Tag Archives: NBA Live Toolkit

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 paying tribute to Doug’s Stats, an essential modding resource in the early days of our community.

I’ll admit that sometimes I yearn for the World Wide Web of yesteryear, when fansites were king and before social media became everything. Selfishly, it’s because we didn’t have to compete with platforms backed by billionaires, but beyond that, I miss seeing other websites that have the same passion that we do. At this point, we’ve outlasted a number of our contemporaries, from fellow NBA Live fansites to our former host, GameSpy. Some of those sites have been preserved by archive.org, but many others are sadly gone forever.

Occasionally, someone will drop by the Forum or one of our social media pages to reminisce and express joy that we’re still around. Obviously it’s always nice to receive flattering compliments and read people’s positive memories of the NLSC, but I also relate to it because I too am heartened to discover a site I once used to visit is still around decades later. One of those sites is Doug’s Stats, which as I mentioned, was once an essential roster modding resource in our community. Doug’s work definitely deserves recognition – even to this day – so let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five basketball games that you may not be aware that we can mod.

When we were founded as the NBA Live Series Center all the way back in 1996, the focus of our modding community was naturally the NBA Live releases on PC. When NBA Live went console-only and NBA 2K came to PC, we turned our focus to that series. Basically, we’ve primarily focused on the brand leader that’s releasing on PC, but we’ve long been open to supporting mods for other games as well. There haven’t been as many of those releases – at least not around these parts – but modders have branched out into other titles, such as johnz1’s efforts for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition.

To that point though, there have been some other hoops titles over the years that can be modded. A focus on NBA Live and NBA 2K, and the general lack of popularity of these games, are the main reasons we haven’t seen fit to mod them. Nevertheless, they can be tinkered with to some extent, even if it’s simply renaming players. With more and more enthusiasm for retro basketball gaming and modding nowadays, there might be niche interest in furnishing them with a simple mod or two. Even if there isn’t quite enough interest to warrant any major public releases, the knowledge that we can mod these overlooked games could always spice up our retro basketball gaming sessions!

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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…

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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 paying tribute to some very useful software in our modding community: DB Commander.

There have been a number of important modding tools developed over the years. The early NBA Live editors tipped everything off, bringing modding to games that were definitely not designed with it in mind. They were followed by the NBA Live Toolkit, which made editing the new roster database files so much simpler. The EA Graphics Editor and other tools expanded modding (or patching, as it used to be called) beyond rosters, facilitating a plethora of custom faces, jerseys, courts, and more. When NBA 2K came to PC, REDitor II, RED MC, and other utilities made modding viable.

However, one of the most useful tools in NBA Live modding didn’t come from our community. That wasn’t unusual of course, as some of our most frequently-used modding tools were originally developed for other EA Sports PC releases. The one that I’m talking about today is a commercial solution, though many of us did stick with the shareware release. That program is DB Commander, developed by T&T Solutions. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five ways that NBA Live modding was better than the NBA 2K modding scene.

It’s no mystery as to why I was far more involved with modding NBA Live than I am NBA 2K. NBA Live, and in particular the PC version, was the game that I grew up with. It’s the series that this site was founded upon – the NLSC did officially stand for the NBA Live Series Center, after all – and it was tinkering with my favourite hoops titles that got me into the hobby of modding. By the time NBA 2K came to PC, I was beginning to get burned out on creating mods, and it also took me a few releases to really warm up to the series.

With that being said, I am interested in creating mods for NBA 2K, and have been trying my hand at various roster projects. There have been several barriers that have stood in the way of releasing work, including free time to complete those projects, and the need to learn new methods and file formats. It’s been an interesting journey, and I hope that I can release some NBA 2K mods in the future. There are undoubtedly some aspects of NBA Live modding – or patching, as we used to call it – that I prefer. It’s why I’ll always have some desire to tinker with old favourites, as the heyday of NBA Live modding was a special time in our community. Here are five reasons why.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at tweaked roster updates for NBA Live.

One of the key elements of roster updates, be they official updates or community-made rosters, is tweaking player ratings for more realistic performance. Whether it’s correcting the guesswork that’s originally needed when assigning ratings for a rookie player, or accounting for a drastic change in performance compared to the previous season, adjusting player attributes is an important part of creating a desirable gameplay experience. In some cases, gamers have ended up making major adjustments to all players, in order to counteract gameplay quirks and try to inject a little more realism into the game. These were known as tweaked roster updates.

It’s an outdated practice now, but many years ago, creating a tweaked version of a roster was considered a necessity if you wanted to try and enhance the experience for your fellow NBA Live gamers. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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