TEW '16 Plug and Play Updates Discussion

[Benji]

So @Skummy had a great idea some time ago about "Plug and Play" updates for TEW. Basically instead of having one big update, you could import individual companies/files into your game to create the game world you wanted. Essentially like Football Manager tends to have with its active leagues system. This would help people with slower computers, or add more depth for those seeking a deeper database. It would also mean that no one person is responsible for such a massive update system, which quite frankly has always been a massive ask of certain core individuals.

We've talked about it casually, but I thought maybe we should open the forum to more people to see if they would be interested in maybe helping building and maintaining individual companies. I'm not saying we're starting right now (or at all), I just thought it was worth throwing the idea on to the floor.

For example - I'm not greatly familiar with the editor, but I did wonder how it would work if people work for multiple companies - does the editor have function to be able to acknowledge when a company has been imported and retain all a worker's "worked for" companies? How would you work around such an issue?

There's also the issue of where to start - do you dive straight in with modern day, or do you build the base scenario from a retro scenario? Maybe 1983 since that's the first Starrcade and the early building blocks of modern WWF/E?

[Adam Ryland]

31 minutes ago, Benji said:

For example - I'm not greatly familiar with the editor, but I did wonder how it would work if people work for multiple companies - does the editor have function to be able to acknowledge when a company has been imported and retain all a worker's "worked for" companies? How would you work around such an issue?

When you use the importer to bring in a company there is a tick box visible that reads "Import each company's associated contracts at the same time". The way it works is:

- You import WWE with that box ticked

- At that point, it will go through the contracts associated with WWE and look for a wrestler of the same name. So if it finds a contract between WWE and the worker called "John Cena" in that database, it will then look if there's a worker called "John Cena" in the target database; if there isn't, it's ignored, otherwise it will import the contract and link it to that worker. Only the name needs to be identical, it's irrelevant whether they have any other similarities.

Therefore you need to have imported the workers first before you import contracts.

Your issue for this project is that it only works on hard data - it only knows that John Cena should work there if it can find a contract linking the two; the John Cena worker doesn't independently know or remember where it should be working. Therefore you'd have to have a master database that has all the contract relationships (even if the workers are literally just names and the rest of the data is just the default settings) for the importer to work with. (EDIT - So, to clarify, that means that you couldn't spread the different companies out over multiple databases, they'd have to be locked to the master database. All the other stuff you likely could spread out across multiple databases.)

Your issue with this project idea is that you're going to have to be very careful about the order that you import things (for example, you would always need to import belts after workers and companies, because otherwise they can't look for matching company and worker names), and you're going to have to make sure that all the names are exact matches throughout all the databases being created; "Undertaker" and "The Undertaker", for example, would be totally different to the importer and would throw it off.

[Benji]

Damn, that basically sinks the entire thing since workers are the biggest part of the database building and would be where the plug and play stuff would probably be best needed >_>

[Adam Ryland]

Yes, it would. I think it's a good concept though, and if there's another game in the series I'd certainly look into incorporating it into the editor.

[SeanDMan]

What do you mean, if? 

[Adam Ryland]

Well who knows if I'll survive that long? Apparently fictional traffic accidents are really on the rise at the moment.

[Lineker]

2 minutes ago, Adam Ryland said:

Well who knows if I'll survive that long? Apparently fictional traffic accidents are really on the rise at the moment.

ohshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

[Draevyn]

Adam is like Santa Claus. He knows when you've been good or bad or you know, faked your own death.

[Gabriel]

If you're looking to build a giant database, then this is a great idea. The problem comes with trying to provide Lite options for users.

If you chose a start date and had people contribute their favorite promotions/wrestlers, work on locations, title histories and all that jazz, then it could work out quite well if there is a curator who pieces it all together. But importing things and removing them for different versions will create all kinds of headaches within the database itself.

If you want to provide Lite options, I would suggest choosing a historical point in time to set the mod, and get people to contribute as much as possible to the mod itself. Once you've created this gigantic database, you have your set data for people who want a full game world and don't mind longer load times. From there, you could start working on isolation different areas of the game to create a more streamlined experience. You could do one where you just remove anyone who never did anything major in their careers, but keeping all of the promotions... or you could have different databases for different game regions of the world. If you want to play as New Japan for instance, you may not care about having all of the smaller names from the American or British independent scenes... so that Japan-centric database would only feature promotions and workers from outside of  Japan who had a legitimate impact on the business and would affect your ability to run your company. Do one of those for each game regions, maybe?

 

Either way, it's a lofty task, but a good idea. The way that the editor works and links things though, it's going to be a nightmare to try importing all of this information. It would be far easier to start everything from scratch, especially if you want other people contributing. Because then you can set a standard for how things are added to the database and then just let people loose to do it.

[Skummy]

When I first came up with the idea, it was based on the assumption that were would be a Core/"Lite" database, and then could release optional "add-ons" after the fact - my first thought was to have add-ons for things like retired legends and non-wrestlers, or celebrities, and so on. I hadn't given that much thought to the logistics of doing it for whole promotions.

[TheWho87]

22 hours ago, Skummy said:

When I first came up with the idea, it was based on the assumption that were would be a Core/"Lite" database, and then could release optional "add-ons" after the fact - my first thought was to have add-ons for things like retired legends and non-wrestlers, or celebrities, and so on. I hadn't given that much thought to the logistics of doing it for whole promotions.

That would not be a bad set up and could work, maybe have regional add on packs that you could add promotions, wrestlers and their contracts.

A side note to this, I had always thought a rookie add on pack would be fantastic for historical mods, every wrestler set up with stats based on their rookie year so you could import them in.

[Gabriel]

16 minutes ago, TheWho87 said:

That would not be a bad set up and could work, maybe have regional add on packs that you could add promotions, wrestlers and their contracts.

A side note to this, I had always thought a rookie add on pack would be fantastic for historical mods, every wrestler set up with stats based on their rookie year so you could import them in.

Rookie packs would be a great way to expand on historical mods, without overloading the mod itself. Say I'm playing New Japan and don't care to add a thousand random ass workers I will never use... I could conceivably just download a Rookies Pack in whatever form they are made, and import the specific workers that I want to add to the game world. That would be great.