Umachines' 2K12 and MVP uniforms feedback thread

[Umachines]

Hello everyone. I want to use this way to keep those ones interested in my work making uniforms, posted about the things I’m doing or I’m about to do. Right now, We’re in MLB post season. But certainly I’m not resting at all when it comes to uniforms. My lastest MLB set was for the Atlanta Braves. You can check it here, if you have not seen it before:

 

 

 

But in this moment, I’m back with some old friends (and some new ones too) at MVP Caribe site. We are currently working on 2019-2020 Caribbean winter ball season mod. These are some pics of the uniforms I’ve been making these last days:

 

 

 

I guess they’ll be over 70 uniforms for the Dominican and Venezuelan leagues. If you are one of those baseball lovers who just want to play any of the game ways, give it a try. It’s certainly a great way to know a little bit about where most of Latin MLB players come from.

 

 

I’m also excited about what Nike is doing with its new exclusivity MLB contract. And I have to admit, that although I’m one of those who didn’t want the (in)famous swoosh on the jersey front, Nike is releasing exactly what they need to release to make most of people forget about the patch. And of course I’m willing to make my own version of all this new stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, I don’t want to just release my 2K12 updates. I actually want to dust my MVP sets off. And brig you my versions of these new uniforms. I want to update my 320p uniforms and I want to release them this time in an easier way to install You can see one of these sets here:

 

 

Anyway, time and money are what keeps me from dedicating more to my unie mods. So I decided to make public my Pay Pal account, not to charge a fee for them, but to accept uniforms requests and donations, of course. In fact, I’m planning an even bigger project that involves a lot of PC Baseball uniforms. Please support me here:

 

paypal.me/umachines

 

(In case you decide to send me some supporting payment, please contact me via PM, to have that in mind)

You can also use my paypal account if you have a particular uniform request that you would like to ask for.

 

This is part of aproject that I could not finish two years ago for some reasons that are not worthy to mention, but I hope we can retake these ideas:

 

 

 

 

Well, that said, I’ll be posting some news here and thanks to Yankee4Life again for letting me announce this at the site. Don’t forget:

paypal.me/umachines if you want to support me.

 

[Kccitystar]

You've always done solid work and I'm happy your skills have blessed the MLB2K12 community with great updates. Thanks again.

[bctrackboi11]

Always been a fan of your work. Could use a hand with my college mod if you are interested.

[kyleb]

Great stuff!

[Umachines]

Thanks for your words guys. Every one of you is very appreciated to me.

 

You know, Caribbean uniforms are somtimes a true challenge, mostly because of the tons of advertising on them. But there are also many other things that make them particularly hard to recreate. The letterings are not as easy to find as MLB wordmarks. Most of the times we have to make them again with vector software starting from pictures of the jerseys. And several teams add funny colored shapes to their jerseys that make them even harder to copy. Special event patches are not aviable in online stores either. If it's not enough, some teams also change these shapes and even the letterings almost every year. But we take this the funny way and try to do our best to copy them anyway. Didn't I mention that winterball season lasts only 3 monthes, by the way?.

 

I wanted to show you this case. CARIBES DE ANZOATEGUI is a venezuelan team. They added a new pattern to their uniforms this year. I like the way they look, but the first time I saw it, I thought 'well, what is this now?':

 

These are some oval lunars set in a beehive pattern. But they are randomly placed in lighter and darker groups. I knew I was not gonna find this thing on the net.

 

 

So I decided to make my own pattern, similar to what I did for Arizona snake skin uniforms a couple of years ago. I made my own beehive oval pattern with vector software and manually changed the gray tones for little random groups, until I got something that I guessed was close to the real pattern. Then I used my vector pattern in the bitmap editor. This was a very easy solution, in fact.

this is a WIP picture.

 

 

And this is the final result for my Caribes 2019-2020 uniforms:

 

 

[BallFour]

1 hour ago, Umachines said:

Thanks for your words guys. Every one of you is very appreciated to me.

 

You know, Caribbean uniforms are somtimes a true challenge, mostly because of the tons of advertising on them. But there are also many other things that make them particularly hard to recreate. The letterings are not as easy to find as MLB wordmarks. Most of the times we have to make them again with vector software starting from pictures of the jerseys. And several teams add funny colored shapes to their jerseys that make them even harder to copy. Special event patches are not aviable in online stores either. If it's not enough, some teams also change these shapes and even the letterings almost every year. But we take this the funny way and try to do our best to copy them anyway. Didn't I mention that winterball season lastes only 3 monthes, by the way?.

 

I wanted to show you this case. CARIBES DE ANZOATEGUI is a venezuelan team. They added a new pattern to their uniforms this year. I like the way they look, but the first time I saw it, I thought 'well, what is this now?':

 

These are some oval lunars set in a beehive pattern. But they are randomly placed in lighter and darker groups. I knew I was not gonna find this thing on the net.

 

 

So I decided to make my own patter, similar to what I did for Arizona snake skin uniforms a couple of years ago. I made my own beehive oval pattern with vactor software and manually changed the gray tones for little random groups, until I got something that I guessed was close to the real pattern. Then I used my vector pattern in the bitmap editor. This was a very easy solution, in fact.

this is a WIP picture.

 

 

And this is the final result for my Caribes 2019-2020 uniforms:

 

 

That's an awesome job! Yeah, sometimes you've gotta get creative when it comes to the new patterns and things like that. Excellent work as always!

[Umachines]

Thanks ball four. I'm following your hard work with MVP too. You have to know this feeling of knowing you can make certain uniform, and not resting until it's already working. 😆

[BallFour]

6 minutes ago, Umachines said:

Thanks ball four. I'm following you hard work with MVP too. You have to know this feeling of knowing you can make certain uniform, and not resting until it's already working. 😆

HA! I absolutely understand that feeling.

[Umachines]

What really impressed me the most about 2K baseball games, compared to our old MVP 2005 was the way their engine deals with cloth simulation. In the old game there was no  way to simulate cloth. So, the only thing they had was their skills to make some polygons and static bitmaps simulate how clothes look on a human body. They used to draw some wrinkles on the same jersey files. Uniform makers remember very well "jers", "jert", "jerf" and "jerk" fles.

 

But with the new way to do the things, these textures were not neccesary anymore. Well, I used to think this way too. The fact is that these tricks are still very handfull.

 

Since 2K Baseball is aviable, my main complain about the uniforms was that they used to look great, but too artificial. Like made of wax, remember?. And that's why I made my own templates back in 2017, before releasing any uniform. That's good, but they still looked too 'perfect', I mean too clean, and no wrinkles, according to the body type.

 

What I'm doing now is actually already done. Another uniform maker saw this too and made his own solution. I don't really know who did it, and it was a great job. But you know I always try to do these things my own way.

 

There is actually a file that you can use to simulate some extra wrinkles on the uniforms. It's located in global.iff. They are two textures. The original version of the game came with this file. There are almost not wrinkles, although it's easier to see this watching its alpha channel, instead the main yellow picture:

 

 

I'm posting later what I'm doing with this texture, guys...

[Kccitystar]

38 minutes ago, Umachines said:

What I'm doing now is actually already done. Another uniform maker saw this too and made his own solution. I don't really know who did it, and it was a great job. But you know I always try to do these things my own way.

 

There is actually a file that you can use to simulate some extra wrinkles on the uniforms. It's located in global.iff. They are two textures. The original version of the game came with this file. There are almost not wrinkles, although it's easier to see this watching its alpha channel, instead the main yellow picture:

 

I'm posting later what I'm doing with this texture, guys...

Ah yes! I had created a "super" global.iff file that had added wrinkle textures for the uniforms that were uploaded some modders in the asian 2K community shortly after 2012 was released. Feel free to build on them or use them as you see fit.

 

There's actually about six of these textures in the global, one green, one yellow and one grey. Another set was designed for stirrups as well.

[juanitobanca]

Great work !, have u thought of designing Mexican Winter League teams?

[Kccitystar]

6 minutes ago, juanitobanca said:

Great work !, have u thought of designing Mexican Winter League teams?

You might want to check https://www.mvp2kcaribe.com/

[LouisvilleLipp]

You've always done fantastic work on 2K12.  I hope it continues......👏

[Umachines]

14 hours ago, Kccitystar said:

Ah yes! I had created a "super" global.iff file that had added wrinkle textures for the uniforms that were uploaded some modders in the asian 2K community shortly after 2012 was released. Feel free to build on them or use them as you see fit.

 

There's actually about six of these textures in the global, one green, one yellow and one grey. Another set was designed for stirrups as well.

Thanks again, KC. In fact, you were the first person I thought about when I saw this mod. And I guess global.iff has also been growing with all these shoes and accesories improvements the last years. I found all the six textures you have told me. But I still have a problem with it.

 

This is your vesion of the file. It looks much more natural with the wrinkles. But looking closer, I've found some spotted areas. Mostly on left shoulder and under both arms. I also want to try something else with this texture.

 

 

I'm adding the old "Jers" texture form MVP 2005, in order to imitate the way the jersey would look on an athletic body. I guess it would work great for most players. Sorry, CC. Remember this is a WIP version, and there are still several things to fix. But you can see the chest shape and even the clavicles.

 

And here is my problem: If I change all six files in an original global.iff file, from 2K12, The uniform looks clean and with all the wrinkles I want. But if I do the same to the modified global.iff, I still have some of those spots I say:

 

So, there has to be a seventh file to change. But I have not found it yet.

 

I also have another question about this file. The original version is about 42Mb. But the current file is 93Mb instead. Since I have not studied all the rest of the files yet, I'm not sure about the reason for such a big difference in current global.iff size.

 

[Kccitystar]

32 minutes ago, Umachines said:

So, there has to be a seventh file to change. But I have not found it yet.

So one funny thing about this game, and I guess it's just a reflection of the tech at the time the game was in development: there's artificial ambient occlusion. AO is basically an effect the game uses to cast shadows on nearby objects in a 3D space. Since the game is a console port of the X360 version, the effect had to be artificially created. There are a lot of these files in the global.

 

The file you're looking for is this one:

 

 

Quote

 

I also have another question about this file. The original version is about 42Mb. But the current file is 93Mb instead. Since I have not studied all the rest of the files yet, I'm not sure about the reason for such a big difference in current global.iff size.

 

 

Compressed vs Uncompressed

[Umachines]

Thanks again. That's cause you have to ask all you can 😅.

[Kccitystar]

1 minute ago, Umachines said:

Thanks again. That's cause you have to ask all you can 😅.

 

Global.iff is one file that has eluded me for the longest time. There's a lot of textures that can be edited/modified, but I haven't taken a look at it myself since 2017 to be honest 😂

[Umachines]

Well, you know I've been trying to replace that texture you said (039DBD50.dds) for the original one, with your compiled iff tool, and it actually does some damage to the iff container every time I try. I mean the file works, but with some funny glitches. Maybe with an Hex editor?

[bctrackboi11]

11 hours ago, Umachines said:

Well, you know I've been trying to replace that texture you said (039DBD50.dds) for the original one, with your compiled iff tool, and it actually does some damage to the iff container every time I try. I mean the file works, but with some funny glitches. Maybe with an Hex editor?

Try .7zip for your .iff files. That's what they are doing over at NLSC with NBA2K now.

[Umachines]

One never stops learning. I really want to thank you for your help, guys. This is the way uniforms will look with my changes to gobal.iff file. We are using it in 2K19 Caribe mod. But I'm releasing a MLB version soon too. I think it is well balanced, not too much, not too little of wrinkle effect. And it also looks very clean too. I'm leaving more pictures with the same Dominican team, just to comapare with the rest of the pics.

 

[Umachines]

Beside making uniforms, I also like trying some changes to the way the game looks. But more than that, to the way it feels. If you remember These power icons from any MVP baseball mod, I made them the first time for the earlier MVP Caribe Versions. I guess many players, like me, used to feel more 'agressive', just because of the addition of these power icons, instead the stock ones:

 

 

I also made these subtle changes to the runners minimap, with the little batting helmets, and some tweaks to the way it looked in general. This is less noticable than the power icons. But I think it was a good improvement too. BTW, I took the idea of the helmets from the game SPORTS TALK BASEBALL for the Sega Genesis, back in the 1990's XD.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, now for the 2K12 mods, I want to make some changes the same way, but according to what this other game allows me.

The first thing I'm trying is my own version of what we used to call the vector circle in MVP. It's the guide to field a flyball most of the times. We are testing this version, and I think it's very nice to field the ball with it:

 

 

 The other detail I want to change are those icons that tell you to wich base any runner is going at the moment, Those ones that say '1','2','3' and 'H'. I'm trying these arrows that point to the bases:

 

 

All these changes are really simple and easy to do. But I'm sure you will agree with me that the game will feel different once you test them.

[bctrackboi11]

9 hours ago, Umachines said:

Beside making uniforms, I also like trying some changes to the way the game looks. But more than that, to the way it feels. If you remember These power icons from any MVP baseball mod, I made them the first time for the earlier MVP Caribe Versions. I guess many players, like me, used to feel more 'agressive', just because of the addition of these power icons, instead the stock ones:

 

 

I also made these subtle changes to the runners minimap, with the little batting helmets, and some tweaks to the way it looked in general. This is less noticable than the power icons. But I think it was a good improvement too. BTW, I took the idead of the helmets from the game SPORTS TALK BASEBALL for the Sega Genesis, back in the 1990's XD.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, now for the 2K12 mods, I want to make some changes the same way, but according to what this other game allows me.

The first thing I'm trying is my own version of what we used to call the vector circle in MVP. It's the guide to field a flyball most of the times. We, are testing this version, and I think it's very nice to field the ball with it:

 

 

 The other detail I want to change are those icons that tell you to wich base any runner is going at the moment, Those ones that say '1','2','3' and 'H'. I'm trying these arrows that point to the bases:

 

 

All these changes are really simple and easy to do. But I'm sure you will agree with me that the game will feel different once you test them.

Do you mind if I use these for my NCAA mod?

[Umachines]

2 hours ago, bctrackboi11 said:

Do you mind if I use these for my NCAA mod?

No problem, dude. Once our mod is released, I'm making these files public. But you can send me the needed files to make our own NCAA version.

[Umachines]

Since my work on Caribe 2K19 is done, I'm back to MLB 2020 stuff. This is a pic of my WIP for the Padres new pinstripes road uniform. I want to make some new changes to my templates and there are still some details about Nike swoosh shape and position, so the final version of this uniform could be slightly different:

 

[ming]

Sweet, I think these are better than the old gold road set they used to use!