OOTP10 Suggestions: Customization

[battists]

This suggestion thread is designed to collect suggestions for the next version of OOTP, on the following topic:

Customization

Includes
- Suggestions related to the customizable features in the game, such as nations, names, injuries, skin elements, logos, etc.

Excludes
- FaceGen, covered by a separate thread

Instructions
We will use this thread to collect suggestions on the above topic. Later on, we hope to present this information back to the community in a way that would allow you to vote and prioritize certain features.

If you would like to participate, here are the rules!

1. Only 1 suggestion per post.
2. Suggestions must be on-topic for the thread.
3. Constructive, non-inflammatory suggestions only.
4. No comments on others' suggestions are necessary. That means, we don't need 15 posts in the thread saying "Great idea!" or "I agree!"
5. Please don't link to other forum threads as your way of making suggestions. ("My suggestion can be found HERE.") If it's important enough to you that you want it in this thread, then it should be important enough to put it in the format I've asked for here!
6. You can certainly post suggestions that conflict with or build upon earlier suggestions.
7. Mockups are welcomed, they really help Markus see what you're interested in accomplishing.

Format for Suggestions

Suggestion
What is your suggestion? Be as specific as possible; include the screen you're talking about, if applicable.

Reason
Why do you think this is important? If this is to correct what you perceive as a problem in OOTP 2007, what is that problem? Be as specific as possible.

Priority
In your opinion, how important is this suggestion?
High (MUST have), Medium (should have), Low (nice to have))


Handy Cut-and-Paste Suggestion Form:

Suggestion


Reason


Priority


Thanks for participating!

Steve

[Cryomaniac]

Suggestion
Ability to customize the "Accomplishments" in the History section.

Reason
The accomplishments are mostly geared towards a 162 game schedule.
I often use shorter schedules, and sometimes longer ones (312 games anyone?). In the later case, 50 home runs or 20 wins is meaningless, and the list gets full pretty quickly, I'd like be able to change it to say 100 HRs and 40 wins.

Priority
Medium

[Tony M]

Suggestion

Move the majority of Global Settings to a League Level

Reason

Currently all leagues in a universe have the same aging curves, recording of logs, suspensions, etc when it might be advantageous to have these different in different leagues

Priority

High

[ovccsteve]

Suggestion
Give user the ability to set "default" for team screens, for example, Pitching screen shows pitchers only or all players, with Pitching Stats 1 or 2 or Ratings or Potential.

Reason
It's a pain to open the Pitchers screen and see a list of position players only or to open the Lineups screen to find pitching or minor-league stats.

Priority
Medium. Increase enjoyability quite a bit.

[Bluenoser]

Well, Cryomaniac decided to steal my suggestion, he could at least have copied and pasted to get it right. I'll do that myself, thanks.

Suggestion
Ability to customize the "Accomplishments" in the History section.

Reason
The accomplishments are mostly geared towards a 162 game schedule. such as 50 Home Run Seasons, 150+ RBI Seasons, and 20+ Win Seasons. If I create a custom schedule for a smaller league, such as 120 games or 80 games, these "Accomplishments" aren't proportionate to my league. In an 80 game or 120 game schedule, no-one is going to hit 50+ home runs or have 150+ RBI's, and not likely will you have a 20 game winner. I'd like to be able to customize these so they would be proportional to my schedule length. In an 80 game season, 30 or 35+ home runs would be better, 100+ RBI's, and 15+ win seasons.

Priority
Medium

[texasmame]

SUGGESTION: Ball flight more closely resembling MicroLeague (height, shadow, etc.)

REASON: Current ball flight is distracting and detracts from the otherwise polished look of the game.

LEVEL: Moderate

[Ktulu]

Suggestion: Create a system where complete custom teams can easily be added to the database...

The basic idea is to create a system where complete teams (Logo, Uniform, Nickname, City) can easily be added to the "game database" and to maybe even ship the game with as many pre-made "complete teams" as possible. In other words, to have a database of teams to draw from when creating leagues.

Currently the game has an excellent database of cities, this proposal expands on that to improve the customization of the game. Instead of the game matching "Boston" with a random nickname from the database, the user could select "Pilgrims" and the colors, uniform, logo and stadium would automatically be loaded.

The basic concept:

A "complete team" would consist of the following:

Nickname
Primary Logo
Secondary Logo (if these are implemented)
Primary and Secondary Colors
Uniform (home and away if implemented)
Stadium Name
Stadium Capacity
Stadium Park Factors
Stadium Picture (optional)

How to implement it:

Each team would be contained within it's own folder stored in some custom teams folder. This would make sharing user created teams organized and simple.

Now, we've all found it frustrating to have teams in 1930 matched with nicknames like "Ant Eaters" and "Eruption". To solve this each "complete team" would be matched with an appropriate era. The easiest way to do this would probably be by decade, so you could have a "Boston Pilgrims" team in a 1920's style and one from the 2000's.

To keep things organized I would propose some kind of folder naming convention that the game could use to categorize the various teams, for example

City(optional)_Nickname_Era_PriColor_SecColor_# (# is used in case there are multiple versions of the same city/nickname and era)

Boston_Pilgrims_1940_#000000_#FFFFFF_1 or
Pilgrims_2000_#000000_#FFFFFF_3

* Obviously this is just a suggetion, I have no idea what would work best to achieve a balance between easy programming and easy user customization.

Inside each folder you would find the following: png's of the logo(s), unifom(s), cap(s) and stadium. There would also be some kind of park.txt file which would contain park name, park capacity and park factors.

Use in game:

Now how do you load these "complete teams" into the game? Well there are two options: 1) is to match the city names to the available "complete teams" in the database; 2) is to assign generic "complete teams".

From the names and affiliations tab of the league setup...

City Based Teams

The city in the team name field is either entered by the user or OOTP. Now, in the nickname field, instead of just a simple text input field this would be changed to some kind of text input drop down combination*. When the drop down is clicked OOTP searches through the "comlete teams" database and loads every team that matches the city. These would be displayed in the dropdown in a format such as "Pilgrims (1920)", "Pilgrims (1940)" .... "Zebras (1980)".

* Now here is where this text input/drop down hybrid comes in. Maybe the user doesn't want to select from the pre-made teams so they can just type their nickname in, but as the user types the dropdown list would be filtered. So if the user types "P" only nicknames that start with "P" would be displayed... I'm sure you get the idea.

Generic Teams

For generic teams OOTP would load every pre-made team that does not contain a cityname. Obviously the dropdown could potentially contain hundreds of teams so this is why the "filter as you type" option is important.

Now in addition to selecting each team nickname individually there needs to be a way to assign "complete teams" to every team in a given league.

So, there should be two buttons at the bottom of the "Names and Affiliations" page, one to assign "complete teams" based on city name and one to assign "complete teams" using generic teams.

This would work similarly to the "Randomize Cities" and "Randomize Nicknames" actions that are currently available with one addition. After the button is clicked the user would be presented with a pop-up box asking them to select the era's in which to draw the teams from. Basically it would be a series of checkboxes for each decade or era of "complete teams". This would allow you to select teams from 1910-1950 or in some wacky universe to mix teams from 1890 with teams from 1970 or everywhere in between.

In addition to setting everything up in league setup, all options should be available from the customization screen for each individual team.

Reasons:

- If this were to be implemented it is theoretically possible that the game could ship with(or could be included as an optional download) hundreds of pre-made teams ready to go out of the box. Obviously there are copyright concerns with a lot of user created mods, so most of these would have to be limited to original user creations.

- Even if the game does not ship with official "Complete Teams" the excellent mod community would quickly fill the gap. Imagine modpacks of every major league team's uniforms from every decade, or having the option of choosing between 20 different "complete teams" for your New York franchise.

- In addition to the mod opportunities for the community, this system would dramatically make things easier for end users. No more downloading uniforms and caps and having to place them in specific folders then load the data individually within each team's customization screen.

- It eliminates the generic 3 letter logos with random colors.

- It eliminates non-era appropriate nicknames

- It would make setting up minor leagues with some "personality" rather than the generic ones that most users probably use due to the amount of time it takes to customize each individual team.

- Finally, it would save a lot of time. No more searching the forum, your hard drive, mod websites to find that logo for your team and then having to load it in game and create an appropriate uniform and color scheme to match the logo.

Priority

Low

[pstrickert]

Suggestion: Allow the user to choose which statistics to display for pitchers and batters on the Webcast screen. (Or, at the very least, allow the user to re-order the lines of stats, if desired.)

Reason: Personal preference.

Priority: Low.
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[pstrickert]

Suggestion: Allow the user to make layout changes to the Broadcast and Webcast screens, as well as font, text color, and background color changes.

Reason: Personal preference. Besides, other games allow it, including the graphically-challenged Diamond Mind Baseball.

Priority: Medium.
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[tchalifour]

Suggestion: Ability to change the default award names when creating a league, or an option to "Apply Award Names" to all leagues.

Reason: I hate setting up large universes and having to change each individual award name (I can't stand the defaults). It would be nice to create the award names on a parent league, hit apply all, and not have to go change each one. Big time saver.

Priority: Medium-high.

[drowtfs]

Suggestion
Ability to set up more complex playoff schemes, such as a Wild card round similar to what they do in real world NFL. Like, first round byes and stuff.

Reason
To allow one to expand his league into 2 leagues of 4 divisions each, and still keep the Wild Card element. If only division winners can go to the playoffs, you will have teams with losing records making the playoffs, and if you make it so that the top 2 clubs in each division qualify, it is way too easy to qualify for it to be worthy of a 162-game baseball season.

Priority
Medium

[bwburke94]

Mine is similar to drowtfs'.

Suggestion
First (and maybe second) round byes.

Reason
If I want a 10-team playoff system, let me do it! Or maybe 24 teams. Or 61.

Priority
High.

[Le Grande Orange]

SUGGESTION

Allow the use of secondary and special team logos for teams.

REASON

It allows logo makers more areas in which to exercise their creativity, and it adds additional visual flair to the game, as well as replicating how real world teams have primary, secondary, and special logos.

PRIORITY

Medium/High.


The Suggestion in Detail

Right now, team logos are at a fixed 150x150 resolution, and where the space onscreen is less than that, the game shrinks the logo to fit. Since logo always looks best at its designed resolution, to avoid any shrinking allow for a secondary team logo of a smaller fixed resolution (say, 100x100 or perhaps 75x75) to be created and used by OOTP.

So, in places where a logo is shown at 150x150, the primary logo is used, and in places where a team logo is shown at a smaller size, the secondary logo would be used (if one is present; if one is not present, then the game can use the primary logo). Logos could be differentiated by adding a "P" or "S" to their file name.

Special team logos would be those often used by teams in anniversary years, such as their tenth or twenty-five season, for example. Thus a special team logo could be created for these anniversary seasons and the game would then use that special team logo for the team in that season. The anniversary seasons in which such special logos could be used would be every tenth season (e.g. tenth, twentieth, thirtieth, etc.) as well as the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth season. These special logos could be identified by adding the season they're to be used in (e.g. "10", "25" etc.) to the file name. Thus a logo maker could create different special logos for each different anniversary season.

If the game doesn't find a special logo for a given season, it just continues to use the regular team logo.

[Le Grande Orange]

SUGGESTION

Allow the use of special league event logos.

REASON

It allows logo makers more areas in which to exercise their creativity, and it adds additional visual flair to the game, as well as replicating how real world leagues have special logos for different kinds of events, such as the All-Star Game, playoff series, and so forth.

PRIORITY

Medium/High.


The Suggestion in Detail

These special event logos would be used primarily in news stories, but could also perhaps be shown on the schedule screen or other screens where applicable. The league events for which logos could be created would be: opening day of the regular season, the All-Star Game, tiebreaking playoff games, and a separate logo for each round of the post-season. Such special event logos would be creatable for each individual league, just like how regular league logos are at the moment.

Generic logos for these special events could be created and shipped with the game (I'd be happy to design a few for this purpose) to illustrate what such league event logos add to the look of the game, and hopefully inspiring logo makers to create plenty more such event logos for OOTP players to use.

[Le Grande Orange]

SUGGESTION

Allow the use of division title, subleague championship, and league championship pennant graphics on a team's home screen.

REASON

It allows graphics creators more areas in which to exercise their creativity, and it adds additional visual flair to the game. I think it would be fun for folks to look at their team's home page and see there little division pennants illustrating their team's success over the years. It's intended to be reminiscent of how division title and other pennants can be seen in real-world ballparks.

PRIORITY

Medium/High.


The Suggestion in Detail

There would be three types of such pennant graphics: one for division titles, one for subleague championships, and one for the league championship. These could either be generic graphics used by all leagues, or for more individuality, allow such pennant graphics to be created for each individual league. For the latter, the size of the graphic would have to be sufficient so that it can be clearly seen how they are for a specific league. (I recommend such pennant graphics be individualized by league; it adds much more visual flavour to the game.)

In either case, generic versions can ship with the game (I'd be happy to design a few for consideration). The graphics gurus can take it from there to supply plenty more custom creations for use by OOTP players.

[Syxx34]

Suggestion
Make it easier for a commish to modify the league structure of the world. As if he wants to move players to different team in the organization. So he could delete a league. Have it remove the whole league from the game. As now if you delete a league - it will still appear on the html pages and there nothing in them but history

Reason
Gives the commish more flexibility on league structure. So instead of having two AAA, 3 AA, 5 A, 2 SA, and 5 R League. He could have the MLB, 1 AAA, AA, A, SA, A season leagues. So it would be a smaller file!

Priority

High

[crazyeights]

Suggestion
Sort the league reports for online leagues by ratings like OOTP 6 did, or at least give the option of sorting them thais way.

Reason
It makes the reports much easier to read in online leagues

Priority
High

[lt2cents]

Suggestion

Provide for in game management of some customizing aspects, especiallly during initial game setup. This would replace manually swapping in custom files (and remembering to do it before starting to set up a league).


Reason
Too often a major league and maybe 30 minor leagues are hand created during set up only to remember that files like the nations or names files that can be customized are set for 2008, not 1938 and you have a game with way too many Hispanic or Asian names, etc for the period. The program should provide a means to manage which custom files to use during setup time- including in the setup wizard. You should be able to get players with nationalities, name sets determined by you during set up, not by what files happened to be in the folder at the time. Other customizable files should also be managed in game where the game handles the players selection choice between available alternates.


Priority
Low.

[pstrickert]

Suggestion

To allow the user to "fine tune" the type and length of injuries in the game.


Reason

Not everyone is satisfied with the injury model as it exists. The OOTP message board contains a couple of threads that discuss the issues.


Priority

High.

[tchalifour]

Suggestion: Alternate team nicknames.

Maybe on the team customization page, you could have the teams primary, offical nickname (ie, Yankees, Angels, D-backs) and a "local" or "alternate" nickname field (ie, Bronx Bombers, Halos, Snakes). In the PbP or news stories, sometimes the alternate name could be used in lieu of the regular nickname.

ie: "Player A has signed on the dotted line with the Angels. Halos fans are in for a treat this year."

Reason: It makes PbP and news stories deeper and more intresting.

Piority: Low. Its a nice idea, but not nessesary.