Troubles with DBF editing

[framebrain]

Our league has modified the NLSC roster patch so that our players are allocated to the correct teams. While the players are on the right teams, each player has the wrong height, weight and skin tone. (For example, Paul Pierce has the body of Austin Croshere (height, weight and skin color, but his skill levels are correct).

As far as we can tell, the incorrect data is all located in appearance.dbf file. We have compared the data between our patch and the NLSC patch and things look fine. Of particular note, we found that our players.dbf file was almost 3 times the size of the NLSC players.dbf file.

Any ideas?

[Andrew]

What exactly did you modify?

[dunadan]

as i am the one who did all the modifying, i will reply to this. here's a detailed description of how i create patches for the nll.

1) i import the nlsc-patch into the database used on our site. its mysql. a slight problem here is that it doesnt support boolean values, so i save them as 0s and 1s for now

2) i retrieve the data thats needs to be changed, join it to the table that contains the patch and export it into a csv-file

3) in the next step i just copy/paste all the datasets into an access db i created from the original dbf-file. it was the most convenient way to convert those 0/1s back to boolean, that i that i could come up with

4) finally, since i havent found a way to export working dbf-files from access, i export to excel and save as dbf.

this process contains a lot of juggling data back and forth. but it used to work fine with live 03 and live 04.
i did the same for live 05 (after adjusting all the tables of course) and the players.dbf file looks ok. (excel has blown up the size since all the integer fields are stored with a length of 14 or something, but i dont think thats a real problem)
the players are all there. their ratings/teams/stats all show correctly in the game. it simply wont match to the appearance.dbf file.

no matter which version of that file i use. we tried my appearence-file, where i changed some player-ids, as well as the one from nlsc.
(all the veterans have the same playerids in my patch as in the nlsc patch. only the rookies of the last couple of years are differnt.)

after 4 days of fooling around, comparing files, trying different dbf-tools to look at them we havent been able to find anything that indicates where the error is.

[SkipToMy_Lou]

dunadan



Joined: 10 Apr 2003
Posts: 1

Lol took you 19 months to get your first post

[Andrew]

I'm guessing the problem occured as a result of the programs you are using to edit the DBF files. Although there hasn't been many problems the last couple of years, Excel isn't always a stable program for editing NBA Live's DBFs.

[framebrain]

Andrew - I think you are right. We opened it again in OpenOffice and changed the column width. Seems to have worked.

[Donatello]

i just downloaded openoffice yesterday, and i'm really pleased with it