Historical Simulation

[pleming]

Has anyone ever considered creating some historical sims?

What I'd like to do is start a career with the Celtics the year that Pitino took over (97?), and correct the mistakes if you will.

I'm fairly new with NBA Live but I've done a few personal rosters sets with OOTP and Madden...

I think to do this you'd need to completely overhaul the rosters to make the the 1996 rosters, then have a db file ready to copy over with the incoming rookie classes. I guess you could do this from any year, just as long as you have a file with incoming rookies.

Anyone else have this thought? The only drawback I can see is NBA Live won't have accurate years. The sim will always start in 03-04... but I can get past this.

I'm willing to do a bunch of roster sets, but I'd need some guidance to make sure I'm doing things right (editing the right files, etc.) as I'm not too confident playing with the files in NBA Live...

Other things to consider would be really getting a handle on the Career Envelope so that we can accurately judge when players will retire, etc. and getting really good with ratings.

Would it be possible to have a DB update each year after the season to have the ratings reflect what really happened that year?

For example, I'm not thrilled with NBA Live's progression of players. It's usually a bell curve of some sort, with peaks being higher and lower for different players... In real life, guys have up years, down years, etc. I want to have a guy with a rating that reflects how well he did THAT year.

So I don't want to have (total hypothetical) Mitch Richmond rated 84 in '93, 86 in '95, 90 in '96 if in reality, he was more of a 84/72/90 guy with a bad year for whatever reason in 95.

Anyways, any help you all can give me would be appreciated.

[Mark.]

That is an awesome idea, i wanted to do it myself, but i dont the players well enough, i would be interested in helping out, cos ive done a bit with DBF, A guy over in the dynasty forum has done one with a PS2 but since he cant change the DBF's he doesnt have full teams of historic players.

[Andrew]

I've actually started work on my 95/96 roster patch. After it's done, perhaps a few of us could look at developing add-ons that would allow people to easily import rookie classes before advancing to the Offseason.

[pleming]

Awesome... Please keep me informed as to the status... If you need anything, let me know.

Just out of curiosity, would it work the way I described above?

[pleming]

One other thing...

Can this be done in franchise mode? Or would we have to do a series of single seasons play and a master db each year? Obviously we'd have to manually draft and sign free agents, etc... which would stink.

[Mark.]

No you can insert real players into the draft through the dbf, but the only problem is that the cpu still creates the generated rookies.

I was thinking another way of doing it would be to not insert the rookie class, then after the draft the team that got the first pick would get player that would most likely have gone first in the real draft and so on and then delete the generated rookie. But it would lead to having to reorder all the rosters for each team in the dbf which would take a lot of time, but i guess it would be worth it

[SKempSonics]

Hehe I did this for madden, except the San Francisco 49ers in Jerry Rice's rookie season. I was doing a franchise report that was highlighting a re-start of the young players career. Seeing if I too would be able to put up the kind of numbers he did through his career, under my control. Didn't finish it, although since they auto-retire late 30's I knew i'd be at a disadvantage because Rice hasn't retired. :\ damn set-retirement ages.

[OldFoolStyle]

I Don't know if it'll work for '04, but in '03 you could put players in the draft pool and set their years pro to -1, and they'd show up in the draft.

[Andrew]

That worked in NBA Live 2000 and NBA Live 2001, but not NBA Live 2003. The two most recent NBA Lives both clear all players and teams except for the 29 NBA teams and the Free Agents pool when you start a new Dynasty Game. Thus, you can't place the rookies in the Rookie Pool with a roster patch, as they'll just be cleared when you start a Dynasty.