Hey, thanks for the reply. I really enjoyed your 90s series I actually was looking at your photos the other day when I had to make the early to mid 90s sharks and blues jerseys ; they are pretty bang on great job
Anyway, bear with me as this is sure to be a long messy explanation. I hope at least some of this will make sense lol
My rosters are fairly accurate, but I did cut some corners for some of the teams that were complete tire fires like the Blue Jackets, Thrashers and early 2000s Blackhawks. If I was two forwards or a defender off of finishing their roster I usually just took some no name guy from a European league and adjusted his overall a bit and put him on their roster.
A lot of those teams had guys I couldn't bother to make as they were mostly fringe nhlers who got no more than a cup of coffee in the big leagues. If they didn't have a long career and they were on a tire fire expansion team I just simply ignored them. The playoff teams and Canadian teams were the ones I put the most effort in, however I made sure all teams had their stars , secondary players and goalies on their roster.
I broke it down each season individually using hockey database and Wikipedia as my main references for rosters and retired players. I always managed my roster files carefully( you have a limit of 15 files) so I knew I could copy my latest roster file onto the next empty space and pick up exactly where I lefted off. After nearly a year's worth of doing this in my free time I was able to get to where I am now. Created Goalies and created teams were never close to a issue for me. Once NHL 18 comes out I hope to create the 16-17 roster and 15-16 roster in that game to open up some roster files on NHL 17 to continue my project.
You see once you reach 600 players you can get around it by editing players that are of no use for the roster file they are in. For example there is no reason for me to have a player Nikolai Zherdev sitting somewhere in the AHL in the 97-98 roster file taking up space when I can simply just turn him into an actual player who played that season like old man Jari Kuri. I counted over 100 players that I created in previous roster files that were of no use for the 1996-1997 roster file and I am now re-editing them into usable players for that season now. Each season you probably have to make anywhere between 30-50 skaters so there is only so long that I can keep this up, but I'm fairly confident that I can keep it going until at least 93-94.
So in short it took a lot of time, a lot of corner cutting, a bit of inventory and having a few screws lose somewhere in my head to have the patience to stick with it hahahaha. The reward though is a retro next gen nhl game with 15 seasons of old rosters to choose from. I have this all backed up onto a USB drive to keep it safe and I will not even dare to attempt this on NHL 18. Like I said 17 will be a throwback game for me and 18 will be devoted to the modern NHL. Anyway, I apologize for the long read, but there was absolutely no way I could explain this all in a paragraph lol I hope all is well
