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Old Forum Index » Football Beta Testing » Football Beta Test Discussion » Notes on names, notes and numbers
celamantia
- Unlike baseball, player names can contain apostrophes. Some players will come with apostrophes generated by ABE's still-unnamed little brother. Of course, there is all kinds of potential for bugs where players have apostrophes in their name, so if you have one of these, keep a close eye on them.
- Unlike baseball, the name is divided into first name, last name, and a nickname. Last name is required, first and nick name are not. The restriction on naming players the same as another player is restricted to active players, not retired ones, so once Joe Awesome retires, you can change another player to Joe Awesome.
- Nicknames are not always displayed; when they are displayed they will automatically have quotes around them. Note that some of the first names in the master database are actually nicknames, I've decided to leave them that way as some players are likely to have nicknames that are so pervasive that they become the nickname.
- Initial draft players will not have uniform numbers; college draft players will inherit the numbers they wore in college. At the beginning of each game, the sim will make sure that all numbers are unique, so if you do nothing all of your players will get numbered properly. Uniform numbers are used onscreen in Dynasty Vision to identify players (and internally to pass fatigue information to the Dynasty Vision display).
- Games are played a quarter at a time. If you change your player's uniform number "during" a game, the game will still show the number he started the game with.
Notes on names, notes and numbers
July 18, 2010 at 07:24PM View BBCode
I haven't seen any name change activity... I'm rather surprised. That's probably a good thing for now as I'm about to wipe and regenerate the players. But there are a couple of notes I'd like to point out:- Unlike baseball, player names can contain apostrophes. Some players will come with apostrophes generated by ABE's still-unnamed little brother. Of course, there is all kinds of potential for bugs where players have apostrophes in their name, so if you have one of these, keep a close eye on them.
- Unlike baseball, the name is divided into first name, last name, and a nickname. Last name is required, first and nick name are not. The restriction on naming players the same as another player is restricted to active players, not retired ones, so once Joe Awesome retires, you can change another player to Joe Awesome.
- Nicknames are not always displayed; when they are displayed they will automatically have quotes around them. Note that some of the first names in the master database are actually nicknames, I've decided to leave them that way as some players are likely to have nicknames that are so pervasive that they become the nickname.
- Initial draft players will not have uniform numbers; college draft players will inherit the numbers they wore in college. At the beginning of each game, the sim will make sure that all numbers are unique, so if you do nothing all of your players will get numbered properly. Uniform numbers are used onscreen in Dynasty Vision to identify players (and internally to pass fatigue information to the Dynasty Vision display).
- Games are played a quarter at a time. If you change your player's uniform number "during" a game, the game will still show the number he started the game with.
bpearly69
July 18, 2010 at 09:57PM View BBCode
looks good, so your wiping all the players? starting it over again? any update on when games will start?
celamantia
July 18, 2010 at 10:01PM View BBCode
I was hoping to do it tonight, but I am rapidly running out of "tonight".
Hamilton2
July 19, 2010 at 03:01AM View BBCode
Thanks for the updates on this, Chris. I changed some numbers, but forgot to test the name change feature. Keep up the good work.
celamantia
July 19, 2010 at 03:09PM View BBCode
I put in a pass to automatically assign uniform numbers after the draft; numbers can of course still be changed.
happy
Let me know when its ready to restart.
July 19, 2010 at 03:46PM View BBCode
I havent been checking up on this much because I thought it was getting reset (which sounds like im right)Let me know when its ready to restart.
celamantia
July 19, 2010 at 03:49PM View BBCode
It's been reset; these are the players we will be playing our first games with.
bpearly69
July 19, 2010 at 05:46PM View BBCode
the first games are starting in a few days? just want to know because I am leaving the 23rd, and will be gone until august 3rd, ill try and keep updated as much as possible
happy
also, just FYI, putting my top QB's "best postion" as holder is kinda lame.
You gotta put some sort of weight on the positions. Like, a WR wont be listed as a "kick returner" unless he is a significantly better kick returner than WR. I would even expect my #3 WR to be listed as "WR" unless he is an exceptional (like #1 in the league) quality kick/punt returner.
and no one should be a "holder" as their primary position...
July 19, 2010 at 05:50PM View BBCode
I guess coach prefs arent up, yes?also, just FYI, putting my top QB's "best postion" as holder is kinda lame.
You gotta put some sort of weight on the positions. Like, a WR wont be listed as a "kick returner" unless he is a significantly better kick returner than WR. I would even expect my #3 WR to be listed as "WR" unless he is an exceptional (like #1 in the league) quality kick/punt returner.
and no one should be a "holder" as their primary position...
happy
Also, the 15 character max sort of works for the players, but ive gotten errors there too by putting in 15 characters that the game cant identify (for example the "heart" from the arial character map. it shows up as #9370 or something, so if you put 15 of them in, it ends up with 75 characters.
July 19, 2010 at 06:10PM View BBCode
also I get truncation errors when trying to put ridiculously long names into the team name.Also, the 15 character max sort of works for the players, but ive gotten errors there too by putting in 15 characters that the game cant identify (for example the "heart" from the arial character map. it shows up as #9370 or something, so if you put 15 of them in, it ends up with 75 characters.
celamantia
Will have some basic ones up soon, maybe not in time for the first game.
"Best role" was originally meant for those positions that split into multiple roles, like RB to HB and FB or S to SS and FS. I expanded it to help identify special-teams players. Perhaps rather than calling it "Best role" I can call it "Alt Role" and show the highest role OTHER than the primary position so nobody has their primary role there, and if your best alternate role isn't within a half-letter-grade or so it'll just show as blank.
This can also be handled, as you say, by adjusting the relative ratings for the special-teams roles. But "Best role" is not a player's main position, it's just a shortcut to looking at the player card to look for special teams players and fullbacks and such.
[Edited on 7-19-2010 by celamantia]
July 19, 2010 at 06:15PM View BBCode
Originally posted by happy
I guess coach prefs arent up, yes?
Will have some basic ones up soon, maybe not in time for the first game.
also, just FYI, putting my top QB's "best postion" as holder is kinda lame.
"Best role" was originally meant for those positions that split into multiple roles, like RB to HB and FB or S to SS and FS. I expanded it to help identify special-teams players. Perhaps rather than calling it "Best role" I can call it "Alt Role" and show the highest role OTHER than the primary position so nobody has their primary role there, and if your best alternate role isn't within a half-letter-grade or so it'll just show as blank.
This can also be handled, as you say, by adjusting the relative ratings for the special-teams roles. But "Best role" is not a player's main position, it's just a shortcut to looking at the player card to look for special teams players and fullbacks and such.
[Edited on 7-19-2010 by celamantia]
celamantia
It is often going to be the case that a player that excels at his natural position may excel at a special teams position, since there is some overlap in the ratings used to determine the overall grade.
July 19, 2010 at 06:26PM View BBCode
Another thing we can do, if Holder is really too trivial to identify, is remove H from the list of potential "best roles" and let people look for decent holders on the player cards.It is often going to be the case that a player that excels at his natural position may excel at a special teams position, since there is some overlap in the ratings used to determine the overall grade.
celamantia
Fortunately, it looks like none of the special characters actually broke the display, although I need to see how you got away without last names on a couple. I should probably filter some of the more "egregious" characters like underscores. Thanks for giving it a workout!
[Edited on 7-19-2010 by celamantia]
July 19, 2010 at 06:39PM View BBCode
Originally posted by happy
also I get truncation errors when trying to put ridiculously long names into the team name.
Also, the 15 character max sort of works for the players, but ive gotten errors there too by putting in 15 characters that the game cant identify (for example the "heart" from the arial character map. it shows up as #9370 or something, so if you put 15 of them in, it ends up with 75 characters.
Fortunately, it looks like none of the special characters actually broke the display, although I need to see how you got away without last names on a couple. I should probably filter some of the more "egregious" characters like underscores. Thanks for giving it a workout!
[Edited on 7-19-2010 by celamantia]
celamantia
July 19, 2010 at 06:44PM View BBCode
What I want is for it to be impossible to actually "break" the page while still giving the Football version of the OGL room to be creative.
celamantia
This may be a bug in the Java routines I am using to encode and decode strings. It should be stored in the database as a heart and be converted to ⒚ on output but it's getting double-encoded somewhere, or a mismatch between the Web server encoding and the database encoding.
July 19, 2010 at 09:24PM View BBCode
Originally posted by happy
Also, the 15 character max sort of works for the players, but ive gotten errors there too by putting in 15 characters that the game cant identify (for example the "heart" from the arial character map. it shows up as #9370 or something, so if you put 15 of them in, it ends up with 75 characters.
This may be a bug in the Java routines I am using to encode and decode strings. It should be stored in the database as a heart and be converted to ⒚ on output but it's getting double-encoded somewhere, or a mismatch between the Web server encoding and the database encoding.
tworoosters
[Edited on 7-19-2010 by tworoosters]
July 19, 2010 at 11:12PM View BBCode
Players added from waivers are all assigned #0, I currently have four #0 on my team.[Edited on 7-19-2010 by tworoosters]
celamantia
July 20, 2010 at 12:03AM View BBCode
If you do not assign them numbers, they will be assigned numbers if they are on the active roster when the next game starts.
happy
Im surprised none of this broke the screen. Impressive.
You should give league options for naming limitations. Some leagues would be just fine with names like "Hector 1/4" but other more traditional owners would expect a first and last name, where the names are capitalized and only letters and possibly apostrophes and dashes.
[Edited on 7-20-2010 by happy]
July 20, 2010 at 09:05PM View BBCode
i just put a space in the last name area. On the plus side, "space space" wont let me double name people. It effectively gets counted as nothing once its actually stored, so I cant just create a bunch of different players with the same name by putting spaces on the end.Im surprised none of this broke the screen. Impressive.
You should give league options for naming limitations. Some leagues would be just fine with names like "Hector 1/4" but other more traditional owners would expect a first and last name, where the names are capitalized and only letters and possibly apostrophes and dashes.
[Edited on 7-20-2010 by happy]
celamantia
I need to check that. There's supposed to be a "trim" applied to that that removes excess white space on either side of the name, but I may have missed it in a key spot.
That seems to confirm that trim is working, I just missed it somewhere.
Even regular names won't always fit that spec. Consider a last name like "von Frankenstein". But we are using ISO-8859-1 rather than Unicode (which is probably why the heart failed, now that I think about it) so the character set is limited; I could effectively filter out "graphic" characters in names for most leagues and enable them for more "theme-y" leagues.
July 20, 2010 at 09:20PM View BBCode
Originally posted by happy
i just put a space in the last name area.
I need to check that. There's supposed to be a "trim" applied to that that removes excess white space on either side of the name, but I may have missed it in a key spot.
On the plus side, "space space" wont let me double name people. It effectively gets counted as nothing once its actually stored
That seems to confirm that trim is working, I just missed it somewhere.
Im surprised none of this broke the screen. Impressive.
You should give league options for naming limitations. Some leagues would be just fine with names like "Hector 1/4" but other more traditional owners would expect a first and last name, where the names are capitalized and only letters and possibly apostrophes and dashes.
Even regular names won't always fit that spec. Consider a last name like "von Frankenstein". But we are using ISO-8859-1 rather than Unicode (which is probably why the heart failed, now that I think about it) so the character set is limited; I could effectively filter out "graphic" characters in names for most leagues and enable them for more "theme-y" leagues.
happy
July 21, 2010 at 04:27PM View BBCode
yeah, but I figured names like WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW might cause issues becuase the letters are so wide.
celamantia
- Player names must contain at least one letter and may contain letters, spaces, or the characters - (dash), ' (apostrophe), , (comma), . (period), or ` (grave accent). Digits are not allowed, but Roman numerals are. (If I have missed a character that may reasonably be expected in a football player's name, please let me know.)
- Team names can have the same characters as player names, and also may have numeric digits and the exclamation point, ampersand, and pound sign.
- Team names may no longer be duplicates within the same league This check is case-insensitive, so the RAIDERS cannot be in the same league as the Raiders. Team name checks are done both on initial team creation and on name changes.
I've left myself a hook in the code to make it relatively easy to add custom additional symbols for specific leagues, although I have not gone so far as to actually add that feature yet.
July 26, 2010 at 05:05AM View BBCode
The naming issues have been fixed; I have reverted the team and players to "normal" names in case some of the more unusual names (which should no longer be possible) are what's been causing the attempt to start the games up to break. Specifically:- Player names must contain at least one letter and may contain letters, spaces, or the characters - (dash), ' (apostrophe), , (comma), . (period), or ` (grave accent). Digits are not allowed, but Roman numerals are. (If I have missed a character that may reasonably be expected in a football player's name, please let me know.)
- Team names can have the same characters as player names, and also may have numeric digits and the exclamation point, ampersand, and pound sign.
- Team names may no longer be duplicates within the same league This check is case-insensitive, so the RAIDERS cannot be in the same league as the Raiders. Team name checks are done both on initial team creation and on name changes.
I've left myself a hook in the code to make it relatively easy to add custom additional symbols for specific leagues, although I have not gone so far as to actually add that feature yet.
CCondardo
~Corey
July 26, 2010 at 01:04PM View BBCode
Just tested out a name change and it worked flawlessly! Everything looks good Chris.~Corey
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