created players faces corrupted after editing dbf

[mchakko]

I've had a problem when editing the dbfs (I use excel - things usually work ok)...but sometimes when I reload the rosters into the game, the faces of created players get all changed.

just now I edited my rosters to add a couple guys from the new rosters from this site - i created torraye braggs and mark jones in the game, then copied their info from the nlsc rosters into my players.dbf, appearance.dbf, and faces.dbf files. Everything worked fine in the game (except when I tried to release torraye braggs to FA it said he was a legend player and couldn't go to the fa pool - I haven't figured out this problem either.)

Then, I just tried to move Karl Malone and Tyrone Hill so they are retired - i moved them to team '38' in players.dbf like a bunch of other retired players in the nlsc roster; then I loaded the game - they were gone from the FA list, but all the created players faces were now scrambled!

What controls the faces? Why would it be changed by changing the team for Malone in Hill?

as far as I can tell the player ratings are in players.dbf; then linked by their playerid their size and cyberface are in appearance.dbf; if they don't have a cyberface, they then have a FACEID, which is controlled by the values in faces.dbf ...

[mchakko]

I think I figured it out -

the appearance.dbf is *NOT* linked to the players.dbf by playerid's - it is only linked by the order of the fields.

Therefore, if you ever sort the players.dbf by editing it, next time you load the rosters, the appearance.dbf will be all scrambled.

Luckily there is an appearanceid in appearance.dbf which is the same as the playerid; the best solution appears to be to whenever you save the dbf, sort both the appearance.dbf and players.dbf by playerid. That way they should always match up correctly.

[Bassman58]

I have had numerous problems when DBF editing rosters. I have experienced the same problems with cyberfaces. I make copies of the roster frequently so I don't have to re-do alot of editing. PatTheHead says he had similar problems when creating his rosters. I use CDBF for Windows. Some people have had issues with Excel so you may want to try a dbf editor or try the NBA Live 2005 Editor by Diego Rostagnol.

[Andrew]

Even if you reordered appearance.dbf to match players.dbf, the game would crash. Whenever you reorder the records in players.dbf using Excel and save the game, you will encounter errors. The more recent versions of Excel are a little safer, but programs such as DB Commander are much, much safer still. Diego's NBA Live 2005 Editor is also safe to use.