HOW TO: Player Card Tutorial (NHL94 & NHL95)

[wboy]

I've finally posted the tutorial on my site.

I've packaged it as a download (rather than online pages) as there is a fair bit of other resources I have included to help you with the process of updating player cards.

It basically contains:

• a step-by-step tutorial on updating player cards in Tile Molester,
  
• additional pages & documents (pdfs) listing all the offsets & player cards (for both NHL 94 & 95),
  
• information about changing the player card to roster player associations,
  
• IPS patches to repair player cards with shared tiles,
  
• and more...
  

Let me know if you think any sections are unclear or vague (excuse any bad engrish), and I'll update the tutorial appropriately in the near future.

Find it here:

http://www.hexaddicts.com/nose

EDIT: link dead, here is the file:

player card tutorial.zip -smozoma

Enjoy,

wboy.

PS: Evan, feel free to use the info & resources as you wish in the editing section of this site.

[MHL-RJ]

Awesome. You're the man.

[Evan]

wow nice wboy... always hard at work

I'll have to check that out when I have time to devote to it.

[mack]

About time you updated your site.....

Nice work bro.

[clifto]

WOW!!! Works very well, thx alot.

[Sabre Dance]

What a great tutorial, I just stumbled across this so that's why I bumped it. Does anyone know how to change the player cards for the All Star teams? I didn't see it anywhere in the tutorial.

[smozoma]

What a great tutorial, I just stumbled across this so that's why I bumped it. Does anyone know how to change the player cards for the All Star teams? I didn't see it anywhere in the tutorial.

look for link_94.png in there

It gives the locations where you write the address of the picture

(it reuses the pictures from the teams.. no point having the same picture twice)

[Sabre Dance]

look for link_94.png in there

It gives the locations where you write the address of the picture

(it reuses the pictures from the teams.. no point having the same picture twice)

Duh, how the hell did I miss that? Thank you for pointing that out to me, I feel like Lloyd Christmas right now.

Edited May 30, 2009 by Sabre Dance

[TruePensFan1981]

Duh, how the hell did I miss that? Thank you for pointing that out to me, I feel like Lloyd Christmas right now.

Do you have a rapist's wit?

[Sabre Dance]

Do you have a rapist's wit?

That's a lovely accent you have. New Jersey?

[Evan]

PS: Evan, feel free to use the info & resources as you wish in the editing section of this site.

Well, it took a little while but I've finally added this to the editing section of NHL94.com for everyone's convenience.

-Evan

[Sabre Dance]

Well, it took a little while but I've finally added this to the editing section of NHL94.com for everyone's convenience.

-Evan

Good idea Evan, it kinda got lost in the shuffle.

[trudatman]

if anybody here actually finds editing player cards to be "a breeze," I could use some help. it has my Genesis hack tied up (crashes trying to load cards for dead players).

tru.zip

[trudatman]

bump. see above post.

[smozoma]

player cards are lots of work.. i doubt anyone is going to do it for you

[trudatman]

it doesn't hurt to ask. definitely not a breeze. maybe somebody out there has a mind for it and wants to donate the effort it would take to make everybody use a generic image, assuming it would be considerably less than the struggle I find it to be. I don't have my hopes up. I've been putting in some work making the Genesis version fun. I changed some of the skater ability vectors, making it play more like the SNES version. I edited the on ice graphics, cleaning up the views. it's possible to rush through the menu to keep it from crashing, but it is frustrating. most of the changes I have made have come through the teachings and tools of others and I could use more help, but a shortcut through this trouble for me could be that somebody reading this thinks this player cards business is easy. maybe it'll click for me after a fourth go-through. I wish my Mac didn't seem to be prejudiced against Wboy's efforts and I wish I'd have started with a decompressed file, but my efforts in the Genesis format are a limited resource, so I'm not starting over.

short version: player cards may just be in the ga, but I can't say for sure because I have no idea what that shit is about.

edit: would help if this chart was in my language, too...

Edited October 29, 2010 by trudatman

[JF@^]

Good Evening,

Could someone please confirm how the ips patches to fix the broken images work? Do I just drop the file into the resources folder in TM? Sorry to bother with what I'm sure is an easy answer..

Nevermind - it's coming back to me now. Sorry.

Edited September 23, 2015 by JF@^

[kingraph]

HOW TO UPDATE PLAYER CARDS FOR ALL PLAYERS IN WBOY'S 30 TEAM ROM

The tutorial above doesn't exactly reflect how the player card table works in the 30-team ROM, so I'm just adding the following information to help those having trouble updating their player cards.

First, I assume at this point you know how to edit the player card photos.  If not, please review the tutorial in the OP as it details everything step by step. 

Now, linking the player card photos to the appropriate players on each team is done by updating the pointer table found at offset 000003FE (the original table is in 000F92F4).

First, here is a direct quote from @wboy's tutorial regarding linking:

––– LINKING PLAYER CARDS TO ROSTERS IN NHL 94 –––

At the offset Hex "000F92F4", you will find the team order player cards offset pointers that instruct the game where the player card-to-roster association data exists. The break down of the data that exists at each one of those pointer offsets can be found in the image below.

The player card offset that is stored in each slot is the player card offset starting at the 10 byte header data, not the "3bpp linear" tile data. The position "Pos#" value determines which player's name on your team rosters is associated to the player card. The "Pos#" value must equal the position of the player in your team roster starting at 0 (as opposed to start at 1 as used by the Line Configuration data found within each team). For example, your first goalie's Pos# value is 0000, and the second goalie is 0001. If the team only has two goalies, then the 1st player/skater is your 3rd rostered player, so they their Pos# value is 0002. If your teams has 26 rostered players, and you wish to assign the player card to the last player on your list, then the Pos# value is 0019, as Hex 19 equals decimal 25 (the 26th number starting from 0).

The first player card offset is typically your goalie and is shown last on game's main menu, after the player cards offset slots 2 through 6 have been shown. If a team has more than six slots, then those player cards can only be seen when viewing the team though the "Player Cards" facility found in-game on the "Start Game"/"Pause Menu". As you can see in red, each team player card is terminated with Hex 00000000. All players not listed with their own player card association use the generic "Handedness Left/Right" picture (or goalie if appropriate) when viewed in-game within "Player Cards".

 

/end wboy quote.

I found that the easiest way to get this to work on the 30-team ROM is to create a full table where each team has 26 player card slots and then ends with 00000000.  Even if a team has less than 26 players, the table works fine if you use a generic card offset for the unused player slots.  Just like the tutorial says, the first 6 player cards that you list (and roster positions) will be the ones that are displayed on the menu screen.  Note that you can't have duplicate roster spots in the table for one team, so if you change this around, make sure that each pointer is for a different roster.

For example, if your player cards are listed as 0000, 0001, 0002, 0003....all the way to 0019 (hex value...decimal is 25, which is the 26th player because we start at 0000), the first six players on the roster will be displayed during the start menu.  If you decided to put the 9th player instead of 2nd, you would switch "0001" with "0009", but you must make sure that "0009" doesn't show up again on the table, so you'd likely swap with what you changed, in this case "0001".

I made a Google Doc that helps make this much easier.  If you know the player names and their corresponding card offsets, you can link a roster dump (use this tool) to that data to fit it into a table that creates the hex values you need to copy/paste.  I think you can download your own copy from this to work on your ROMs.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oPiasWKUsK2bS49QsQiZ0cQNyEwFfublFUury2LUsFg/edit?usp=sharing

I hope this make sense.  I feel like it's much easier than I'm explaining, so if you run into any trouble feel free to ask. 

 

[AdamCatalyst]

1 hour ago, CPLANAS1985 said:

Again, how do I assign a new picture to a player without a portrait of his own!?!?

Where in the tutorial (provided in the first post), are you getting stuck?

[AdamCatalyst]

2 hours ago, CPLANAS1985 said:

Well... Those players that are using generic skater portraits, unlike players with portraits... For example in NHL 94, let's take the Detroit Red Wings... Steve Yzerman has his own portrait but a skater like Nicklas Lidstrom does NOT...

I have no idea what part of the tutorial you are stuck in. In any case, you would need to insert the Lidstrom image that you wanted to use into the ROM, and then you would need to update the pointer for that players card, as per the tutorial.

[stevemac]

Thanks for the guide. I have a question: is there a tool or a specific method that allows me to see which player in my ROM is linked to which player card? And if it's linked to a generic player card, how can I find the specific player and modify it so that it points to a card at a specific offset? I'm super confused

[von Ozbourne]

Technically? It does depend a bit if you are using the original ROM vs the 30 or 32-team expanded versions.

If it's the original, there is a list of player names and offsets used included in the folder for the EARE tool. This is used by the tool to set the photos used by the player with the corresponding name regardless of where they appear in the roster data. Going to these offsets in your sprite editor of choice can also allow you to see the photo that will be linked to that player.

The expanded versions are a bit different and easier to look at. If you open the ROM in a hex editor and go to offset 040E, that is the start of the list of player photo links. 
For example, in the 32-Team expanded ROM, the first entry is "0012 095E 0000". This means that the player photo at offset 0012095E is the photo being pointed at and player 0000 [the first player, ie: starting goaltender] is the player that that photo is linked to. The next photo in line is 00120CC8 and the 00XX number will depend on what the second player on the list will be. Usually this is a forward or d-man on the top line, but it could be anyone and the "XX" will refer to that player's spot on the roster list [0004 for the player in the fifth roster spot 000F for the 16th, etc.] I should also note that there are some versions of ROMs on this site where only the top line has photos, and the remaining 20 roster spots are generic cards. In these cases, the "00120CC8" or whatever offset number you're looking at, might just be 00000000. in these cases, the game just pics the default righty/lefty goalie/player image.

Now granted, the offsets could be changed to whatever order you want depending on what photos are already in those offset locations, or, slightly easier, you can change the player order to match the photos in that list with what player you would like them to be linked to.

That all said, this is just an overview based on the presumption that you have some familiarity with these tools. There are some good tutorials on this forum, or if you just need some clarification on something, drop me a DM and I can elaborate.

I will say though that depending on how much ROM editing you've done already, one method I've done when I was just starting out was to simply open the ROM in NOSE and an emulator at the same time, and when I needed a player to match a certain photo after the roster and new photos were set, I just used "Move Up/Down" buttons to shift a player's roster position until the photos lined up with who I wanted. [did I mention I was just starting out? It just seemed easier than trying to figure out what I did not yet understand enough to do properly]

[stevemac]

Thanks von Ozbourne!