How To Change Box Score
& Message Board Headings
Creation Date: March 7, 1998
Revision Date:
The information in this article applies to:
Cactus League Interactive Baseball for Windows
Reprinted with permission from The Games People Play
This is for advanced users only. Use at
your own risk.
Editing Headings To Your Heart's Content
Some Less Obvious Places to Put Your Personal Stamp on the Game
By Kerry Leibowitz
One of the noteworthy things about CLIB, is the ability
of the user to personalize the game by customizing the appearance of so many of the
simulation's features. Many of these are quite obvious-the categorical headings in the
stat reports can be user-specified, for instance. Some are considerably less apparent. Let
me try to give a couple of examples of headings that can be changed, even though it's far
from obvious at first glance that it can be done.
Boxscore Headings
One of the game's flexible features is the ability to
customize boxscores. You have a tremendous amount of flexibility over boxscore appearance,
from what categories are included, to how they're displayed (table or list...or both),
what order they're displayed in, what information to include, and countless other things,
all of which are quite apparent to the user who takes the time to glance at the
"Design Boxscore" protocol. But what is not obvious is that you can edit the
appearance of the categorical headings. But it can be done. Here's how.
With a boxscore displayed on screen (either in the Statistics module or from the Game
module), click on the Format menu. Now, uncheck the "Locked" item. With the
mouse, select any heading in the batter's or pitcher's tabular part of the boxscore.
Right-click on the category of your choice and select HEADING from the pop up menu that
appears. A dialog box will appear, showing the current heading. You may edit that display.
For instance, the default display heading for runs batted in is "RBI" but you
may want your boxscore to replicate the typical format of a published boxscore
("BI" is the typical display in a published box). Right click on "RBI"
and when the dialog box appears, change the entry to "BI" and click OK. The
change will be reflected in the displayed boxscore. When you're done, click on the FILE
menu and select SAVE AS if you want to save your modified design under a new name (without
altering the existing design) or simply SAVE if you don't want to retain the old design.
This is easily done, as you can see, but you have to know to unlock the format before you
start.
Message Board Headings
The message boards-the displays that show game, actual and replay statistics for batters
and pitchers on the game screen-hold a tremendous amount of flexibility within. The user
can choose amongst dozens of game, actual and replay statistics to display for both
batters and pitchers, having them appear in any order he/she wishes, mixing game, actual
and replay stats, and even have different displays automatically appear for different at
bats during a game. The process for setting all of this up is really quite straight
forward.
For example, let's say that you've decided that you want to add "Current Hitting
Streak" to the batter's message board. No problem, you can do that very easily. But,
when you do it, you'll note that the title appears in full: "Current Hit
Streak." That's a lot of wasted space. The numerical part of the display isn't going
to exceed two digits, after all, so this is a very inefficient means of display. The same
is true of "Runs Created Per Game" and "Production" and (for pitchers)
"Run Support" and numerous other categories for pitchers and batters that you
may want to add to the message boards. The full name is provided to prevent confusion (you
know the "What category is that?" kinds of questions), but there's little doubt
that many people will prefer a more economical display. The good news is that the
categories can be edited. Here's how.
In effect, what you need to do is to edit a couple of files, one for batters (IGBA.DAT)
and one for pitchers (IGPA.DAT). These files reside in the folder that contains the game
files. (If you accepted the default directory structure upon installing the game, that
would be: C:\Program Files\Cactus\Cactus League Interactive Baseball.) You can edit these
files with any text editor or word processor. BE SURE TO BACK UP THE FILES BEFORE YOU EDIT
THEM in case you make some kind of an error. This is absolutely essential. (If you don't
back up the files and go on to mess things up, you can still retain the originals from the
program CD, but this is a bit of a pain.) Open IGBA.DAT in your text editor. You'll see
several columns of information. It's the third column that we want to edit. Leave the
others undisturbed. Find the stat(s) that you want to change. For instance, if you go down
to the bottom of the file you'll see the "Replay Current Hit Streak" category
that we talked about. You may want to adjust that to "CHS" to conserve space on
the batter's message board. Select the TYPEOVER option on your text editor/word processor.
This is very important because you don't want to disturb the column alignment of anything
in the file. It's crucial that the column alignments remain undisturbed. Now, leaving the
"Replay" part of the existing name alone, type CHS and use the spacebar to blank
out the remaining part of the "Current Hit Streak" part of the default title.
Once you've edited all the categories you want to change in this manner, save the file,
retaining the IGBA.DAT name. Be sure that you save this as a Text File or the game won't
be able to read it. The same editing rules all apply to the IGPA.DAT file (for editing
pitchers' stats).
That's it. The next time that you play a game, the previous "Current Hit Streak"
heading will be replaced by "CHS" which will fit in better the rest of your stat
category headings. And since you edited the file yourself, you should have no trouble
answering the question "What category is that?"
Edited IGBA.DAT and IGPA.DAT files are available for free downloading
at TGPP.
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