Editing players.dbf for 2nd season in dynasty crashes game

[colickyboy]

after the first season in my dynasty, i edited players.dbf using dbfplus ...basically just to change the free agents and draft picks around so they mirror the real-life NBA (e.g, damon jones to cleveland, deron williams to utah, etc). i'm trying to make sure all the team rosters are numbered correctly (e.g., not two starting PGs, not two bench guys in position 7, etc). i'm only changing the ORIGTEAM, TEAM and ROSTERPOS fields.

i also had to change some draftees from signed to a team (like angelo gigli) to a free agent since they weren't drafted in real-life by changing the ORIGTEAM and TEAM to 50 from whatever they were.

i can load live 2005 but when i try to play the first game of the 2nd season, the game exits to windows and i get the "Windows has encountered an error and needs to exit. Do you want to send a report to Microsoft? <send><don't send>" error message. That's the only error message I get...no codebase error messages or anything else.

What did I do wrong? Do I need to edit other fields when undoing draftees or players changing teams, like CASHTOTAL or something?!?

[COOLmac©]

did you have a back up of your entire dbf before you edit? cause i think you messed it up dude. you have to restore that messed up dbf with your back up.

[colickyboy]

i did back it up. i figured this would be hard for people to debug even though I only changed three fields. i guess no one knows why it doesn't like the dbf file, eh?

[Cable]

What program did you use? Excel and Access tend to screw up the .dbf. There was also an issue with sorting the fields in the .dbf, you have to keep them in the same order.

[colickyboy]

i'm using dbfplus.

i might be onto something, though. last night, i fixed three roster issues (two guys had the same bench spot and another team had an IR1 and IR3 spot but no IR2 spot). there's only one roster prob that i didn't fix yet: lakers missing a starting center (didn't fix yet b/c i want to add vlade divac to players.dbf).

so after the three roster fixes, the game started simming games, then it crashed and exited again without any error messages. but since it crashed while simming games (it didn't even get that far last time), i think the issue might be that missing C. i'm going to add a starting center to the lakers and see if that fixes it.

[colickyboy]

well, fixed the rosters but still crashing in the same place. must have something to do with the various cash fields relating to free agency, no? i put some free agents on teams and vice-versa...is there a proper way to do that in players.dbf?!?

[colickyboy]

i figured it out. there was a dude (grimreaper) in an nbalive.org forum who had the same prob. HUGE thanks to him for the advice.

basically, it was two things:
1) all the free agents had to have YEARS_LEFT = 0
2) the ROSTERPOS of all the free agents couldn't be too unbalanced in one position (e.g., 40 free agents with ROSTERPOS = 0 and 2 free agents with ROSTSERPOS = 7 or whatever).

year 2 of my dynasty is all set now