Madden Career Toolkit's Admin Area :: Player Functions

MADCAT offers various functions in the "Player Functions" section that allow you to add additional info to any given player, or to fix their name, if MADCAT messed it up, due to technical limitations.

Viewing a Player

For convenience, you can view a player's card from within the admin area. Do this by typing in the player's id in the database, or just typing in their name. The player's card will load in the preview frame as below.

The biggest reason you'd want to view a player card from within the admin area is to grab their id, so that you can manipulate the player in other ways. The unique id for each player is displayed at the bottom of their player card:

Changing a Player Photo

By default, a player will automatically be associated with a photo named "[First Name]_[Last Name].jpg". Since there are several players that have the same name (Ricky Williams and the other Ricky Williams, for instance) you'll need to specify a different filename for one of them. This can be done like so:

If you wish to remove the custom player photo listing from the database, type in the player id and leave the Photo Filename input blank and hit submit.

Note: This form does NOT upload the photo for you. It just updates a database entry so that the player's player card will look for an image named what you type in. You need to manually upload the image yourself, into the directory you set for player photos ("player_photos", by default).

Player Bios and Photos

MADCAT supports player photos. To create a player photo for Brian Urlacher, you would get a photo of him and name it Brian_Urlacher.jpg and place it in the player_photos directory. There is a face pack for Total Pro Football that uses the same naming scheme, so you can get most of the players in the league without any additional effort (the pack has about 1000 unused photos, however).

Additionally, MADCAT supports player bios. To create a player bio for Brian Urlacher you would place a file called Brian_Urlacher.php in the "player_bios" directory. Alternatively you can name the PHP file using the player's unique id (for Ricky Williams, et al) You can use plain HTML or PHP in the file. The bio will show up as an additional table in the player card (below their statistics).

Adding a Middle Name

Perhaps the most ambiguous feature of the admin area is the ability to "add middle names". You see, there are several players in the default roster, as well as generated names, that have two last names. Antwaan Randle El is probably the most famous of these players. For these players to be introduced to the database properly, MADCAT needs to know that "Randle" is part of Antwaan's last name, and not just his second name (the reason there is no list for second names is that MADCAT treats a middle name as part of the first name, by default). When you install MADCAT it automatically enters several middle names that are last names into the database for you, but it's possible you could come across a new one. If so, the admin area lets you add this to the database so you can successfully import the player.

Renaming a Player

It might be that you need to manually rename a player in the database (perhaps only because you don't want the player's listing to have just their first initial [this happens when the player accrued no stats before being imported into the database]). Type in the player's id and the new name you wish to assign:

Adding Draft or Acquired Info

Choose a player id that you wish to add info for, and type in the draft info or acquired info for that player. There is no set format, as the info is stored in the database as plain text. Draft Info is simply where/when the player was drafted, and Acquired Info is how the player came to be on your team. A player can, of course, have entries in both (his draft info would never change, but his acquired info can).

Changing Rookie Year

There are two reasons you would want to change a player's rookie year. MADCAT stores the rookie year as the first year a player is introduced to the database. This can cause two problems:

1. There is no useful rookie information in the first year of your franchise
2. Free Agent veterans that get signed by a team for the first time, will show up as rookies that year

For this reason, MADCAT let's change a player's rookie year. Simply type in the player's id and the new rookie year:

Deleting a Player

In rare cases you may wish to remove a single player from the database. All references to the player's id will be removed from the database. Type in their id and click the button!

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