Here is an update on what’s going on with NHLView NG and related research: I’m sure a lot of PS3 owners have heard of a little project called PSGroove which, with help of some other tools, allows you to copy your Blue-ray game onto external hard drive and play the game off it. One nifty thing about this process is that files are stored on the hard drive unencrypted which means one can freely look at them. This is of great help for NHLView NG research because it turned out that EA left the whole DB structure metadata on NHL11 BD. With this information I now have complete description of roster format. This information may even help uncover the meaning of some previously unknown fields from PC rosters. I present you this screenshot of a development build of TDBView which has NHL11 default roster open along with metadata information:
Now, this does not solve the problem of NHL 11 saves being encrypted so save files can still not be edited; however, it opens the possibility of modifying the default (and consequently exhibition) roster for PS3 users who are willing to use PSGroove. In any case, I’m working with the assumption that it will be eventually possible to easily extract the roster and pack it back on PS3 (this is already the case in NHL10 and below). Roster extraction is not the main focus of NHLView NG development; having the roster file I’m concentrating on adding support for editing of its main constituents: players, teams and line ups. Hopefully by then there will be tools to integarte the modified rosters in the game. Now that PS3 is wide open, this is not far fetched. Good job PS3 homebrew community, maybe we’ll see NHL modding days resurrect with vengeance! I certainly hope so.
In other news, forum has been cleaned up. Sorry for the mess, I have little time these days to keep it clean on a regular basis.
