Hi.

I just had this idea of importing players and seasons from hockeydb.com (or other hockey stats sites), so I started working on a tool to do just this. It is based on the csv exporter/importer by Kiba found here:

I already have a working NHL94 PC with rosters from the current season. In the long run I plan on calculating player attributes (perhaps even lines) from statistics, but now it all is taken from an NHL18 spreadsheet I found.

There are limitations, as the number of teams in the game for instance. The reason I chose NHL94 and not NHL95 is that I think the scores are better when playing against the CPU on the 94 version. I do think my importer will be compatible with 95 too though.

 

The biggest problem right now is simulation is not 100%.

Players end up winning the Art Ross with something like 55 points and there are also other bugs.

I did not import all stats (PP goals, SH goals, shots, shooting%...).

Importing goalie statistics did not seem to work so they are the default stats, however goalies have a save% of something like 95% right now when simming...

 

Anyone here have tested tampering with the statistics of NHL Hockey (NHL94) and the simulation and have an idea what causes this, what simming statistics that are used for what (and are important to get right into the game)?

I noticed on the original game the Blackhawks always suck when simming due to them having too many players with many penalty minutes. The game seems to punish teams with much penalty minutes. The current NHL has less penalty minutes than in the 92/93 season. Can this be a factor? Any ideas?

Edited March 27, 20188 yr by nikethebike

I just mocked some stats, setting 12% shooting for all players and also mocked pp goals by setting 20% of a players goals to be PP goals.

The stats now got better, however keepers have great SV% but GAA is somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0. Not really close to real NHL right now.

Will need to play around with the stats and see if I can get realistic values. I dont have "real" lines right now either, they are random since what player replaces what is pretty much random.

Nice to see that someone is paying an attention to NHL Hockey also! I would like to see this when you got it ready.

Im interested in testing

I managed to get guys like Ovechkin and Laine to score goals in the 45-50 range most saves. A bug in the game seems to be that someone like Ovechkin that has a pretty average shot percentage but takes loads of shots is punished in the game. To get him to score more while simming I need to lower his amount of shots so that he gets a better shot percentage, which will make him a more reliable scorer.

Another thing I am working on is getting the defenders to score less goals. Ive managed to get forwards pretty close to real life score wise but there are way too many 10+ goal defenders.

I will make the tool take things like these into account when it generates player statistics. It also averages out played games so that all stats are based on as if all players had played 84 games, since that is how the stats are used when simming on NHL Hockey.

Perhaps you could put 'sliders' in your tool that would allow the user to input base stats and then use the sliders to adjust the the stats behind the scenes that would increase d-man scoring, decrease goalie save%, etc.

Seems like the game has a bug in how goalie stats are calculated. I summarized the number of goals let in by goalies and they do not match the goals let in by the team they played for. Strange.

Also the game seems to generate way too many shots in simmed matches. I dont know if this can be fixed in any way so lowering scoring will make keepers get very good saving stats.

 

Does anyone here know of any other good hockey stat sites like hockeydb.com that has many stats for a player displayed in one page. It also helps if it is a static site that is easier to scrape. Things like squad number and position and handedness is also necessary...

Edited March 30, 20188 yr by nikethebike

hockey-reference.com is awesome and has every stat you can think of. It has a feature that allows you to export to csv files.

https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/l/lemiema01.html

Whenever you get around to looking at rosters/lineups etc.. I found this site to be very useful with up-to-date lineups. They have line combinations at the top of the page for every team and it appears to be updated regularly.

Hope this helps:

https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/teams

 

 

Edited March 31, 20188 yr by PenguinFan1985

Awesome suggestions guys!

 

About the lineups, these are great, but I guess I need something like most usual lineup over the entire season.

By the way, does anyone know in what files the lines stored?

Lines are stored in TEAMS.DB.

On 3/31/2018 at 6:17 PM, nikethebike said:

Awesome suggestions guys!

 

About the lineups, these are great, but I guess I need something like most usual lineup over the entire season.

This is no easy task, as players are injured and lines are shuffled all season. 

Corsica has a line generator that will show you the most frequent line combinations - but you'll still need to patch together the 3rd and 4th lines yourself (as there are a lot of combinations).

Cool site. Thanks for the tips, never seen that site before.

Thanks Kiba too. Great info. Might stop using your csv exporter importer and modify the files directly instead as I have some career import problems with Boston.

Depends on how much time I'll have to rewrite stuff.

2 hours ago, nikethebike said:

 

Thanks Kiba too. Great info. Might stop using your csv exporter importer and modify the files directly instead as I have some career import problems with Boston.

Depends on how much time I'll have to rewrite stuff.

Might be a good idea, I wrote import tool to NHL95PC and never tested how it would behave with NHL Hockey. I have source code with it here, so if you find it useful you can alter it for NHL Hockey: http://forum.nhl94.com/index.php?/topic/15180-more-rosters-to-nhl95pc/&do=findComment&comment=140677

Also, I did not include free agents on importing.

Happy hacking!

 

Yeah there are no free agents on NHL hockey if I remember correctly either so that does not matter much.

Thanks for the source code, it was very nice releasing it. I would probably rewrite it in ruby though as that was the language I chose for my converter tool.

Edited April 4, 20188 yr by nikethebike

Sorry I stopped giving updates but work has been halted for a while due to much "real" work.

I am currently thinking of rewriting my generator using https://www.hockey-reference.com instead so I can get more correct player data. However that would limit me to generating stats for NHL, hockeydb has more leagues, guess I could make some kind of "source" plugin system though... Guess I could also make some "target" plugin system to also be able to use this to convert data into other games aswell if I wanted...

Also, when it comes to what I have generated into NHL94 so far, the lines are a challenge, I need to fix them, they are very random now.

Edited May 10, 20188 yr by nikethebike

Seems like my work on this thing got halted. Anyone interested in me releasing what I have or publishing the work as open source? Anyone want to help out coding this?