1983 Roster: beta version available

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Ben75
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1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby Ben75 » Mon Dec 31, 2012 6:38 pm

I'm attaching a roster file I've been working on for some time now. Using Bagdad Bob's 1986 roster (I think it was Bagdad Bob, anyway), I added missing players, moved players to correct teams, and tweaked ratings to create the 1983 NFL roster. My apologies to B-Bob for not asking your blessing, but I don't see a profile for you on here....

For those interested, you can look at the file and find any mistakes (wrong #'s, missing players, players on incorrect teams, etc...) and offer feedback. I'm not really going to get too much into to re-rating players, though. Done enough of that and ratings are rather subjective, anyway. But feel free to alter whatever I've done and resubmit it to the forum. It's the sharing that keeps this place alive.

I can go into great detail about my approach to come up with the ratings, but for now, these notes ought to do:

PLAYERS AND RATINGS

* Most starters will be between 75 and 85. As you move into the low 80s you find all-pro calibur players. Upper 80s and into the 90s will be perennial all-pros and Hall of Fame type guys. There are exceptions, of course, based on a players age. Older all-time greats were lowered, and up-and-coming superstars were held down with lower awareness ratings.

*I essentially used the awareness rating as an experience grade. Players with 80 and 90+ awareness tend to be older veterans. Rookies will typically be 75 or below.

* Nearly all ratings were kept within the ranges found with the game's default roster. You may find some occasional exceptions, like Earl Campbell's strength rating, for example. This doesn't hold for the free agent pool or the expansion teams, which have players rated much lower overall than the regular teams.

* Players are rated slightly slower on average and with a bit less strength, following BB's lead which accounted for the increased speed and strength of modern players. This was not drastic, however; I don't think the difference is nearly as pronounced as what most people think, but that's just my opinion.

* Fullbacks: On average, you'll find their rushing skills (SPD, ACC, AGI, BKT) are higher than normal. This is to account for the fact that most fullbacks back then were regular ball carriers. This means their OVR ratings will appear out of whack a bit. (on a side note, I restructured the overall calculations in my DB_Templates file, so the ratings appear normal to me; I can pass along my formula for anybody interested. I also did this for punters, kickers, and defensive ends). Additionally, there were a number of hybrid backs back then, so keep in mind I sometimes had to decide whether or not to make them a FB or HB.

* I did the best I could on rating the players, and used their career statistics as a guide combined with my own knowledge about them. This sometimes meant dropping down a player who may have had a great year in '83 due to the fact that he fell off completely afterwards, and vice versa.

* I made certain that the OVR ratings for the teams generally reflected the offensive and defensive rankings for the 1983 season. This actually didn't require too much tweaking, so I must have done something right.

* I obtained nearly all information from pro-footballreference.com. I googled every player to to make sure skin tone, hair color, and equipment were close to the mark. Couldn't find images for a few players, though. For contracts, I looked to see how many years a player played with his team from 1983 onward and used that to determine the years left in the contract (up to the maximum seven years, of course.)

*Players who were traded during the season are on the team they began the season with. Also, I may have missed some players who were out for the season with injury, as they did not appear on the roster list at the above website. I was able to catch a few of them, and they are placed on the appropriate teams. I did not, however, remove them from the depth charts, which were also constructed using pro-footballreference.com

* I kept the player egos quite low. They are all below 50, which I did to ensure that they could easily be resigned. Remember, free agency was highly restricted back in 1983!

ROSTER NOTES

* I did not honor Madden's default roster breakdowns, which would've require me to place extra players on teams in some cases. My minimum roster requirements are modded, so it doesn't affect me, but to my suprise the roster simmed through a franchise season without error using the deault breakdowns. The cpu was able to fill its spots just fine.

* Salaries are ridiculosly low (though not for 1983), and perhaps a bit too low. They may have to be adjusted upwards. I didn't give salaries much thought when I started, but once I realized they were too low I wanted to keep everything in scale.

* Player roles were removed. did this using NZA's editor when I started without thinking about it. Now I wish I hadn't done it...sorry.

* I removed the Texans and replaced them with the Oilers (I set their stadium ID to the Superdome). The Jaguars, Panthers, Ravens, and Titans all have generic, low-rated players. The FA pool is also made up of generic players which are rated very low. This was done to minimize the possibility that any of them will become superstars. For this reason, if you play a franchise you may want to change up the divisions (which I kept to default), as the AFC South will have two of these teams in it.

* The Rams are in Los Angelas and the Cardinals in St.Louis. I kept the Raiders in Oakland since they will eventually be moving back there, and I also put the Colts in Indy for the same reason, in addition to avoid having two teams in Baltimore.

* All teams have era-specific logos and uniforms. The Cardinals, for some reason, do not have the proper home throwback available. They have the proper jersey, but for some reason have red instead of white pants. Clearly an EA oversight.

* The coach table has been edited to provide the proper coaching staffs as best as I can tell (couldn't find who the coordinators were for some teams, and few if any of the ST coaches are correct). You'll also find most of the future head coaches for teams in the FA pool, such as Jimmie Johnson and Steve Mariucci. Coaches who were playing in 1983 or after were omitted. This includes Bill Cowher, Jeff Fisher, Jim Haslet, Sean Payton, and Mike Mularkey among others. The offseason simmed just fine through one season with the edited coach table. I haven't gone beyond; that's one of the reasons I'm posting this now.

That's all for now. If you're interested, post possible errors and concerns about crashes in this thread, and I'll see what I can do about getting things fixed. Also, for the 84, 85, and 86 draft classes, I’ve moved those players found on BB’s roster to teams on a roster I have for the future creation of those draft classes.

Happy New Year

1983 Roster: beta version available

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oaklandfan2kx
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby oaklandfan2kx » Mon Dec 31, 2012 11:04 pm

Nice Work on Your 1983 NFL Roster on the Beta Version now do some more 1980's NFL Seasons, I Will See the Following Super Bowl Championships from the Bay Area

1980 (Raiders def. Eagles 27-10)
1981 (49ers def. Bengals 26-21)
1984 (49ers def. Dolphins 38-16)
1988 (49ers def. Bengals 20-16)
1989 (49ers def. Broncos 55-10)

I Can't Wait For This and Yeah we will see draft class files from 1981-1985, can't wait for it!

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AaronS
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby AaronS » Fri Jan 11, 2013 4:10 pm

The Throwback Cardinals uni's are #73 and 74.

The art ID's can be copied from the 1975 Cardinals historic team.

.. the only throwbacks I haven't been able to find are the '90s-early 2000's Chargers. Seems as if they were lost after M2007.
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Leeman67
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby Leeman67 » Sun Jan 13, 2013 12:25 pm

Ben75, this is excellent work. Great job on the ratings! Nice to see some serious thought put into that. I like how you used the Awareness rating, as well as the main skills ones (Speed and Strength). I didn't really see anything that I would disagree with there (I did take Alvin Garrett down a few notches in terms of SP, but other than that...).

To me, the ratings are always more important than the cosmetic things like player faces, skin tones, equipment, etc., although I admit to being very much a perfectionist when it comes to that stuff too. ;) In fact, in terms of your "beta" here, I would say that's really all that's left to improve upon, and even there you did a pretty accurate job.

In terms of the uniforms, I highly recommend installing NICK's uniform dat (found in the Graphics thread), assuming you haven't already done so. He did an impressive job on the throwback uniforms, offering way more options than the original EA configuration, and they're more accurate too. I'm pretty sure he updated every team's set of throwbacks and certainly included ones that can be used for 1983.

Here's another thought if you're feeling really creative and have some time on your hands. For those "filler" teams that didn't exist back then (Ravens, Jags, etc.), you could incorporate a few of the USFL teams from 1983 that were in non-NFL cities, and either include those actual players, or just fill them with the fictional free agent players you came up with. Just a thought. A few of us did something similar to that with a 1976 roster we did, and included some WFL teams from that era. Pretty cool stuff from an alternative reality standpoint.

Overall, a Great Job!! :D

wolfbest
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby wolfbest » Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:05 pm

ok i can't wait going back to home to try the roster .....thank you

Ben75
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby Ben75 » Tue Jan 15, 2013 1:20 am

Thanks for the compliments. I'm still working on it. I've made numerous tweaks since I've first posted the roster file, and plan to repost this when I'm all finished as a kind of mini-mod. For anybody who's done this, it's hard to fight the obsessiveness that kicks in when tweaking rosters and ratings. Recently, I went through and created a ranking for offensive lines in terms of run and pass blocking, using sack percentages and yards per carry (from the 1983 team statistics), and made sure my ratings honored that ranking without severely impacting any players overall ratings.

Right now, I'm working on creating a number of playbooks to be used with this, which contain offensive formations more fitting to the era. Lots of pro-form, near and far, etc...This is rather time consuming, though, as I am using a base playbook and modifying it per team, and am carefully setting AI values. When I'm done I'll hopefully have 6-8 generic 80s playbooks (mostly using stock plays, but with some additional formations I created) that can be assigned to various teams, along with some playbooks for specific teams. I'm also going to include some playbooks and styles which would appear a few years later, like the K-gun, run-and-shoot, Joe Gibbs' 91 offense, etc...I've gone back and watched hours of youtube footage to get a feel for which teams used which formations, and am incorporating that into the playbooks. It won't be perfect - I don't have the time to do a playbook specific to each team, but the point is to get the look and feel of the era.

Plan on adding some defensive playbooks as well.

I'm also looking at trying to get the pro-formation running plays to be a little more effective, as well as getting the fullbacks involved more in the running game as ball carriers. Additionally, I've also been working on the AI on punt coverages, trying to get more realistic returns. This is difficult, though I have made a little bit of progress. Punt returns really expose the limitations on the AI engine for this game. You can get it to the point where it is possible to return a punt for a TD, but then every punt is returnable because the gunners never make it down the field, which would mean no fair catches. It's tricky.

I do plan on using Nick's uniforms. I'm also going to put teams in some stadiums (custom) that are more fitting, but am running into trouble because the field art doesn't display for a custom stadium unless you have a custom art file, so I need extract the field art for a few of the teams somehow (I have a request for Texmod users in the graphics forums).

I like your USFL idea, though at this point I have to put it on the backburner. Trying to tackle quite a bit, here. This thing became much bigger when I broke my foot and was immobile and at home for two straight weeks! I't's better, now, so I've slowed down a bit...lol.

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Leeman67
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby Leeman67 » Tue Jan 15, 2013 7:05 pm

I feel your pain on trying to develop playbooks. I struggled with this big time on my 76-78 simulations (my 1978 franchise journal is on this site). I discovered that when I used a custom playbook in cpu vs cpu mode, it seemed to call pass plays about 70% of the time even if i configured it so that at least 60% of the plays were actually running plays. Go figure. But perhaps that was an anomaly I was dealing with, who knows. I ended up just going with the Run Heavy offense for all but the Cowboys (who were the only team using the shotgun back in those days), and that was ok until a team made into the red zone, and then it was the worst AI play calling I've ever seen. But you did see 5-10 runs per game by the FB, so it was slight progress. Good luck and can't wait to see what you come up with, and looking forward to the next update! :)

Leeman67

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cowboysmb3dw28
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby cowboysmb3dw28 » Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:34 pm

Holy cow this roster is fantastic! Even in the roster menu little things like the Oilers being listed between the Lions and Packers is here! Thanks for the work!!

raidermike
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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby raidermike » Mon Sep 09, 2013 6:54 pm

Nice roster!!!!!
Bagdad Bob was the one that did the 1986 roster but haven't heard from him since FF went down. Would like to help with draft classes unless someone else has them.

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Re: 1983 Roster: beta version available

Postby mikehill » Sun Sep 22, 2013 8:38 am

Great roster! Coaches and everything. You should keep jacksonville and other real teams just replace fictional players with USFL and other leagues players.
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