Interesting find while adding portraits to the game

[Jim825]

I made a rather interesting discovery in my attempt to add portraits to the game and I thought I'd pass this along to others. I had early success adding portraits for the classic teams, but eventually got to a point where the game crashed on me after updating one of the teams.

After trying many things, cursing, scratching my head, cursing some more, walking away, cursing some more, and then taking a few days off, I went back to look at why one version of my portrait file would work, but another would not.

I finally found out that the game started crashing AFTER I changed the portrait for Mickey Mantle (portrait ID 2653). I found that if my portrait file used the default EA portrait for The Mick that the game ran fine (even as I continued to add more portraits). If I changed portrait #2653 to use a different portrait (e.g. AlexTony's portrait in his Classic Portrait pack), the game would crash.

When I looked in the portrait.big file using the BigGUI tool, I found that there are two entries with the same name (but different offsets) that have a size of "1". These entries are named "a2653". There are no other entries with names like this.

As I said earlier, 2653 just happens to be the portrait ID for Mickey Mantle. These two a2653 entries are somehow tied to the portraits in the game (perhaps starting and ending offsets?), but they also rely on portrait 2653 containing EA's Mickey Mantle portrait.

I did some more testing and verified that a portrait file with 450 new classic portraits would work fine if I used the default EA Mickey Mantle portrait, but a portrait file with 350 new classic portraits WOULD NOT work if I changed the Mantle portrait (even though there were 100 less new classic portraits in the file).

The lesson here is simple: DO NOT CHANGE THE MICKEY MANTLE PORTRAIT AT LOCATION 2653!

You can assign a different portrait ID to Mickey Mantle in the '53 or '61 Yankees rosters with MVPEdit, and you can add another portrait. You just can't change the default one. The only downside to using a different portrait for Mantle is that you won't hear his name announced in the game (the audio is keyed on the portrait ID).

I've been "talking" with AlexTony a lot recently, and when I told him about this discovery, he remembers running into the same issue when he changed the default Mantle portrait, but he hadn't been able to determine why making that change caused the game to crash.

I had posted a thread a few days ago saying that my quest to add portraits for all of the Classic teams had come to an end because the game kept crashing. I've now determined that this was caused because I had changed the default Mantle portrait. I'm now back to adding portraits again (I've got 21 teams done so far). This doesn't mean that I won't eventually reach a limit, but it does mean that I'm able to start moving forward again. :D

[AlexTony]

very good professor :!:

[mflv]

When you're finished adding portraits, would there be any way of uploading the portraits.big file to this website so we can all use it?

[Jim825]

When you're finished adding portraits, would there be any way of uploading the portraits.big file to this website so we can all use it?

I uploaded a portrait file last year for MVP2004 Total Classics and I plan to do the same for MVP2005 Total Classics this year.

I'll also be uploading an updated roster file as well, as I've had to go through and resolve portrait ID conflicts (i.e. remove cases where multiple players were assigned the same portrait ID).

[danc]

Fantastic find!!

Let us know when you get this thing finished.

It will be a great additon to classics.

Thanks for your hard work.