Can the world_default file be edited?

[ukhotstove]

Originally Posted by Muzamba

So if you want to see all the issues that have been discussed in this thread addressed soon, please take every opportunity you can to mention how important this is to you.

I don't think I'm speaking alone in saying that your posts have been invaluable as have reds1 recent posts, I'd also like to add in all honesty if it weren't for your replies I'd have actually given up on OOTP and stuck with 11 rather than carried on (maybe somebody needs to give you a pat on the back). Hopefully the questions we have come up with on these threads can be answered, specially in a manual.

[Chicagofan76]

Originally Posted by tylertoo

C-fan, if you import your Endor league from 11, do you even need to tamper with the world_default.xml stuff? I thought that was only for newly created leagues? Unless you're starting from scratch?

Second of all, isn't there a demo of 12 that you could try all this in, before making the decision?

I could be wrong on this but i had thought that Muzumba or MarkMeister said that the cities & nations would not show up in a converted game.
Let's say that the initial game as i have it setup now will transfer, what happens for each draft and when i add expansion teams ( I do expansion almost every 3 sns from 2009 - 2020) Will the cities show up? Will the nations?

I deleted my beta version of 12 that I had 2 days before the game was released so I have no way to test this for now....unless someone with 12 wants to download 1 of my files from Padresfan to test this.

[ukhotstove]

I've just sent a pm to both Markus and Andreas to ask them to clear up the questions that have arisen in this thread, no idea if a response will be on the horizon but hopefully it will and can put some of our minds at ease.

[Markmeister]

Originally Posted by Chicagofan76

I could be wrong on this but i had thought that Muzumba or MarkMeister said that the cities & nations would not show up in a converted game.
Let's say that the initial game as i have it setup now will transfer, what happens for each draft and when i add expansion teams ( I do expansion almost every 3 sns from 2009 - 2020) Will the cities show up? Will the nations?

It wasn't me - I haven't imported any 2011 legues yet as I was holding off until 2012 has been patched a few more times.

[Markmeister]

Originally Posted by cephasjames

Check out TextPad (TextPad - the text editor for Windows). I have used it over Notepad, etc for awhile now. It's so much better and the find and replace feature is great.

I will have to try that out.

Notepad++ has its advantages, but the slowness is aggravating.

Hopefully I can find an xml editor that works better than what I have found so far.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

The problem, then, may be that the .xml file doesn't like WordPad. This bears closer scrutiny.

Well, the .xml file definitely doesn't like WordPad, but it apparently doesn't much care for Notepad either.

I made changes in the World_Default.xml file using Notepad. In general, I only changed bbqual ratings: I gave every nation in Asia and Africa a "0" rating, and the only Latin American nation to get above a "0" was Cuba with a "2." I then boosted a number of European nations' ratings: England and Germany went up to a "4," Ireland up to a "3," etc. I changed the US to having only one language id and ethnicity -- US Historical 39.

The game didn't crash or give me an error message, and, upon opening the program, it showed that all of the changes that I made in the .xml file "stuck."

Success, right? That's what I thought. Then I looked at the player pool. The result: the same old mix of US and Latin American players, as if I had never made any changes. The DR and Venezuela, which showed as having non-existent baseball programs (reflecting the changes I made in the .xml file), provided 540 and 446 players, respectively. In contrast, England and Germany, with good programs, provided 9 players each.

On the other hand, the US players no longer had any Hispanic names, but the names look like they were all drawn from the US Modern - 0 database rather than from the US Historical - 39 database that I had chosen. Oddly enough, it also appears that the game actually applied the changes I made in the ethnicities.txt file, but only for the US. Hispanic players continued to show a mix of Hispanic and African face types, even though I zeroed out the African rating.

I'm sure additional testing is warranted, but it's becoming more and more evident that these ethnicity and language id values are hardcoded in the game. There's no way that I can figure out how to change the national mix, which is a big disappointment to say the least.

[Markmeister]

Joe,

See my post in the other default world.xml topic on how to change the United States to get early 20th century correct.

Basically you have to trick OOTP - renumber the country from 206 to something else (I used 300) and change the name to "United States". The only issue is a minor one. When you add a league with the wizard, there isn't a default nation since 'The United States' doesn't exist in your world. The cities are strange until you assign a nation (I don't remeber exactly what it is, but it was something like Team 1, Team 2, etc.)

I'm not sure why you were getting modern names instead of historical names. But Muzumba mentioned somewhere that the total of the US ethnicity percentages has to be 3000. If you had something else, that may be the issue.

Note: All of the other nations have to total up to 100.

This is what I am using for my world.

		<NATION id="300" name="United States" short="United States" pop="218840792" lid="39" gender="0" bbqual="5" abbr="USA" dem="American">
			<ETHNICITIES>
			<ETHNICITY lid="39" pct="2920" />
			<ETHNICITY lid="1" pct="40" />
			<ETHNICITY lid="7" pct="40" />
			</ETHNICITIES>

Also, did you just zero out African in ethnicities.txt? That doesn't work since the totals of the 5 ethnicities has to be 1000.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Markmeister

Basically you have to trick OOTP - renumber the country from 206 to something else (I used 300) and change the name to "United States". The only issue is a minor one. When you add a league with the wizard, there isn't a default nation since 'The United States' doesn't exist in your world. The cities are strange until you assign a nation (I don't remeber exactly what it is, but it was something like Team 1, Team 2, etc.)

At the point that I have to invent an alternate USA is about the point that I give up on this whole thing. It just shouldn't be this difficult.

Originally Posted by Markmeister

I'm not sure why you were getting modern names instead of historical names. But Muzumba mentioned somewhere that the total of the US ethnicity percentages has to be 3000. If you had something else, that may be the issue.

I know that. I set the value at 3000.

But you're not telling me anything I don't already know. It's clear that you can make changes in Notepad that will change the values in the nation editor. I've done that. But, as I pointed out, those changes aren't reflected in the players that the game actually creates. When you create a game, what is the national breakdown of the player pool?

Originally Posted by Markmeister

Note: All of the other nations have to total up to 100.

Yeah, I know that too.

Originally Posted by Markmeister

Also, did you just zero out African in ethnicities.txt? That doesn't work since the totals of the 5 ethnicities has to be 1000.

Geez, give me some credit.

[Markmeister]

Joe,

Changing the nation name to "United States" gave me 0 players from the nations that had no baseball talent which is exactly what I wanted. I'm not sure if changing the id# to 300 did anything, but since it worked I didn't change it back to 206.

Sorry about all of the questions I poasted. I had no idea what numbers you had used for the ratios.

So far, I think the biggest issue right now with the new xml file is it's size. Because it is so big, we can't attach it to a post so others can see what we are doing.

[Andreas Raht]

Hey guys,

The idea why we switched from txt files to XML files is indeed the higher flexibility of XML especially when it comes to structured data. I know that XML has one disadvantage and that is you cannot just open and edit it as a table in Excel. We will do our best to add functionality to OOTP to make sure that the XML files are an improvement for all of you instead of a step back.

What we really needed for OOTP was an online world database where we can edit the world data and export it to a world file that we can ship with OOTP. That has been done now. We made a lot of code changes and improvements and added states and regions. The number of languages per nation is no longer hard-coded. The number of languages in the game is still hard-coded (40), but my goal is to get rid of all hard-coded data eventually.

I'll add the following features in patches ASAP:
- add, edit, delete and search/filter cities
- add, edit, delete and search/filter states
- export world data to XML

This way you will not need to edit data in the XML.
If you edit data in XML, please use text editors that can edit plain text. Wordpad or MS Word will add all kind of unwanted formatting code to the files. Notepad++ is AFAIK the perfect tool to edit the XML files. You can easily test XML files by opening them in a web browser. Most browsers will show error messages if the XML file has syntax errors.

Of course OOTP 12 should import OOTP 11 leagues with customized world data properly. The world data is saved in the world.dat and that file will be imported into OOTP 12. OOTP 12 will not merge the world_default.xml file into the imported OOTP 11 game or something like that.

If you edit the world_default.xml file, your changes will not have any effect on games that you already created. You will only see them in new games.

Originally Posted by albatross11

True...there is the "potential" for more flexibility. However, if I already have a very heavily modified cities.txt file (that I have spent years modifying to my liking), and the only way of using that data in OOTP12 is inputting over 140 thousand lines of data into the XML file (and not, from reading these forums, being sure even that would work) then the change to the XML format is not a good thing (for me).

You can import the OOTP 11 league into OOTP 12 and export the world data to XML, when the export tool is available.

Originally Posted by cephasjames

Yeah, and I don't think changes we've made for 11 will even tansfer over into 12 if we import an 11 world into 12.

If that's the case, it's a bug.

Originally Posted by Markmeister

Joe,

I'm guessing that when languages were originally added they were hard coded.

Markus may have added them to the world default.xml, but hasn't changed the hard coding in the game yet.

That's true, we still have a hard-coded languages array in the game. But the goal is definitely to get rid of all hard-coded stuff.

[Andreas Raht]

You can edit the languages in the nation editor, I'm sure you saw that already. Please do not enter a value "0" with OOTP versions before 12.1.12, it has a bug that basically destroyed the league when you entered "0" for the language The upcoming patch will fix this.

The numbers for the languages are only ratios, not percentages. For any nation, you can enter any numbers and the total does not matter at all.
If a nation has two languages, for example spanish and english, and there are 25% speaking english, than you could enter 25 and 75, or 250 and 750, or 4 and 12 or whatever.

The USA has to have the ID #206 and the name must be "The United States" at the moment. OOTP needs to find the USA record and that's what OOTP uses to find it.

Any other questions, please ask. I subscribed to this thread.

[ukhotstove]

Just want to say thank you to Andreas for answering my pm, also want to thank him for his input in this thread.

[Markmeister]

Andreas,

Thanks for your post. I'm looking forward to hear your input.

Quick questions regarding regions.
1) Will we be able to limit the number of players from other regions, similar to how we can limit players from foreign nations?
2) Will we be able to change a league's and/or team's region? For example, if I have in my xml the U.S. desiginated regions, as my workld evolves will I be able to change a leage's region from a sub-region to a larger region?

[Andreas Raht]

Originally Posted by Markmeister

Andreas,

Thanks for your post. I'm looking forward to hear your input.

Quick questions regarding regions.
1) Will we be able to limit the number of players from other regions, similar to how we can limit players from foreign nations?
2) Will we be able to change a league's and/or team's region? For example, if I have in my xml the U.S. desiginated regions, as my workld evolves will I be able to change a leage's region from a sub-region to a larger region?

The plan is, to add a field "region" to each league and each team. There you could optionally select a region. New players would then come from that region (except foreigners). That will be added in a patch.

[Chicagofan76]

Originally Posted by Andreas Raht

Of course OOTP 12 should import OOTP 11 leagues with customized world data properly. The world data is saved in the world.dat and that file will be imported into OOTP 12. OOTP 12 will not merge the world_default.xml file into the imported OOTP 11 game or something like that.

If you edit the world_default.xml file, your changes will not have any effect on games that you already created. You will only see them in new games.

So if I add say an additional 20 nations and 100 cities per to my existing txts in 11 would they show up in a converted game when i transfer it over to 12?


thanx

[Andreas Raht]

Originally Posted by Chicagofan76

So if I add say an additional 20 nations and 100 cities per to my existing txts in 11 would they show up in a converted game when i transfer it over to 12?


thanx

Yes, if you see them in OOTP 11 they should show up in OOTP 12 (after importing the game into OOTP 12).

[cephasjames]

Originally Posted by Andreas Raht

The plan is, to add a field "region" to each league and each team. There you could optionally select a region. New players would then come from that region (except foreigners). That will be added in a patch.

Thanks for speaking up on this!

So we could have a league in the region of Northeast (as an example) and choose to only have teams created from there and players only come from there?

[Andreas Raht]

Originally Posted by cephasjames

Thanks for speaking up on this!

So we could have a league in the region of Northeast (as an example) and choose to only have teams created from there and players only come from there?

Yes, that's the plan.

[cephasjames]

Originally Posted by Andreas Raht

Yes, that's the plan.

Thanks!

[joefromchicago]

Andreas:

Thanks so much for your posts. That clears up a lot of things. Just a few specific questions:

1. How does the game now handle ethnicities? Are those hard-coded too, or can I change the percentages in the ethnicities.txt file and have those changes reflected in the game?

2. Similarly, are player creation values hard-coded in the game? In other words, will I still get a bunch of Latin American players in my player pool, even if I set every Latin American nation's bbqual value to "0"?

3. What happened to the French Canadian-33 names database? Can that be added to the array of available language id's in the .xml file so that the game will recognize that as a valid db, or has it become an orphan database?