Ballpark utility?

[AfWapo]

Hey all. I was just thinking of a possible utility for someone to make. What made me think of it was Larry Anderson's logowatchdog program, which is VERY cool. Kudos to Larry!

Anyway, the idea is a program which would basically do something similar as the logowatchdog, but for stadiums.

I am not a programmer because I was never good at writing code, but I was usually pretty good at thinking through the steps a program would have to take in order to do a job.

So, I was thinking that a program would have to do something like this:

1. Check the year of the current file, and get info on team names and ballpark info in-game.

2. Compare this info to an accurate database containing the same information (team names by year, with stadium info like factors, dimensions, and stadium names, etc.).

3. For any differences between the in-game file and the database, over-write the in-game info with the accurate database info (as an option, of course).

4. Check the OOTP stadium directory for an accurately named picture file.

5. Change the picture file, if found.

TaDA! Automatically updating stadium info!!

I realize it isn't quite so easy, but it seems like it should certainly be do-able. Am I right? Anybody willing to take this on? You'd be a god among men!! Or, at least make a lot of people like me very happy.

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by AfWapo

Hey all. I was just thinking of a possible utility for someone to make. What made me think of it was Larry Anderson's logowatchdog program, which is VERY cool. Kudos to Larry!

Anyway, the idea is a program which would basically do something similar as the logowatchdog, but for stadiums.

I am not a programmer because I was never good at writing code, but I was usually pretty good at thinking through the steps a program would have to take in order to do a job.

So, I was thinking that a program would have to do something like this:

1. Check the year of the current file, and get info on team names and ballpark info in-game.

2. Compare this info to an accurate database containing the same information (team names by year, with stadium info like factors, dimensions, and stadium names, etc.).

3. For any differences between the in-game file and the database, over-write the in-game info with the accurate database info (as an option, of course).

4. Check the OOTP stadium directory for an accurately named picture file.

5. Change the picture file, if found.

TaDA! Automatically updating stadium info!!

I realize it isn't quite so easy, but it seems like it should certainly be do-able. Am I right? Anybody willing to take this on? You'd be a god among men!! Or, at least make a lot of people like me very happy.

The biggest issues I can see with this are

1 - is there such a spreadsheet?
2 - I'm not sure about how automatic it could be as if you only autosave once a year you'll only be able to work out the date once a sim year, and you don't want to keep polling the world file to find the date. The easier way to do this would be to stop the sim every 1st Jan, save the files by quitting, then run a seperate program to update the data and restart the game.

Apart from that, the updating of the relevant database files is possible.