[Corsairs]

Recently my online league hit the beginning of our first regular season, and around the time that it did the league file I was sending out began ballooning in size. Whereas we started with a file around 25 MB in size, now the updates I was sending out were reaching as large as 130 MB! Obviously this was causing a great deal of difficulty for my owners, particularly those few poor souls still on dial-up.

Assuming the extra size was due to the arrival of box scores and game logs to the landscape, I posted a thread asking online players what were normal update sizes in their leagues. One person suggested separating my new and changed images. After each 8 day sim I run "Update / Generate Player Pictures" and had been ticking the "Include new and changed images" box when creating the new league file. I figured it'd only knock off a few MBs, but I'd take any gain I could get.

So for our last sim, after running "Update / Generate Player Pictures" (which resulted in 107 new pictures, going by file date), I first created the league file the way I had been. The archived size was 130 MB. I then unticked the "Include new and changed images" box and created the file again. The result? The archive went down to 22 MB! In shock I looked at the first (enormous) archive and discovered that, rather than just including the new pictures, EVERYTHING in my /images folder was being included. The new pictures, the old ones with file modified dates from October... even a .txt file I had placed in the folder from November was being added!

At the moment I'm handling this by unticking "Include new and changed images" and uploading a separate player picture pack with the updated images from the latest sim. This adds an extra layer of work, though. More importantly, several of my owners aren't extremely computer-saavy, and the extra step is a barrier for them. Solonor suggested in the thread linked above that it's possible the "update" task is resetting a flag in the game to look at all files in the folder. That seems reasonable... any thoughts on this (and how it could be fixed)?

[Solonor]

I just had another thought... Do you have the option turned on to automatically create player pictures? If you do, then maybe you don't need to be running the update function (thus resetting the date). How about trying to just do an upload including new photos without using the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" option?

[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by Solonor

I just had another thought... Do you have the option turned on to automatically create player pictures? If you do, then maybe you don't need to be running the update function (thus resetting the date). How about trying to just do an upload including new photos without using the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" option?

Are you referring to the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" global setting? I have that set to "Always if needed". The thing is, I've noticed it doesn't seem to update the pictures after a sim unless I actually click on the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" button. The file dates certainly don't change on anything in the /images directory until I click that button, and if I browse to a player whose picture I know has changed it will update as I enter his player page.

[sporr]

Have you tried using the "Include new images" for multiple sims after this? During a first sim, ALL images are considered new, so the game includes them all if they have never been included in an update before.

There was a case where our league had to restore from a backup once. In the process of copying and pasting over files, the game saw all of the faces as "new" again and included them all in the next update again.

So I'm wondering if something in your process is causing whatever toggle OOTP uses to determine dates on the photos to be unchecked again so it includes all of the faces.

Do you move any files manually in your process? Because I follow the process you've outlined exactly myself and have not had this problem.

[Corsairs]

Yes, this has been a problem over a number of sims. I haven't moved any files manually except when I upgraded to OOTP 8 (the problem was occurring both before and after that).

Now there is one oddity about my league file: during our setup I used CubbyFan's set to test some settings. When I was finished I deleted all the teams that come with that set from our world template. However, it seems the entries for those teams are still stored in my .dat files. Recently Markus was looking at my files and mentioned there were nearly 4,000 teams in our database. There are only 208 visible teams in PEBA's universe.

I bring this up because when I upgraded to OOTP 8 and did my first picture update, the game actually generated logos for not only the 208 teams in our universe but the 3,700 "phantom teams", too! I had to go through and manually delete the extra logos. That problem hasn't reoccurred. I'm not at all sure, but I'm wondering if the two issues are somehow connected.

[Corsairs]

I wanted to wait until I had a chance to test this over multiple sims on another computer before bumping my thread. Even on a second computer the problem remains: every file in the /images directory is being added when I check "Include new and changed images". I can manually archive the new images and ask my owners to download them manually after each sim, but this is a big enough pain that I'm going to work hard to find a resolution here.

[sporr]

Another question for you. Is a player's image changing from sim to sim at all? In other words, is the game giving the player a new face every sim or is it keeping the same face? Follow up to that question. If it is keeping the same face, is the facial hair changing or the angle changing at all or is that also remaining the same from sim to sim?

[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by sporr

Another question for you. Is a player's image changing from sim to sim at all? In other words, is the game giving the player a new face every sim or is it keeping the same face? Follow up to that question. If it is keeping the same face, is the facial hair changing or the angle changing at all or is that also remaining the same from sim to sim?

I just had a chance to test this and, to the best of my ability to see, there aren't any unexpected player image changes. I focused on 8 players whose pictures I know weren't due to be altered and none of them showed any visible changes after the update.

In terms of file dates, I'm usually getting between 100-200 updated pictures for the test sims I'm running. But I still get over 7000 images packed into each league file with the "new and changed images" box ticked. This happens even with periodic stops to create a new league file.

[Corsairs]

Friendly start-o'-the-week bump. This is still an issue and re-creatable on different computers. Would it help for me to send my files in for examination?

[sporr]

One more thing to try to test a theory....create two league files in the game back-to-back with the box checked. The 2nd one shouldn't include ANY images since they haven't changed in the few minutes between league files.

I'm thinking that there's a file somewhere that the game is comparing to the timestamp on the image files to determine whether they have changed since the last league file or not...

[sporr]

dola...

Maybe this can help track this down...in the "Settings" folder within your league folder there are two files that might determine this. Once is named "last_date_league_file_uploaded.log" and the other is "last_date_simulated.log". Are you moving or deleting these files at all between sims?

[Corsairs]

Good idea with creating back to back league files. I just tried it, but it turns out the second one still includes all the images. That's got me totally stumped.

Regarding the files in the "Settings" folder, I never move or delete those at any time. The only thing I do is copy my entire league folder over to my 2nd computer after each sim to have a backup. Nothing get moved, though, and at any rate that doesn't seem to be the problem based on the results of the consecutive file creation test I just ran.

[Corsairs]

Hate to bump this again, but since the problem is repeatable I figure it's worth a look-over by one of the tech guys. I'd love to knock out the extra step this problem is forcing my owners to take (downloading a separate updated picture pack after each sim).

[Corsairs]

Bump

[sporr]

Do you have a link to a copy? I can see what happens on my PC.

[Corsairs]

Just sent you a PM with the links to the files. Thanks for taking a look!

[Corsairs]

Just curious sporr, did you get the files okay and get a chance to test them? If so, did the problem appear on your computer?

[sporr]

Originally Posted by Corsairs

Just curious sporr, did you get the files okay and get a chance to test them? If so, did the problem appear on your computer?

Just tested this out. Very interesting. It's doing the same thing on my computer. Yet, my league is being handled just fine. There must be some unique set of parameters in your league that is tripping this problem. I've done a little digging, but I don't see anything too obvious. I know you have a lot more leagues than we do, but that should cause this kind of issue. I've played around with some settings, but I'm not having any luck getting it resolved.

At this point, it will probably take someone with a little more skill than me to delve into the dat files. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

[zekester91]

Originally Posted by Corsairs

Bump

It's not a good thing to bump the technical support threads the team tends to work bottom up, so bumping can cause the wrong effect you are looking for....

[Corsairs]

With sporr confirming that this is a repeatable problem with these league files on a totally different computer setup, I'm hoping this is worth a look-over. Nutlaw, any chance you could point Andreas towards this thread?