Import player from NBA Live 07 to NBA Live 08

[marklorenz]

Hello everyone, first of all congratulations for this beautiful basketball community! I searched the whole forum and tutorials to understand this problem but with no luck.
I wanted to import Nick Van Exel from NBA Live 07, using it as free agent in NBA Live 08. These are the steps i did:

1- I used NBA Live 08 editor to open the 07 database. Then I exported the player in a folder on my desktop (got 2 files, Nick Van Exel.player and Nick Van Exel.appr

2- I opened the editor again in the NBA Live 08 database, then i created a new player and overwrited it importing Van Exel (in the import selection only the file Nick Van Exel.player appeared, the file .appr didn't)

3- I opened the game NBA Live 08 and the player was correctly there with his portrait picture in the menu and correctly announced by the speaker. The only problem is that he has no face. I see it like this:

Live08.jpg

Could someone help me with getting the face of the player working correctly?

Thank you so much to all of you in advance!

[[Q]]

You will need to extract his face art file from Live 07 and import it to 08. It's been over 12 years so I don't exactly remember how to do that

[Andrew]

Using the EA Graphics Editor, open the plyrface.viv file from NBA Live 07. Extract Van Exel's face file (nivanex.fsh). Open the plyrlodb.viv file to extract his headshape (nivanexB.ebo). Place both of these files in your NBA Live 08 sgsm folder.

The aforementioned .viv files can be found under sgsm\players. The loose files are placed directly in the sgsm folder. The Extract button in EAGE (available in our Downloads section) should be pretty easy to find. Just scroll down the list of files and highlight Van Exel's, then click Extract.

[marklorenz]

Using the EA Graphics Editor, open the plyrface.viv file from NBA Live 07. Extract Van Exel's face file (nivanex.fsh). Open the plyrlodb.viv file to extract his headshape (nivanexB.ebo). Place both of these files in your NBA Live 08 sgsm folder.

The aforementioned .viv files can be found under sgsm\players. The loose files are placed directly in the sgsm folder. The Extract button in EAGE (available in our Downloads section) should be pretty easy to find. Just scroll down the list of files and highlight Van Exel's, then click Extract.

Thank you so much it worked!! Assuming one wanted to import back these 2 files into the plyrface.viv and plyrlodb.viv of NBA Live 08 (avoiding to have many files in the sgsm folder in case I wanted to add more players like Kukoc) what would be the steps to do? Thank you so much again!

[Andrew]

There's an import function in EAGE and it's basically doing the reverse of what you did (go to import, select the files), but generally speaking, I'd advise against it. The whole reason CustomArt was implemented was to let us easily replace files without having to import to the .viv containers. If something gets messed up and the file is corrupted, you have to import everything all over again. There's no limit when it comes to how many files you can have in the sgsm folder and no advantage to importing to the .vivs. If you look at any big roster projects for NBA Live 08, such as my old rosters, you'll see that they place a ton of files in sgsm and there's no harm in it.

[marklorenz]

There's an import function in EAGE and it's basically doing the reverse of what you did (go to import, select the files), but generally speaking, I'd advise against it. The whole reason CustomArt was implemented was to let us easily replace files without having to import to the .viv containers. If something gets messed up and the file is corrupted, you have to import everything all over again. There's no limit when it comes to how many files you can have in the sgsm folder and no advantage to importing to the .vivs. If you look at any big roster projects for NBA Live 08, such as my old rosters, you'll see that they place a ton of files in sgsm and there's no harm in it.

Thank you very much! I'll follow your advice. Next step I'll try to create a custom squad with retired legends not present in 2008

All the best Sir!!

[marklorenz]

There's an import function in EAGE and it's basically doing the reverse of what you did (go to import, select the files), but generally speaking, I'd advise against it. The whole reason CustomArt was implemented was to let us easily replace files without having to import to the .viv containers. If something gets messed up and the file is corrupted, you have to import everything all over again. There's no limit when it comes to how many files you can have in the sgsm folder and no advantage to importing to the .vivs. If you look at any big roster projects for NBA Live 08, such as my old rosters, you'll see that they place a ton of files in sgsm and there's no harm in it.

Just for curiosity, does the NBA Live Editor work with exporting players from games before 2005? I've seen from the tab menu of the editor that it can open databases from NBA Live 2005 to 08. I tried to open the 2004 database to export Micheal Jordan. I was able to open and access the database, but when I tried to export the player it crashed

[Murat]

No, unfortunately it doesn't. You can use OpenOffice or Excel to copy his data.

[marklorenz]

No, unfortunately it doesn't. You can use OpenOffice or Excel to copy his data.

Ah ok thank you for the reply! I hoped it could work. Even copying data and creating a copy of it I think we'd miss audio files like the speaker calling the player, not 100% sure anyway. Thanks again for your help!

[Andrew]

NBA Live 2005-08 have the same databases and database layouts, give or take a few fields. NBA Live 2004 doesn't use appearance.dbf; it just stored that data in players.dbf. Appearance data was split off into its own file beginning with NBA Live 2005.

[marklorenz]

NBA Live 2005-08 have the same databases and database layouts, give or take a few fields. NBA Live 2004 doesn't use appearance.dbf; it just stored that data in players.dbf. Appearance data was split off into its own file beginning with NBA Live 2005.

Thank you so much!