Possible to set up (or edit) a world using a spreadsheet?

[Magc8Ball]

Hey, all.

If/when I pick up v.9, I'm going to once again set up a new world, since when I transferred between computers last I had some corruption issues and such, so going "fresh" is going to be my best option.

I tend to like playing extremely large worlds, with several main leagues around the world, and my US league(s) have full minors and large feeder systems. This, unfortunately, makes it somewhat... time consuming to actually get everything set up with logos and proper home cities and colors. So, ahead of 9, I figured I'd ask if there is a way to create (or at least edit) a league through a method other than the in-game UI.

It'd be much faster for me to be able to tab through a list and make changes instead of having to constantly click through various parts of the UI. Loading up a world's team data in a spreadsheet would make the process go quite a bit smoother, and if it's possible I'd love to hear about it.

If it's not possible, then please feel free to move this into the relevant Feature Request section of the forums.

Thanks,
-JAL

[Magc8Ball]

Never mind! I suffered a case of "post first, look second". I dug around a bit more in the game and discovered how to do this (rather simply, in fact; it just never clicked that a .CSV file is a "comma separated value" file... which is exactly what I was looking for).

Sorry for the inconvenience, folks.

[CHCfan]

That's awesome -- exactly what I've wanted to do.

How did you do it? Create the league and edit the CSVs or create CSVs and then create the league? I'd like to now how you did/are doing this. Thanks!

[Magc8Ball]

Well, I haven't actually spent any time doing it yet, so it might turn out that I can't really do it well, but what I've figured out so far is:

1. Create the world/league using the structure you want;
2. Set up and Export the CSVs for that world, specifically looking at leagues_basic, teams_basic, and similar ones (depending on how much you need to edit);
3. Open the appropriate CSV files in Excel or OpenOffice or whatever, and edit them.

Teams_basic, for instance, has each team's cityname, nickname, city code, their assigned ballpark (by ballpark ID), city code (by city ID#), their logo name and path, and their color codes. I didn't see columns for their uniform and hat logos, but as long as your logos have color codes imbedded they should work out fine.

Messing around further will probably find even more flexibility.

[CHCfan]

Originally Posted by Magc8Ball

Well, I haven't actually spent any time doing it yet, so it might turn out that I can't really do it well, but what I've figured out so far is:

1. Create the world/league using the structure you want;
2. Set up and Export the CSVs for that world, specifically looking at leagues_basic, teams_basic, and similar ones (depending on how much you need to edit);
3. Open the appropriate CSV files in Excel or OpenOffice or whatever, and edit them.

Teams_basic, for instance, has each team's cityname, nickname, city code, their assigned ballpark (by ballpark ID), city code (by city ID#), their logo name and path, and their color codes. I didn't see columns for their uniform and hat logos, but as long as your logos have color codes imbedded they should work out fine.

Messing around further will probably find even more flexibility.

Sounds good. And all these CSVs are re-importable, right?

I've always felt slowed down by needing to make all of these edits and set-ups within the game -- I hope this works as well as it seems like it can. Thanks again, and good luck to us!

[Magc8Ball]

Originally Posted by CHCfan

Sounds good. And all these CSVs are re-importable, right?

That's the catch: I've not tried to do it yet. I've got a small test league that I set up a while back for these sorts of purposes; I'll probably give it a whack later in the day when I'm more awake. This is something that I've never done with the game (my "modding" has been limited to doing logos and stuff that can just be dumped into a folder like jersey templates) so I'm going to take it a little slow.

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by Magc8Ball

So, ahead of 9, I figured I'd ask if there is a way to create (or at least edit) a league through a method other than the in-game UI.

It can be done. But you'll need to recreate the dat files yourself. And there's so much behind the scenes stuff with worlds/leagues and teams that you can't easily do them separately - they all need to be worked on together.

[CHCfan]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

It can be done. But you'll need to recreate the dat files yourself. And there's so much behind the scenes stuff with worlds/leagues and teams that you can't easily do them separately - they all need to be worked on together.

that's what it was looking like to me, as I was giving it a closer look. So, obviously it's complicated to do . . . but how is the .dat rebuilding even done. I can't save an excel file as .dat can I? And I can't open .dat, can I? Or am I wrong?

[johnph77]

Originally Posted by CHCfan

that's what it was looking like to me, as I was giving it a closer look. So, obviously it's complicated to do . . . but how is the .dat rebuilding even done. I can't save an excel file as .dat can I? And I can't open .dat, can I? Or am I wrong?

FWIW, you can change the file extension from ".dat" to ".txt", if necessary, and edit it in any text editor from WordPad on up.

The last time I checked (haven't tried it with Excel 2007 yet) saving Excel spreadsheet files in ".txt" format is a can of worms. First, all formulas had to be converted to values and saved in a separate file. Not difficult at all, BUT - if, for instance, you had averages and percentages you wanted to be expressed as three decimal points, the text file wouldn't save it in that form - 1H for 3AB would appear in the text file as 0.3333333333333 (15 significant figures) but 1H for 2AB would appear as 0.5 - a real PITA if you wanted to keep the data in columnar form. Strangely enough, Lotus 1-2-3 was the only spreadsheet I ever found that would do this reliably.

[OldFatGuy]

Originally Posted by johnph77

The last time I checked (haven't tried it with Excel 2007 yet) saving Excel spreadsheet files in ".txt" format is a can of worms. First, all formulas had to be converted to values and saved in a separate file. Not difficult at all, BUT - if, for instance, you had averages and percentages you wanted to be expressed as three decimal points, the text file wouldn't save it in that form - 1H for 3AB would appear in the text file as 0.3333333333333 (15 significant figures) but 1H for 2AB would appear as 0.5 - a real PITA if you wanted to keep the data in columnar form. Strangely enough, Lotus 1-2-3 was the only spreadsheet I ever found that would do this reliably.

I might be misunderstanding you, but I've used the Format Cells function, and selected Custom, and forced it to display as a batting average, and when saved to text it was properly formatted. Am I misunderstanding your post???

P.S. Sorry about the name on the text file, I just opened up excel, did it quickly and saved to text. Feel free to send me warnings or whatever, I should've known better.

[Matt Uk]

Originally Posted by OldFatGuy

P.S. Sorry about the name on the text file, I just opened up excel, did it quickly and saved to text. Feel free to send me warnings or whatever, I should've known better.

Maybe it's just me, but it made me laugh

[chimanbj]

Once you do all that editing....how do you get it back in the game? I haven't seen a way to get an edited CSV file back into the game...