von Ozbourne

Ah I haven't played in years, but I still have a fully customized version of Wayne Gretzky's Overtime Hockey sitting in a box in my brother's attic. Even painted up about half a dozen of the teams we had with accurate gear, before I started trying to buy the rest online and got lazy. [the model paint would tent to flake off after extended use anyway] Although I only printed out the numbers, names and patches on full uncut sticker sheets that i can cut out, I totally would make my teams look like that custom Vasilevskiy you have there. [Although our rosters featured guys like Winnipeg's Selanne and Essensa; Pittsburgh's Lemieux and Jagr; Boston's Neely and Oates; and Montreal's Damphousse and Roy.]

Actually that is kind of the thing, there really isn't any specific order for the teams when you use this tool. [full disclosure, I do the photos last now, so I don't really use this method much anymore] The way this method works is that when you copy a player's photo into your ROM using the sprite editor, you copy that player's name into the spot that corresponds with the offset. [circled in the first image] <EDIT> I keep NOSE open to make sure that I am putting the photos in the same order as I have the players listed in the roster section. But the actual order that the photos and players are related can also be checked in the hex code. Player 0000 denotes the staring goalie and doesn't like being changed. It always glitches out on me whenever I try to put him in a different order. He ends up as the last guy in the rotation regardless. In this example I had 20 skaters and 3 goalies and the net minders were the first images i pasted in, but the last three player photos/cards shown where the backups and the starter. But in any case, the red circled offsets in the original post pictures is where the offsets and player names get aligned. To be honest, I messed with them in a couple cases and the player photos don't even need to be in any particular order, just as long as the offset number listed next to a particular player's name matches the offset of the desired photo of the player who owns that name. Or in some cases, multiple people who share a name, so you will have to make sure if you want that or not. </EDIT> The main use for the spreadsheet I find is to change things around after your players have already been set up. For example: A pre-season vs a trade-deadline version of the same ROM. Rather than moving photos around, you can just click to re-point a picture to a player that was traded to another team.

You sparked a memory and I literally got the "I've seen things" expression from this one. Power and will cannot be underestimated, I've done this. Once graduating from pencil and graph paper, I made six seasons worth of spreadsheets for a table hockey league between my brother and me. Had a dozen different teams for that game, printed out stickers of individual names and numbers on their backs. By the last season I'd gotten sophisticated enough to link different sheets, automatically adding up individual game points into a season total and then copying that data over to a full team totals, team player lists and overall stats leader list. Now the question is, does that old backup drive still work...

I did this with Blades of Steel back in the day. In hindsight, I'm glad that game doesn't have individual player stats. Well perhaps, but to compile the game stats and link game sheet data to team calendars and player leader boards and team stats and rankings... Would would almost take longer to do that than it would to play the games.

That's awesome. Hmm, might have to see how this one works if I can borrow the base for a project. Problem I'm running into with the 34-team one is that there are a number of other instability and glitch issues I've encountered as well, and things such as the player trades not working with the non-original-26 teams.

Curious. Do you mean expand the number of teams in a season? Only asking because in experimenting with the 34-team mod, I was able to set the schedule for any team in season mode, change the divisional alignment as far as season standings and change which playoff bracket they belong to when the playoffs start [because weirdly that is a separate bit]. The problems I'm running into however is when I try to include any of the additional eight teams. And while I can change the number of teams in each division, there is no room for the code to exceed 26 and I can't seem to find where to set the number of teams that make the playoffs in each conference. And worst of all, while I can pick whatever teams I want to show up in each division, as soon as you select to start the playoffs, the game freezes. Annoyingly, simply changing the playoff brackets to not include any of the additional eight teams seems to eliminate the freezing issue. Beyond the starting lineup player photos for those additional teams being located in a separate section of the ROM, can't seem to place what is confusing the game so much.

Ah. Clever and the portmanteau something I can get behind. Although as for the plant, I've never heard of them before, but to me the etymology of the word makes me think of the way Brits shorten words via either dropping or just not bothering to pronounce letters. Like it started out as "Whut's that growin' by ya fence theyah? Et looks like ah grasSy 'EDGE mate." And of course, far be it from me to discourage the use of a developer alias...

Sorry, had one of those "Oh! Yeah!" moments when i read this. We encountered this before and figured it out on Ultramagnus' thread a while back. There are in fact two different sets of team ratings. [it gets even messier if you were using the 34-team version.] Funny things is, I usually default to line changes on, so I had the opposite problem before coming across this. Never caught that line changes on/off was what determined which set got used. Oh yeah, have to ask. Who's Sedge?

California is indeed South and West of Manitoba, but I wouldn't really consider Seattle very South. And Houston is actually East of Winnipeg longitudinally... Piss taking aside, you might be alright with Pacific, I mean if the NHL can put the expansion Vancouver Canucks into the Eastern Conference their first couple of seasons, Texas is close enough. Blame that giant dead zone that west of the 100th meridian [where the great plains begin] for the poor options of population dense hubs. Although to be honest, I was always partial to the divisions being named after prominent figures, despite the vanity of it.

Took me a bit to remember what you were talking about. You mean flags/banners eh? Yeah there are a lot of repeated tiles on those screens in the name of saving bytes, so in that case I think I just imported a full mockup into another window and then copied the matching tiles over whatever they were replacing. The good news is that the hex code, that sets the arrangement of the tiles for main menu background and overlay and all of the menu screens, is usually found after each of the graphical assets. Can take a fare chunk of time going through and reconfiguring that, but it does open up the options.

Aah. I was wondering where you got those. Curious though, have you conducted any experiments with 95 music too? I've been seeing how far I can go with changing every asset in the game, but haven't figured anything out with the sound yet. Figure that should be something to try too.

I'd noticed that wboy's tutorial mentioned that the colours are also referenced for elements on the main menu screen [and I think the pre-game perhaps?] but in testing it turned out that as long as you don't change the default white and black, the remaining six grey scale values can be any colour you want and you won't mess up anything else. I've done this with other things, kind of jealous that I didn't think to try with realistic player photos myself. @DeterminedApathy Just a heads up in case you haven't tested it yet, but as for NHL 95, turns out that the photo palette behaves the exact same way. Just a shame that EA ditched the player cards that year and you can only have your awesome photos for the starting lineup.

Not being familiar with IceHL, my first thought was if this related to the IHL [1945-2001] [quickly clear it was not] Have to say, the colour photos are impressive. I was a bit curious where the rosters came from until I saw an Alaska Husky player name Calvin Broadus. ....hmm, wait a minute.

When you are playing around in NOSE and realize this must be a good omen. Anyway, just giving this a bump to highlight the completion of the series. Because now it is a series. Olympic Hockey - 2022 Beijing-N.bin Olympic Hockey - 2022 Beijing-M.bin Olympic Hockey - 2022 Beijing-W.bin Updated descriptions and download in the original post

Don't know is this will help, but I have noticed something similar to this occur when I was copying or importing sprites within some games. My problem seemed to be related to what colours were being displayed when the copy/pasting occurred. Importing is just a matter of making sure that the colours are different enough so there is no misinterpretation on tile molester's part when it chooses what colours to use. Copy/pasting is weird because you would think that it would just directly swap the #4 colour in one game for the #4 colour in the other game, but I came across an issue when the colour palette had a dark grey [R096/G096/B096] and a dark green [R096/G128/B096]. For some reason, both the grey and the green were being interpreted as grey, and it was messing things up. I've also encountered this when the transparency colour is either the same, or too similar to one of the visible colours. The NHL games have this problem a lot since the transparency colour is typically ice blue, so if a sprite uses a colour that is close to that shade, it ends up disappearing when you paste it. This happens a lot in the case where the first/transparency colour is black and there is another instance of black in the palette, everything you paste just ends up as that first instance of black. This is why I usually use bright magenta, or sometimes its inverse of bright green, as my transparent since it should not come up in a regular sprite. In some cases, I've even gone as far as to change the current colour palettes to this, just to make sure that there is no chance of misinterpretation. Sorry for the long reply, hope this helps.

Update complete. No more "Bruins" outlier. New ROM in the main post.

Sunuva.... You know, I'd forgotten all about that. And that's the kind of thing that really bugs me too. ... V1.1 will probably be incoming sometime tomorrow.

After spending a lengthy amount of slow progress on some bigger projects, [plus you know, that whole "being a responsible adult" thing] it was nice to take a break and bang out an Adam Savage style "One Day Build" [in that it actually took two days]. Figured now that it's done, I might as well share it. Thanks to @Deckard for the suggestion on this one, been a while since I did anything with NHL96 and it was fun to revisit it. The premise: Take NHL96 and give it an NHL97 roster update. Effectively making it closer to season end rosters. Fix art as applicable. Which makes this, Not a lot of changes, but the most obvious is, out goes Quebec, in goes Colorado. [sorry to see you go, but it is more historically accurate this way] All the other logos were mainly borrowed from '97 for consistency, although there are a few other fixes that, in theory, shouldn't haven't needed fixing... It's a little thing. Not so little on the other hand... Now, two caveats: 1. Due to how the team positions are hard coded, to avoid a giant compounding mess, Colorado simply adopts Quebec's old place in the North East Division. 2. Due to NHL97 having more memory space allocated to rosters than NHL96, I've had to cut one or two players per team to get in under the free bytes limit. Luckily there is no pre-game preamble anymore [something I would not say under any other circumstance], so I could delete the arena names and free up some extra bytes to avoid having to cut even more players. Thanks to @Deckard again for making the tough choices. UPDATE: Switching to Version 1.1 to eliminate the odd "Bruins" inconsistency. NHL 96 ~ Playoff Edition V1.1.bin NHL 96 ~ Playoff Wide Edition v1.2.bin

Ah. Yeah that's fine, we all start somewhere. To be fair, I find that the 96-98 games are a lot more complicated than the 92-95 ones anyway, so you don't want to start learning there. Unfortunately we don't have any A-level hackers around here who find cracking open 96-98 - like others have done with 93-95 - to be as worthwhile, but at least an art swap like that is attainable.

Curious. You just want the rosters copied over? That's relatively easy to do in NOSE, but what about the artwork? Also 96 still has Quebec and Winnipeg in it, while 97 has them in Colorado/Phoenix. [although I prefer the former anyway] 96 also would be lacking the All-Star teams, but the menu presentation is a lot cleaner and nicer to look at. [Which is mostly why I typically I just skip it an go from 96 to 98]

Yeah, I had started multiple versions, it was just that between some of the actual rosters not getting announced until very late [or getting announced and then changing last minute] and the age-old "free time" issue, I just haven't had the chance to complete the set as it were. Figured at this point I'll just throw this one out and wait until the Olympics are finished so I can use the complete stats as my base for player ratings.

Well that's annoying. I do recall coming across this once while I was in the middle of making changes, and it stumped me to the point where I just went back to a previous version where that issue dis not arise and went on from there. But it seems that when I select South Africa, I'm now getting about a 50/50 chance that it glitches. Weird that I didn't notice this when I was testing, guess it must have snuck back in there along the way. I still can't figure it out, but I'm curious if it has something to do with the fact that I used the hex code edit that changes the default from the East & West All-Stars to the EA & THQ teams. [they had more sprites to work with as far as art] South Africa happens to be the first of all the unranked teams. [EA] Did the same thing for 98, but the glitch hasn't come up yet. Only using Gens myself.

Hah. Guess that means the teams were nicely balanced. Glad to see you like it!

Oooooooooh... I... think so? I'll be honest, withe the recent talk around the 3-star formulas, I was trying to also use Smoz's hack applicator for the modified base weight numbers and 1-15 scale along with the new three-star calculator, but even with the NOSE file edit, something was preventing me from opening it after all of those things were applied. However, I am pretty sure that I did the weight bug and base weight before I ran into issues [although the base weights probably didn't change anyway], but I reserve the right to be wrong.

Okay, if I didn't know that it would make the names a mess to read, I'd be tempted to use those. It's also kind of weird to try to figure out how some of those conversions were devised. Like (Ethan) Wei Ruike lost his first name? The women's team has some weird ones too. Actually not much of a story. I just liked the idea of using a pretend development company rather than a solo artist name. Also, that way if any collaborative work is used in my stuff, I can just say they were contracted to be part of the "Team". As for why that name, it's kind of a combination of influences like Team 17, and the original "Team Canada", aka my home town Winnipeg Falcons, who won gold representing Canada at the 1920 Olympics. Can't really explain why it amuses me to build up a lore around a bunch of modded games, just weird that way I guess.