Posts tagged "Customization"
New league type: cross-era leagues, made up of historical teams from different years
This is not actually a new feature, just an easier UI for an existing feature! The original feature is from last year, but you need to hunt through like 5 different menus to find it. Now you can just go here and instantly create a league:
Create leagues from a mix of teams - random teams, real current/historical teams, and teams from your existing leagues
Recently I added an exhibition game feature that lets you play a game between two teams from any season in any of your leagues. In BBGM you can also pick any real teams, current or historical. This was a pretty exciting feature because it was the first time there was any type of cross-league play. But you can imagine a lot of other things involving multiple leagues that might be fun.
So here's another one: when creating a new random/custom league, you can now include and current/historical teams from any of your leagues, including real teams in BBGM! Try it out by clicking the "Customize" button next to the team selector when creating a new random or custom league.
Randomize built-in teams when starting a new random players league
There are now 50 different built-in teams. But when starting a new random players league, you always get the same 30, unless you manually select some other teams.
Now in version 2021.07.11.0740, there is an easy way to randomize the teams in your league, and it's pretty cool how it works. Thank you nicidob for the idea!
Access it by clicking "Customize" next to the list of teams when creating a new random players league:
Two new league settings: "Age of Draft Prospects" and "Force Retire at Age"
If you've been keeping a close eye on the changelog you may have noticed some work done by @domini7. The new features described in this post are his magnum opus. Thanks @domini7, I love you! If anyone else wants to get involved, head over to GitHub.
Today there are two new league settings available in all leagues.
Age of Draft Prospects: Allows you to change the age of generated draft prospects.
Force Retire at Age: Allows you to set a maximum age limit for your league.
Both of these options are available to be edited at Tools > Settings in God Mode, but you might be better off editing the draftAges and forceRetireAge settings in a league file so that they apply for randomly generated players in new leageus. (At some point I will make it possible to edit these before league creation from the UI!)
You may think something like, "hey, this will let me simulate a college or high school league!" Well, ages are part of that, and this does help. But there's still a lot of other differences between pro and college sports, so that's not really what this is about. It's really about letting you do whatever weird shit you want to do. Seniors league? Sure. Dystopian future where babies are raised to play basketball? Why not. Have fun.
How does it work?
Redesigned league settings page
I just deployed an update including a completely re-designed league settings page. Try it at Tools > League Settings.
Mostly this is just a cosmetic change, but it does have one functional improvement: several of the settings that were previously available only in God Mode are now available any time. Things that don't affect your ability to succeed in the game or win achievements, such as enabling the Elam Ending. Sure it changes game simulation, but it doesn't make it any easier to accomplish anything, so no advantage can be gained by toggling that option.
The cosmetic changes are:
Players now have jersey numbers, and teams can retire jersey numbers of former players
Basketball GM and Football GM now have jersey numbers for players! This is something people have been requesting for a while. It took me so long to do it because I just don't really notice jersey numbers. If you quizzed me on jersey numbers of popular athletes, I would fail horribly. But this isn't about me, it's about you guys! And I know jersey numbers are important to a lot of you.
You can view jersey numbers in a few different places: on player profile pages, on the Player Bios page, and on the little popup when you click the stats icon next to a player's name. On player profile pages you can also see the full history of jersey numbers for a player, which was inspired by Basketball Reference:
Better support for customization of player names, countries, and colleges
Basketball GM has long supported customizing the names and countries of randomly generated players, which is useful for people making custom league files. For instance, if you want to simulate a league in France, it makes sense to mostly generate French players.
The problem with this feature was that it kind of sucked. The file format was confusing and required a lot of repetitive work. Basically it was designed to make my life easy, rather than making it easy to use. That's the opposite of how I normally try to operate.
Today I have finally rectified the situation. There is a new format for customizing randomly-generated player names and countries. Don't worry, all your old league files will continue to work like normal. But in the future you'll be able to use the new format, which is both easier and more powerful. Here is the documentation.
Import/export individual players
New feature! You can export a subset of players from a league, and import them into another league. Access these features by going to Tools > Import/Export Players.
Both importing and exporting are quite flexible. For export, you can pick any player in your league's history - current players, players from past seasons, or draft prospects.
Then when importing, you have even more options:
A bunch of new options for league creation: challenge modes (no draft picks, no free agents, no trades, no visible ratings), player development realism, and more
Today I added a bunch of fun new features to Basketball GM and Football GM. They're all available when you create a new league, by clicking the "More options" link at the bottom.
Different types of leagues will have different options available. This is what you see when creating a new "real players" league in Basketball GM, which has almost all of the new options available:
Some of those options (challenge modes and real player development determinism) are also available in God Mode, where you can change them in any existing league.
What exactly do all of these new options do?
Far future draft classes
For a long time, Basketball GM has let you view draft classes up to three years in the future. Similarly, for people making custom roster files, it's been possible to define up to three years of draft classes in the file.
But what if you want more? Like if you want to make a file for the NBA in 2003, with every draft class up to today? Previously that wasn't possible, but now it is.
New options: hard/soft cap and playoff byes
I just deployed a new version of Basketball GM with three changes:
The ability to change from a soft cap (default) to a hard cap.
An option to give playoff teams first round byes.
An option to set the number of playoff rounds and the number of games per round.
Okay, #3 was already there, but now you can easily change it in the God Mode options, along with the two brand new features.
Customizable stadium capacities
Minor new feature in version 2018.04.08.66: you can now set the stadium capacity for each team. To do this, enable God Mode (Tools menu) and then go to Tools > Edit Team Info.
This will probably do weird things to team finances if you change it. You probably shouldn't edit it unless you're making a custom league file.
For people making custom league files, see the teams customization documentation for more info.
More customization options: conferences, divisions, and playoff length
Until today, Basketball GM was hardcoded to always have 2 conferences, 6 divisions, and 16 teams in the playoffs. If you wanted to set up a league with a different structure, you were out of luck.
But today that has changed! You can have any number of conferences and divisions, and the number of teams in the playoffs can be any power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc). Unfortunately this is only customizable by making a league JSON file, but it's not that hard, I promise. Here is the documentation and here is an example file with 3 conferences, 6 divisions, 12 teams, and a 4 team playoff.
Please let me know if you notice bugs related to this!
Customize random player names
By default, Basketball GM uses random American names taken from the US Census. However if you’re making a custom league file designed to represent a basketball league in another country, it is annoying when the new players generated in your league all have names like "John Smith".
Now, when creating a League File, you have the ability to define the list of names used for randomly generated players. For more info, check out the documentation.
New feature: God Mode
God Mode enables some features that are a little too close to cheating for me to want enabled by default. Specifically:
- The ability to create new players (this feature has been around for a while, but now it is only available in God Mode)
- The ability to edit players (available only since earlier today)
- The ability to force trades to be accepted (brand new)
New customization features: full league import/export and custom draft class import
This post is to announce two new features that have gone live over the past couple weeks that should enhance the customizability of Basketball GM: full league import/export and draft class import.