Finally, it's done.

It's taken quite a while, as some who've seen the original post would probably know...

but we got here, I'm happy with where everything is at and everything seems to run surprisingly well.

Before we get in to things, I've got tons of people I need to thank and some to credit. So I'd like to thank those who have given me advice, everyone who have offered me help throughout (Even if I didn't take you up on it, I know I'm rather stubborn at times, I know , thank you non the less.), I'd like to thank Tomas whose input has been invaluable and I'd like to thank Tomas again for allowing me to use the courses from his Australian schedule, so thanks to him, MJ and Grey for their amazing attention to detail and dedication, without seeing the horses zip around my local Hobart racecourse in game I doubt I would've found the passion to take this on. This is seriously the most passionate community I've been apart of and that feeling is just absolutely infectious. So genuinely a massive thank you to everyone in this community.

CREDIT/MODS USED:

Tomas' SO7 Australian Schedule (Racecourses) - By Tomas, MJ and Grey

SiriusChill's Horse Portraits Mod - By SiriusChill and The Duke

Increment Bar - From skylark2007's post but not skylarks one - By ?????

It's entirely possible I've missed something here, if I have please let me know so I can give the proper credit where due, if there's any problems with any mods, please don't hesitate to pm me about it.
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Alright, so originally I was going to just make the singular schedule but 1 just happened to turn in to 3, kinda funny how that happens, this is also the reason it took an extra month instead of being released on the 24th of December which I originally planned to. I'll list out the schedules one by one, give a little insight and anyone whose interested can make a decision off of that.

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SCHEDULE #1 (2020 Complete Australian Schedule) This is the schedule I was dreaming of when I begun with this little assignment, it contains a WHOPPING 6531 RACES with correct race names, distance and prize money, but hold your horses (yes, that was an intended pun) while it might contain that many races and yes, they are all technically accessible through schedule editor that doesn't mean they will all load in while starting a new game, the game itself seems it will adjudicate which races are "essential" more or less and it usually does this by either the race quality or whether it's the 3rd race meeting, the third meeting on a day is usually assumed as less important and therefore it cuts "lesser" races this way, so 5000 is most likely a more accurate number, not including generated maidens, novices, handicaps or selling races. So yeah, still an absolute bloody ton, but important to make note of. This is a super slow burn schedule, you need to set realistic and appropriate targets for each and every horse, with how things work in this one, every horse can have value, this is an ultra simulation type schedule. Every horse can succeed to some degree so long as you make the right choices for them. NEGATIVES: 1. While it doesn't seem to happen very often the game will likely occasionally crash, of course this will depend on your system. 2. Some of the "Maiden" class races that have been made are seemingly very hard unless you have a very solid horse, almost seems like you put them in a listed race at times and unfortunately I don't know exactly why this is to be honest, it could be as simple as maybe maiden quality horses are just super good in my test run file of the game or something. 3. While not super common there's a few walkover races and voids here and there.

SCHEDULE #2 (2020 No Maiden Australian Schedule) This schedule is basically a streamlined version of the first one, which gets rid of all the created "Maiden" race category races, this was created in case others were annoyed by the second negative in the first schedule (See above), asides from that, not much has really changed, scraping the Maiden races means there's 4927 races in this schedule and it seems to load and simulate forward a little bit faster, but it may still occasionally crash and of course walkovers will still happen here and there.

SCHEDULE #3 (2020 Important Races Australian Schedules) This schedule is a compact one with near 700 races, mostly high level or important handicaps, listed races and of course all the G-races, this is the schedule if you don't really care about the simulation aspects and mainly just want a breeding schedule exporting quality horses, it's rather breezy, less stress, pretty fast loading times etc. The only real problem I've found with this one is for some reason when the game loads up it really doesn't like to be nice to South Australia and include the Morphettville races, I don't really know why, if that bothers you, as all the Morphettville races are in the files, I imagine this could be remedied through the in game schedule editor though?

INSTRUCTIONS:

*Please back up all your original game files before installing any of these, I cannot stress this point enough, it's very simple and can save you a world of pain, I learned the hard way. 'Copy' all the original game files and then just 'paste' them in a new folder, call it "SO7 - Original Files", it's really just that easy*

1. Pick your poison.

(2020 Complete Australian Schedule) https://www.mediafire.com/file/w16lwde2wu4dmn2/2020_Complete_Australian_Schedule_-_By_James.zip/file

(2020 No Maiden Australian Schedule) https://www.mediafire.com/file/aptth9h0hrj0a10/2020_No_Maiden_Australian_Schedule_-_By_James.zip/file

(2020 Important Races Australian Schedule) https://www.mediafire.com/file/qwdqio4unzc317j/2020_Important_Race_Australian_Schedule_-_By_James.zip/file

2. Wait until it downloads, it's basically 2gbs it'll take a while.

3. Open the folder when done, and 'copy' the 3 files

4. Open your Starters Orders 7 game file (if you have it through Steam, go to your files, 'Desktop', 'This PC', go to where it's stored, likely in 'Local Disk', 'Program Files (x86)', 'Steam', 'steamapps', 'common', find 'Starters Orders 7 Horse Racing' and double click on it, now paste those copied files and allow overwrite files.

5. Hopefully after that's done everything should be in working order and installed.

6. If everything is installed correctly, it should reflect that in the schedule editor with the correct number of races, if so, enjoy.

7?. The correct race count isn't displayed, what now? I had a couple of issues here and there test installing, in order to resolve this I re-installed SO7 and copied the the 3 files in to the folder afterwards, a bit annoying, but it worked like a charm after this. so if you've got other mods you want to run with this, I would recommend installing them afterwards.
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I've put a lot of effort in to this, but there will likely be a few typos/mistakes, if you've found anything that could use some fixing, please let me know. Cheers everyone.

james, it might be just me or every one is getting the same thing, every time I click on the download it's taking me to another site, and I am getting "this site has been reported as it has viruses or something, if I was you mate I would fix your downloads, because my virus protector will not allow me to download your work me mate.

Thanks Tomas, appreciate you bringing that to my attention.

It's rather strange, it should take you straight to the download file through MediaFire, it might be because it's a link directly to the file to download and your antivirus might find that strange and immediately block it thinking it's malicious, but other than that I'm not too sure why. I rescanned the files and in 29,470 files Norton gave me the green light, so I suspect it's most likely the link/s that your antivirus doesn't like.

Here's a different link, this one is to the folder containing the downloads instead https://www.mediafire.com/folder/yz2t9ip9rj23u/Documents

Maybe a bit more luck with this one, but that's quite peculiar, is it with just one of the links or is it all of them?

Cheers, mate.

Is there new jockeys + trainers added?

I don't believe so, I can't recall changing them as I've used this schedule or one's with the same jockeys and trainers for ages so I'm not sure, comparing the original files it doesn't look like anything have been added that would put any new jockeys or trainers in, but coincidentally I was actually considering getting the necessary images together and refilling out the jockeys and trainers list to see if I could make it more accurate and up to date for the schedule.

Might get up Racenet and see what I can do.

About 1 year ago, I used the trainers + jockeys Tomas used in his mod and added a plenty of current day figures. If you want the files let me know and I can send it might be a good starting point for you. It requires a lot of manual work unfortunately or maybe there is a quick way to do it that I never discovered.

So I've checked back a little too late here I pretty much made a start on the jockeys immediately after I saw your message as I had a little free time and I'm now basically half done there, I was able to get all the metro jockeys through racing.com, I was able to get all the names down and a fair few of the weights for jockeys, so I should be able to get everything done over the next day or so. The hard part is gonna be getting together a good image for everyone, might just have to add those at a later date. I very much appreciate the offer though.

Hi James,
I uploaded the jockey/trainer + Portraits that I created. Not sure if you can use them but will upload them anyway in case they help. Lots of time went into those portraits so could save you some time! We are also working on your schedule to remove the blank meetings. It might be something to do with the files having no field sizes entered.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/ijg9sq57 ... 7.zip/file

Here is the link to the files. If we can get your new schedule working perfect with up to date trainers + jockeys it would help get me back into this game again.

Cheers

Awesome, I appreciate it, I'll give them a look over and see what I can put together.

When it comes to the blank meetings I did originally think it could be due to no field size set, but it seems that a few even with field sizes entered have also been given a fair share of blank meetings, so I've more or less come to the conclusion it's most likely due to limitations, but I mean I could certainly be wrong, SO7 is my first entry played in the series and I'd say undoubtedly there's a lot of people here that'd know a hell of a lot more about schedules then I probably ever will.

It's pretty cool to know others are looking in to things with the schedule, I'm hoping my conclusion is wrong and staying wishful that one day everything will be absolutely mint, I just know I'm devo that the Morphettville Group Races don't all pop up.

Anyway, I'm a bit of an idiot, because it was a short task, I didn't bother to back up the jockey file last night and now can't find it, so I guess I'm redoing it then.

So when it comes to Jockeys/Trainers I'll be adding 403 jockeys (all that have all participated in a metro race) because that won't really affect much, HOWEVER when it comes to trainers, horse distribution will be affected depending on the amount added. The base trainer numbers are 170, I could add as many as 500 (as that's the most I can see on the leaderboards) but that seems too many based on the amount of horses that'll load in. I'm thinking 250-300 is feasible, but a second opinion never hurts, so what do you think?

Not sure honestly, the only thing I did last time I played the game was use Tomas roster for jockeys and trainers and removed the dead/irrelevant/retired and replaced them with updated ones. It seemed to work OK

That's fair enough, guess we'll see how we go.