Court Editing Tutorial

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This tutorial contains steps on editing courts and creating court patches in NBA Live 2001 and earlier. It was originally contributed by Thuan Vuu.

Part I: Court Editing

Firstly, you'll need the EA Graphics Editor (EAGE). This is probably the most important editor that you'll need, so go download it now! Secondly, I recommend that you get into the game and play some exhibition games, or any type of game where you'll see the courts, go to the instant replay, and look at the positions of the logos, names, lettering etc, take some screenshots via the "Screenshot" button, and choose a court which you'll like to replace the logos/names/lettering with your own logos/names/lettering.

Exit the current game, and create a new custom team by pressing "Roster" in the bottom of the screen, and selecting "Custom team". Choose a name, your players, the colour of the uniform (not necessary if you have your own jerseys), your logo and save it. Now exit the game totally and start up EAGE.

Open the "art/ingame/teams/teamdata.viv" (make sure you have a full installation, or else you won't have this file), and extract the **crt.fsh, **crt.bin and **bbd.fsh files (** - is the abbreviation of the team's court that you want edit, usually the first 2 letters of the city name eg Atlanta = at, Chicago = ci). You do this by first selecting the file name in the left frame, and then clicking on the "Extract" button which is the third button on the topmost toolbar. You'll be asked if you want to decompress them, answer yes, because it's impossible to edit them compressed. Then use EAGE again to view **crt.fsh independently, ie off the hard disk (where you saved them) and look at the subfiles contained within them (tlog, wood etc). You'll notice that these files contain the pictures that are used on the court ie. the logos/names/lettering etc, just take a look at the screenshots that you took earlier. Extract these files as gif/bmp or whatever format you want, and edit them accordingly. You'll probably have to edit them a few times before you perfect what you want. Persevere!!!!

When you have done editing those files, you'll want to add them back into the **crt.fsh file you got them out off, and you do this again using EAGE.

Follow these same steps with the **bbd.fsh (which is for the backboard stand) but I don't really recommend editing this file!!!!

Just choose a **bbd.fsh from a team which has a backboard stand colour that you like. If there isn't any, then you can edit the colour of the backboard stand by opening it in EAGE, and changing the palette of the "!PAL" subfile. You do this by first clicking on the "!PAL" in the left frame, then clicking on the palette tool, which is the fourth button on the top toolbar. Click on it, then change the RGB values to the RGB values that you want.

Lastly, you rename **crt.fsh, **crt.bin, **bbd.fsh, replacing the ** with a 2 letter abrreviation which isn't already used in the game, compress them using GFXPAK and then add them to your "art/ingame/teams/teamdata.viv" file using EAGE or a similar program (GFXPAK or EAPATCH).

To add the court files to your teamdata.viv file open up EAGE, and click on the import wizard which is the second button on the top toolbar. Choose "Add files to an external TAR archive", and choose the "teamdata.viv" file in the "Specify a new or existing TAR". Select your files (**crt.fsh, **crt.bin, **bbd.fsh) in the "Build a list of files to add to the TAR" by pressing "Add..." and choosing your files. Press "Next >>" to add them to the "temadata.viv" file.

Part II: Database Editing

You need to edit the dbf files in order for the game to be able to use the files you have just created and added to the game. You do this by editng the "teams.dbf" file of the roster that you saved your custom team to a while earlier. Use the Toolkit (from NLSC) or a similar database editor to do this. The "teams.dbf" file is located in the "saves\default" folder of your main nba live folder. Locate your team, and change "TEAMABR2" to the 2 letter abbreviation that you chose above, and the game will read the court files as the home court. There you have it, your own custom court!

Part III: Further Customization

If you want to totally customize your home court, you can edit the "**crt.bin" file. View the Bin Editing Tutorial for more details.

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