006.zip

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

Apologies to anyone with an online league who has tried this. It won't work. Having trawled through all the game setup options I've found some more strings in the initial section of world.dat.

I'm building them in today and should have it fixed by the end of the day.

It's been sent to PadresFan and is also available at

http://www.bourtonville.co.uk/OOTPEditor1006.zip

I've tried this out to import nations, but when I do, I just keep getting the message "An error has occurred."

The first time I used it, it worked okay, but I was actually importing the same nations.txt file I'd used. Once I changed it, it didn't work.

Here's what I did:

I created a nations.txt file with the US set to 100% American names (code 0). That was the only change from the original. I started a league with that and then closed the game. I used the importer and it seemed to work, but I couldn't tell because there were no changes in the nations.txt file. It did make the backup files.

Then I restored the original nations.txt and tried to import it using this utility. That's when the error happens. It doesn't make the backup files or make any changes.

Any ideas?

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by ctorg

I've tried this out to import nations, but when I do, I just keep getting the message "An error has occurred."

The first time I used it, it worked okay, but I was actually importing the same nations.txt file I'd used. Once I changed it, it didn't work.

Here's what I did:

I created a nations.txt file with the US set to 100% American names (code 0). That was the only change from the original. I started a league with that and then closed the game. I used the importer and it seemed to work, but I couldn't tell because there were no changes in the nations.txt file. It did make the backup files.

Then I restored the original nations.txt and tried to import it using this utility. That's when the error happens. It doesn't make the backup files or make any changes.

Any ideas?

OK. I'll drop you a PM with my email address. The game wasn't open when you tried the second import - I've noticed something that if you create a new game it doesn't always close the original game until you start the new one. I either shut down OOTP or load up another game whilst fiddling with .dats

[ctorg]

Actually, it appears that it was me being a bonehead that caused the problem. I think I must have copied a path wrong, because when I redid everything, it worked fine.

Great mod!

[Skywalker76]

Just wanted to say it worked for me. Thanks a lot.