Wayback Wednesday: The NBA Live Toolkit

In this week's Wayback Wednesday, Andrew takes a look back at the NBA Live Toolkit, once an essential modding utility in our community.

The post Wayback Wednesday: The NBA Live Toolkit appeared first on NLSC.

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at an essential modding utility in the early days of our community: the NBA Live Toolkit.

In some respects, roster editing in basketball video games has come a long way. We have access to animation packages, salary data, and other attributes that used to be hidden. At the same time, the in-game roster customisation tools still have many of the same drawbacks as they did in much earlier games. There are still attributes and bio data that we can’t edit or add for created players, or even modify for original players. Placeholder players are still difficult to deal with, as they’re not completely customisable. To make truly detailed roster mods, we need external editing tools.

Fortunately, talented people in the community have been able to step up and develop roster editing tools throughout the years. It began with our founders’ editors for the early NBA Live games, Vl@d took on the challenge for the burgeoning NBA 2K modding scene, and Looyh continues to carry the torch today. It hasn’t been easy, with executable and save files needing to be mapped and decoded. However, editing roster files did become easier with the adoption of the DBF format, and the process was further simplified by the NBA Live Toolkit. Let’s take a look back…way back…

I’ve previously taken a detailed look back at the use of DBF files in NBA Live, but the short version is that the series began using them in NBA Live 98 PC. As former NBA Live developer Darren Schueller revealed when I interviewed him, this was actually done to make managing data easier during the game’s development, but it had the happy side effect of making the finished game more moddable. This is because DBF files can be opened by commercially available database (and also spreadsheet) software. Thus, it was no longer necessary to develop a third party program that could modify the games’ executable file’ and roster data files to edit the players and teams.

Of course, while the change to DBF files made NBA Live 98’s rosters moddable without the use of a program specifically designed for that purpose, the process was still challenging. Opening up the raw data files in software such as DB Commander was confronting for novices, and still less efficient for more advanced users. With our founders’ editors for NBA Live 95, 96, and 97, we were accustomed to having clear labels for all of the data we were editing, as well as dropdown menus and guides that ensured we’d never enter invalid values. From a technical standpoint, we didn’t need custom software to mod the rosters anymore, but ease and accessibility were an issue.

And so, our founders developed the first iteration of the NBA Live Toolkit! Instead of trawling through rows and columns of raw data, roster modders could simply open up the DBF files in the Toolkit and edit them using an interface that was similar to the editors for NBA Live 95-97. Players were easy to find either by selecting the team they were on, or from the dropdown menu listing every player in the roster. There was a facility to add them to the East or West All-Stars, quickly overwriting the data of the original player. Team names could be changed, Michael Jordan’s Roster Player could be given a Created Player face and properly become MJ…the Toolkit could do it all!

Furthermore, even if you weren’t intimidated by the sight of all the raw data in the DBF files, the NBA Live Toolkit was still the program of choice for experienced roster modders. It was simply quicker and more efficient for entering new data and changing existing values. Also, since the raw ratings values ranged from 0-99 while the in-game ratings were displayed on a 50-99 scale, the Toolkit would automatically calculate and display the in-game rating next to the editable field, avoiding the need to make the conversions ourselves. There were also some very handy tools that built upon the functionality of previous NBA Live editors, streamlining roster creation.

Player statistics could be imported from the text files provided by Doug Steele’s site, which is still active and being updated today! Additionally, the Toolkit could – if you desired – automatically calculate Free Throw, Steal, Block, Offensive Rebounding, and Defensive Rebounding ratings based on the imported stats. There was also an option to import data from another DBF file, making it easier to apply changes from a new roster update into a Season mode game already in progress. Meanwhile, the MegaModifier function allowed roster modders to make global edits to data, from ratings adjustments across the board to increasing their Years Pro for a new season.

This made the NBA Live Toolkit a very powerful and useful editor. There was a catch, though. The use of DBF files allowed it to be developed as a Microsoft Access module. This was obviously beneficial to making the Toolkit a reality, but it also meant that it wasn’t a standalone program, requiring Microsoft Access 97 in order to function. Considering that a large number of PC users did have Microsoft Office 97 installed, it wasn’t an unreasonable requirement. With that being said, while it was a sensible approach to developing the Toolkit, anyone who didn’t have Access 97 was unfortunately out of luck. Some users definitely would’ve been in that boat back then.

Still, it was a viable solution. Building the Toolkit through Access 97 also allowed it to natively utilise its sorting functionality, and other standard database operations. With NBA Live continuing to use DBF files in subsequent PC releases, it also meant that the basic structure was in place to develop updated versions of the Toolkit for NBA Live 99 and 2000. That’s not to discount the time and effort it would’ve taken of course, since it was still necessary to map the new fields and values when those games were released, and then update the module accordingly. Glance at the release dates for the NBA Live 99 and 2000 Toolkits though, and you’ll see they were made quicker.

As the years went by however, another problem presented itself. Because the Toolkits were developed using Access 97, they wouldn’t work with any earlier versions of Access…or any later ones, either. In fact, the readme files included a disclaimer noting that there wouldn’t be a version for Access 2000, so don’t expect one. This wasn’t necessarily an issue for many of us, as in the days before the subscription and online app models, many people made do with an older version of Microsoft Office for as long as they could. Indeed, I was still using Office 97 until early 2004, when I was gifted a copy of Office 2003 (which I’m actually still using some twenty years later!).

By the turn of the millennium of course, more and more people were using Office 2000, and thus couldn’t open the Toolkit. However, the bigger issue was that our founders were moving on, meaning that someone else would have to develop the Toolkits and other such utilities. Fortunately, a community member – Jonathan – did step up and make a new Toolkit for NBA Live 2001; two in fact, as there was a version for Access 97 and Access 2000! He also made Access 97 and 2000 Toolkits for NBA Live 2003, while another community member – Marc – developed one for Access 2003. Although we did have DB Commander, their efforts were appreciated.

I was certainly grateful to have Toolkits for NBA Live 2001 and NBA Live 2003. As someone who was maintaining current updates at a time when Tweaked Rosters were very much in vogue, the MegaModifier utility was essential. It meant that I only had to update the regular roster file, save a copy, and then use the MegaModifier to make the global edits that the community generally agreed produced the best results. Even if I was using DB Commander to make other edits here and there, the NBA Live Toolkit was necessary for that finishing touch with the Tweaked Rosters. Once sliders were introduced in NBA Live 2004 of course, those Tweaked Rosters became unnecessary.

It’s a good thing too, as no more Toolkits would be developed following the versions for NBA Live 2003. The prospect of not having such an editor initially caused some panic in the community. Did this mean the end of the NLSC roster updates, and other mods? Not at all! When our founders were beginning to step away and the future of the Toolkits was up in the air, I was not only growing accustomed to editing the DBF files with DB Commander, but in late 2002, I also produced a series of guides that mapped out the files. I wanted us to be prepared in case we didn’t have Toolkits in the future, as well as help out modders who didn’t have a compatible version of Access.

Fortunately, the end of the NBA Live Toolkits didn’t put a stop to roster modding. Thanks to programs such as DB Commander, we can still mod the games today, even though most of us have long since upgraded to a new version of Microsoft Office and can’t use the Toolkits (which are still available in our Downloads database). However, back in the day, those original Toolkits by Tim and Brien ensured that roster modding was viable and accessible, whether you were creating a project for the community or your own personal use. There was a reason that the NLSC proudly advertised itself as the home of roster updates and editors for the PC versions of NBA Live back then!

When you consider some of the hoops we’ve had to jump through to mod more recent titles, it’s difficult not to be wistful about how good we had it with NBA Live. To that point though, that was in large part due to the tremendous work of our founders. Yes, the adoption of DBF files gave us a huge advantage beginning with NBA Live 98 PC, but the NBA Live Toolkit provided a user-friendly interface that truly allowed roster modding to be easier than ever before. We’ve seen some excellent tools developed since then, but the NBA Live Toolkits will always be special. They were essential in the early days of modding, and further helped established us as the site for NBA Live.

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