NCAA 06 PS2 Dynasty Save File Editing

[Harry97]

Screenshot looks amazing, so cool to see NCAA 06 without impact players. We are doing so much good work here to customize this amazing football engine. By the way @minotauri did you see that other topic about that PDAD.csv in TEMPLATE.DAT? I'm about to try to edit that and rebuild the disc to see if I can make it possible to block FGs or Punts in NCAA 06, and maybe change the type of laterals when you press R2! That would be amazing.

You wouldn't believe the kind of stuff I've been able to pull off through cheat engine. I am completely remastering NCAA 06 one step at a time. What we've uncovered in NCAA 06 is truly the stuff of legend.

[minotauri]

Screenshot looks amazing, so cool to see NCAA 06 without impact players. We are doing so much good work here to customize this amazing football engine. By the way @minotauri did you see that other topic about that PDAD.csv in TEMPLATE.DAT? I'm about to try to edit that and rebuild the disc to see if I can make it possible to block FGs or Punts in NCAA 06, and maybe change the type of laterals when you press R2! That would be amazing.

You wouldn't believe the kind of stuff I've been able to pull off through cheat engine. I am completely remastering NCAA 06 one step at a time. What we've uncovered in NCAA 06 is truly the stuff of legend.

Man that is cool. I saw the thread but didnt look at it closely as I was working on this mod. We have a huge update now. Over half teams have new unis now and most teams have 2-4 alternate uniforms, with updated presentations and everything. Very happy how this is progressing. I also have the patch to fix number locations on jerseys and helmets which came in handy for the updated uniforms too. That is done by patching UNIF in Strmdata.db. I also patched Template.DAT for the schedule generator fix for re-aligned conferences, and 2021 rosters (for use if you want to do Road to Heisman).

Someone also made a Playbook Editor which has seen some really cool things but we havent incorporated that into our mod yet. Waiting for someone to finish up something they like first.

Anyway, I'll have to read over that thread tonight.


Back to the Impact Player. So it seems like at the beginning of the year only two slots are used. I'm assuming TPIO and TPID (off and def impact), and then midyear, the TS1 slot is activated, and the game will re-calc the next impact player. So this mod would have to be re-performed when that occurs mid-year as well, or we can just live with 1 impact player at mid-year, which isnt that bad of an idea either.

[minotauri]

oh btw, i cant wait to hear what you've done with cheat engine. i never tried doing that at all, nor where to start...

[Harry97]

oh btw, i cant wait to hear what you've done with cheat engine. i never tried doing that at all, nor where to start...

Today is an exciting day. I am releasing my first code for NCAA 06!

This code allows you to turn QB hand signals ON after calling an audible at the line of scrimmage for neutral site games, which are OFF by default. Conversely this code can also turn QB hand signals OFF at the line of scrimmage in normal Home stadium games, which are ON by default, allowing you to have Quick Audibles in normal Home games.

I use this code a lot because I like having the QB hand signals ON in neutral site games, so even in neutral site games the away players have trouble hearing audibles due to crowd noise. So this code being turned ON would give the Home team a crowd advantage in a neutral site game, as they have in normal Home games. In NCAA 06, this also applies if the Home team plays in another team's home stadium. That's treated as a neutral site game as well as it pertains to the audible signals being ON or OFF. If you go into Play Now and play in another team's home stadium, even if it isn't in a designated neutral site stadium like a Bowl Game, it still turns Hand signals OFF by default. So this code allows you to override this and have them ON or OFF as you please no matter what stadium you play in.

One thing to note about Neutral site games, specifically when you change the Stadium choice in Play Now to another team's Home stadium, which makes it a neutral site game for all intents and purposes, minus the split 50/50 crowds, is that in these kinds of games, the "home" part of the crowd (which is usually 95% of the stadium in a normal Home team's stadium) will visibly stand up and cheer both teams when they score, unlike when you play in the Home Team's stadium the "Home" (95%) part of the crowd will only stand up and cheer when the home team scores. If when you change the stadium to another team's home stadium, the home team will get chants and audio cheers more than the away team, but conversely, in a neutral site game, the away team will get "boos" when they do something its fans wouldn't like, like going for it on 4th and long deep in their own territory.

What this reveals is that making a game a neutral site game, even if that's just switching to another team's Home stadium, seems to affect a lot about the crowds, both audibly and visibly. More importantly, I have observed that the designated neutral site stadiums, typically with 50/50 split crowds, like conf title games, bowl games or Florida-Georgia, CU-CSU, etc are actually glitched when it comes to the crowds because in NCAA 06, in regular home games or in neutral site games, if you study the crowd reactions, you'll notice that the "away" fans in the "away" sections of the crowd never visibly stand up and cheer when their team scores. This translates to neutral site games and leads to a glitch because in bowl games, conf title games, etc they split the crowd colors 50/50 in the stadium but yet the whole crowd (both sides of the stadium) are programmed to both stand up and cheer as one when either team scores.

In 50/50 split crowd neutral site games like bowl games, the glitch is that both sides of the stadium's fans always stand up and cheer when either team scores. So it's not as though you can get the away half of the stadium to cheer when the away team scores and the home half of the stadium to cheer when the home team scores. In the neutral site stadiums, it's programmed so that both sides (the entire crowd) always stands up and cheer when either team scores, but this looks wrong in stadiums that the crowd is split 50/50 because for it to be a true 50/50 split stadium game, the away fans would need to stand up and cheer and they don't. With the away team's fans not standing up and cheering, the only thing EA could do in neutral site stadiums is program the whole crowd to stand up and cheer when either team scores even though that looks wrong since the crowd is split 50/50. But when you play in another team's home stadium, there are no visible 50/50 split team colors in the crowd, so with 95% of the crowd standing and cheers when either team scores, this looks better as a non-split crowd neutral site game. And in situations when both teams have the same base colors, it looks perfect.

What this means is that it's important that we are able to edit team crowd colors to make neutral site crowds look even better (since 50/50 split crowds are glitched) which we can do by editing the TCRP value, which is in the TEAM Table in a Dynasty save and it's in the Create-A-School save file. This TCRP value is essentially a team ID # that sets the colors of its fans in the crowd. So it can change a team's crowd colors to another team's crowd colors if you change a team's TCRP value to another team's default TCRP value, which will make your team's fans have another team's default colors in the crowd when you play. So in neutral site 50/50 split crowds, you can edit the away team's crowd colors to be the same as the home team's crowd color, so there won't be a 50/50 color split anymore since in designated neutral site stadiums it's programmed for the whole stadium to stand and cheer at once. You can essentially fix the glitch in designated neutral site stadiums, eliminating the 50/50 split crowds by changing the TCRP value of the away team to be either the home team's or a less contrasting color.

I am releasing this code as a .pnach cheat file to be used in PCSX2. Using the .pnach file locks in your selection no matter what stadium you choose to play in. The address in the .pnach file can be accessed via cheat engine as a single-byte address for PCSX2 versions 1.6 or below. For PCSX2 1.7, it would need to be converted to a pointer to be used in cheat engine. This .pnach code is a good starting point for my code releases. Some codes like this one work as a .pnach cheat file for PCSX2, while many other codes would have to be accessed inside cheat engine to work correctly.

F9D574EF.7z

(496 Bytes) Downloaded 81 times

Instructions : Place the .pnach file in the "cheats" folder inside PCSX2, select "Enable cheats" inside PCSX2.

[minotauri]

Among the plethora of new discoveries we've unlocked through hex editing, I did find out how to REMOVE conferences during dynasty play!

It was actually rather stupidly easy.

You basically just change League LGID to 1 in CONF for the conference you want to get rid of. Then change the teams in TEAM to the conference CGID/DGID you want to move them too. But here's the part that you have to do. You need to move a team, any team, to the old conference that you are removing from FBS. In this case, I just put a random FCS team or set of teams in there.

So, basically the game used to hang or crash when I tried this in the past because I did not have any teams in the WAC (CGID: 14), but through dumb what if experimentation this week, I found out that all I had to do was move any team to the WAC, and it works!

I actually ended up moving the MAC and WAC down to FCS, so I only have 9 conferences, and 1 independents right now in my League of 120 teams. 5 x 14 power conferences, 4 x 12 G4 conferences (American, MAC-USA, Mt West, Sun Belt), and 2 independents (Notre Dame and UMass)

[Harry97]

Among the plethora of new discoveries we've unlocked through hex editing

What other discoveries have you unlocked through hex editing? I think we'd all be interested to hear about that.

I did find out how to REMOVE conferences during dynasty play!

It was actually rather stupidly easy.

You basically just change League LGID to 1 in CONF for the conference you want to get rid of. Then change the teams in TEAM to the conference CGID/DGID you want to move them too. But here's the part that you have to do. You need to move a team, any team, to the old conference that you are removing from FBS. In this case, I just put a random FCS team or set of teams in there.

So, basically the game used to hang or crash when I tried this in the past because I did not have any teams in the WAC (CGID: 14), but

through dumb what if experimentation this week

I've done a ton of what if experimentation. You're chasing dreams with your discoveries minotauri and I really appreciate what you're up to and hearing about these success reports.

I actually ended up moving the MAC and WAC down to FCS, so I only have 9 conferences, and 1 independents right now in my League of 120 teams. 5 x 14 power conferences, 4 x 12 G4 conferences (American, MAC-USA, Mt West, Sun Belt), and 2 independents (Notre Dame and UMass)

That's very interesting. So in the TEAM.csv you took those FCS teams (I'm calling them 1AA because that's what they are called in NCAA 06) listed there that are essentially "in the background" within dynasty and you put one of them in your removed conference, because there has to be at least 1 team in every conference or it crashes. But then what happens when you simulate through the season? Does the 1AA team that you put into a "removed" conference end up getting ranked and competing in 1A for bowls? Or is there another field and value that makes them ineligible for competition in the 1A rankings even with them in a "removed" 1A conference? I know if you don't give a 1A team a schedule and a team finishes 0-0, they end up in the Top 25.

Also, does that 1AA team count against the amount of teams you can have in a working dynasty? And is 120 teams still the max you can get to work in a season? Have you tried deleting some of the FCS teams from the TEAM.csv in an effort to add more teams beyond the 120 team limit?

[minotauri]

I've done a ton of what if experimentation. You're chasing dreams with your discoveries minotauri and I really appreciate what you're up to and hearing about these success reports.

That's very interesting. So in the TEAM.csv you took those FCS teams (I'm calling them 1AA because that's what they are called in NCAA 06) listed there that are essentially "in the background" within dynasty and you put one of them in your removed conference, because there has to be at least 1 team in every conference or it crashes. But then what happens when you simulate through the season? Does the 1AA team that you put into a "removed" conference end up getting ranked and competing in 1A for bowls? Or is there another field and value that makes them ineligible for competition in the 1A rankings even with them in a "removed" 1A conference? I know if you don't give a 1A team a schedule and a team finishes 0-0, they end up in the Top 25.

Also, does that 1AA team count against the amount of teams you can have in a working dynasty? And is 120 teams still the max you can get to work in a season? Have you tried deleting some of the FCS teams from the TEAM.csv in an effort to add more teams beyond the 120 team limit?

Yes, I moved 1AA teams to fill in at least one spot for the teams I removed from a conference. It does not rank or do anything with them during the dynasty. This is because there is a column called TTYP in TEAM db that controls which league they are in. 0 = 1A (FBS) and 1 = 1AA (FCS). These must be changed and equal to 119 or 120 total teams in 1A otherwise the game either hangs or performs erratically.

We are actively looking at ways to push the league size to 127 teams with mixed-success, but we potentially have a few options to go test out in the future, with hopefully minimal disturbances to the rest of the database (i.e. reducing player last names length, or reducing players per team down by a couple players, or combinations of both, or something else to reduce the database size to make up for adding more teams and their associated players)

[Harry97]

Yes, I moved 1AA teams to fill in at least one spot for the teams I removed from a conference. It does not rank or do anything with them during the dynasty. This is because there is a column called TTYP in TEAM db that controls which league they are in. 0 = 1A (FBS) and 1 = 1AA (FCS). These must be changed and equal to 119 or 120 total teams in 1A otherwise the game either hangs or performs erratically.

We are actively looking at ways to push the league size to 127 teams with mixed-success, but we potentially have a few options to go test out in the future, with hopefully minimal disturbances to the rest of the database (i.e. reducing player last names length, or reducing players per team down by a couple players, or combinations of both, or something else to reduce the database size to make up for adding more teams and their associated players)

Reducing player last names length by 1 or 2 characters would have the added benefit of making it so that you don't get those longer last names that end up squished (narrow) on the back of players jerseys. The weird thing about that, as I'm sure you noticed, is that sometimes longer last names aren't squished and narrowed and sometimes they are. I'm not sure exactly what causes that problem, but it always bothers me when I see a squished last name on the back of a player's jersey. I thought maybe there's certain letters that cause long last names to be squished or perhaps it's certain body type %s that cause it. I thought maybe there's some way to hack the name plate formatting so that doesn't happen with longer last names. I would suggest trying to reduce player last names by only 1 character first, and seeing if that eliminates all the squished last names on the back of jerseys. That alone might not be enough to allow you to add 127 teams, but then combined with eliminating a couple of players per team, that might be enough. I mean 2 players less per team would be about 250 more players. That's 4 teams right there. 3 less players per team would probably allow you to add 6 or 7 more teams, plus the 1 less character on last names. If you can get all 127 teams in a Dynasty that would be fantastic.

[minotauri]

Yes, I moved 1AA teams to fill in at least one spot for the teams I removed from a conference. It does not rank or do anything with them during the dynasty. This is because there is a column called TTYP in TEAM db that controls which league they are in. 0 = 1A (FBS) and 1 = 1AA (FCS). These must be changed and equal to 119 or 120 total teams in 1A otherwise the game either hangs or performs erratically.

We are actively looking at ways to push the league size to 127 teams with mixed-success, but we potentially have a few options to go test out in the future, with hopefully minimal disturbances to the rest of the database (i.e. reducing player last names length, or reducing players per team down by a couple players, or combinations of both, or something else to reduce the database size to make up for adding more teams and their associated players)

Reducing player last names length by 1 or 2 characters would have the added benefit of making it so that you don't get those longer last names that end up squished (narrow) on the back of players jerseys. The weird thing about that, as I'm sure you noticed, is that sometimes longer last names aren't squished and narrowed and sometimes they are. I'm not sure exactly what causes that problem, but it always bothers me when I see a squished last name on the back of a player's jersey. I thought maybe there's certain letters that cause long last names to be squished or perhaps it's certain body type %s that cause it. I thought maybe there's some way to hack the name plate formatting so that doesn't happen with longer last names. I would suggest trying to reduce player last names by only 1 character first, and seeing if that eliminates all the squished last names on the back of jerseys. That alone might not be enough to allow you to add 127 teams, but then combined with eliminating a couple of players per team, that might be enough. I mean 2 players less per team would be about 250 more players. That's 4 teams right there. 3 less players per team would probably allow you to add 6 or 7 more teams, plus the 1 less character on last names. If you can get all 127 teams in a Dynasty that would be fantastic.

The modded strmdata.db file that I am using in the NCAA NEXT actually has a last name character limit of 10 since my updated names database only has 10 character max on names. So this is already implemented into the mod we are working on. The next step, which JDHalfrack was off and on working on, is completely removing the columns that store the remaining letters to reduce to overall size of the entire database save file.

[minotauri]

Converting Dynasty Saves & Advanced League Restructuring -- and introducing my fantasy roster generator

As some of you are aware, I tinker with my league setup quite often in dynasty mode, and have been doing it for years now. More recently, I've gone quite a bit more extreme in my league setups and forgoing the traditional layouts of the NCAA 06 game, by adding 14-team conferences and other things, as mentioned in the previous post.

In most cases, simply editing the TEAM database with the correct CGID and DGID and TTYP values will move teams around. Then you'd follow up with TSWP databased edits to swap teams around. This only works if you keep the same league structure.

As a refresher or for those new to this:
CGID = Conf ID
DGID = Division ID (15 is no divisions)
TTYP = Team Type (0=FBS, 1=FCS)
CGID/DGID values can be round in the CONF and DIVI tables in dynasty save.

But, let's say you want to add a new team from FCS or several of them. How about adding a create-a-team to the dynasty IN THE MIDDLE OF long dynasty?

It's not as simple as making some tweaks to the existing save file. Of course, try it first, and see if it works. If it leads to issues, maybe you need to do something out of the box a bit.

This is how I added Liberty as the 120th team to my league last year and more recently added North Dakota State, a created team, to my existing dynasty save file that was already 2 years in.

I made a wiki page months ago that covers this already, so I'll just link it here: https://github.com/h4wduk3n/NCAA06Next/ ... to-another

But the gist of it all, is you create a brand new save with the teams you want in it. Then you transfer a ton of data from your existing save over to it, and restructure the new save with the league alignment you want. And voila. its done and working!


Here's what my current dynasty league progression has looked like:

unknown.png (267.62 KiB) Viewed 1341 times

One thing to note here is that PLAY, which stores the player rosters, may need to be revised to include players from a "new" team added to your dynasty, otherwise, they will have 0 players and start from scratch. Not a horrible idea, and potentially fun. To help combat this, I did create a Fantasy Player Generator, that could help create a fictional roster for teams in Dynasty mode.

To use it, you input the parameters in the first page, and then click on the DYNASTY export page, copy and paste and add it to your final PLAY table. You will probably have to delete the PGID range for the team that you are removing from the league setup though! You can find the PGID range from the roster generator.