Total Classics 1962 --- 50 Years Ago .......

[stecropper]

Thanks Yankee4Life for those gracious comments and excellent review of TC62. Much appreciated.

112155 & Yankee4Life,

I have long been wanting to Synch up the '60s Mods with Strat-O-Matic Ratings since I too, like 112155, consider Strat-O-Matic the best at rating players attributes. Reason being is that Strat-O-Matics team of 4-5 baseball enthusiast dedicate some 1500+ hours to each season to rate the players in several categories and they do it from intensive research through box scores; magazine/newspaper articles; personal experience etc etc and not solely on Statistics. Then they gather around a table for almost a solid week to discuss and hash out their different opinions before coming to their final ratings for each player in each of those categories. I would have loved to have been sitting at that table with them during the '60s as I think I would have learned a lot more about the players of those years. Although, I purchased my 1st Strat-O-Matic board game in 1962 and again every year since through the late '70s so I think I know those players attributes fairly well from that.

Now what I do to "Strat-O-Maticize" the Classics is a fairly simple but tedious manual process. I focus on aligning my ratings within the ranges of Strat-O-Matics for each player & pitcher in the following categories:

Bunting; Steal Aggression; Baserunning; Speed; Fielding; Range; Throw Strength; Throw Accuracy; & Pickoff Move.

Strat-O-Matic has those basic same categories and they rate them in ranges such as AAA<->E; 1<->20, -6<->+6, 1<->15 etc etc.

So I do my normal Roster Building process including Importing from the Lahman Data Base; execute my Global Tweaks and even do my very intensive Individual Tweaks for each player/pitcher in those categories.

Then I export my MVPEdit .mbe file into the games data/database directory which creates the attrib.dat file which contains all those players/pitchers with their ratings in each category.

I then open that attrib.dat file as a .csv file into a spreadsheet and eliminate all but the 25 man roster players/pitchers from the Major League teams entries(rows).

I then create columns for each of those 9 rating categories above that I will align with Strat-O-Matic and go to the Strat-O-Matic game and input each of it's ratings for each individual player/pitcher in those respective columns.

I then move each of those columns next to it's relative MVP 2005 column such as Bunting.

I then sort (like in the Bunting example) all entries by 1st Strat-O-Matic rating and then 2nd by MVP 2005's rating.

I then have a very good picture of how all my assigned ratings from my Roster Building process line up with/compared to Strat-O-Matics and make adjustments accordingly with Strat-O-Matics being the rule/guide.

In some categories such as Fielding & Range I do this process indivdiually by position (in such all 2nd basemen together; etc etc) .........

Then I take this spreadsheet info and manually make all the adjustments to each individual player/pitcher in my MVPEdit .mbe file and then export to the game.

This process took me a little over a week for TC62 but to me it was very much worth the effort.

I actually was very surprised ( and pleased to find out) how close my ratings coming out of my normal Roster Building Process was to Strat-O-Matics. In the typical players/pitchers with a fair amount of playing time there typically was only a slight change to a rating if any at all but, of course, with some of the lessor used player/pitchers the changes were much more dramatic.

Knowing that ratings for such things as Throwing Arm Strength & Accuracy can seldom be accurate from using stats alone the Strat-O-Matic approach to me is the only way of getting this stuff as close to accurate as possible. That applies as well to those other categories I synched with Strat-O-Matics but perhaps to a lessor degree.

So no --- No formulas were used to Strat-O-Maticize TC62 as I personally believe no formula can do as good of job as the Strat-O-Matic guys do in my opinion (and I wrote all the formulas for MVPEdit so I truly believe that).

I do have plans to go back and Strat-O-Maticize the other '60s Mods in due time. I sincerely think the weeks plus effort is worth the gain.

Take Care,

Don

[Padres67]

Wow-that was a great deal of work. I really appreciate the extra effort Don, it really does make the game more accurate. I'm glad you are still in the modding business.

[kyleb]

Thanks so much for doing this. I posted a comment in the Mod Announcements thread, but that forum is a bit neglected. So here it is again:

"Just downloaded this, it looks great. However, there are many uncompressed files between models.big and portrait.big. If these don't cause crashes now, won't they cause crashes later? I've experienced results like that when using TiT to install updates to TC1964. Both 1962 and 1964 have 2727.fsh in portraits.big and have had nothing but trouble using TiT with 1964."

Thanks again for this!

[stecropper]

Hi Kyleb,

Thanks for your contribution to MVP 2012. I have just downloaded it and will fire it up shortly. I know it will be a fabulous mod enjoyed by many including myself. Thanks Again !

As far as your concern regarding uncompressed files in TC62 & TC64. Yes, there are uncompressed files in the models.big and then there is that sole 2727.fsh one in the portraits.big file. The ones in the models.big as well as the 2727 one in the portraits.big are entries that are not used for any of the Major League Teams or players represented in the Mod thus they will not cause any crashes when using this mod as it was intended and.or built for. Perhaps if you attempt to play a minor league game (which the game is not intended nor built for) you will experience a crash.

I use TiT extensively as well as it's predecessor the "Installer Thingy" and they seem to work fine for me. In fact you can export all those files out of models.big and then reinstall them with TiT or the "Installer Thingy" and they will compress each of them for you and same goes for that one 2727.fsh found in the portraits.big file. Or if you prefer just delete each of them.

Thanks Again,

Don

[kyleb]

Hi Kyleb,

Thanks for your contribution to MVP 2012. I have just downloaded it and will fire it up shortly. I know it will be a fabulous mod enjoyed by many including myself. Thanks Again !

As far as your concern regarding uncompressed files in TC62 & TC64. Yes, there are uncompressed files in the models.big and then there is that sole 2727.fsh one in the portraits.big file. The ones in the models.big as well as the 2727 one in the portraits.big are entries that are not used for any of the Major League Teams or players represented in the Mod thus they will not cause any crashes when using this mod as it was intended and.or built for. Perhaps if you attempt to play a minor league game (which the game is not intended nor built for) you will experience a crash.

I use TiT extensively as well as it's predecessor the "Installer Thingy" and they seem to work fine for me. In fact you can export all those files out of models.big and then reinstall them with TiT or the "Installer Thingy" and they will compress each of them for you and same goes for that one 2727.fsh found in the portraits.big file. Or if you prefer just delete each of them.

Thanks Again,

Don

Thanks for the guidance. That 2727.fsh file was a bug for me before; I couldn't get it to compress without Biggui crashing. So, I ended up deleting it out, exporting the remaining fsh files and reimporting them over a stock .big file. I did this for all of the files in 1964 and 1962 that I was having problems with and now everything seems to be working correctly. Previously, I had been unable to install any of Dennisjames' 1964 uniforms without TiT crashing, but I have them all properly installed now. Thanks so much!

And thanks for the kind words on MVP 12, I had a blast!

[kyleb]

I'd also like to add that the TC mods you and the other guys do are what finally convinced me to stop Xbox modding and start PC modding. Thanks again!