BreedTool v1.1.0 Readme file General Questions ---------------------- What is BreedingTool? BreedingTool (BT) is a utility for players of the horse racing simulation created by Mike Wallace and located at http://www.simulatedsports.net/hr. BT helps the owner/trainers of that game find information about the breeding of horses in the game. Users can find horses by searching for any combination of sires, dam sires and dam dam sires available within the game. Where do I get the data on the horses? Updates of the breeding.txt used to populate the BT database are made available on lobo13's Sim Tools page. These files are imported into the BT database and used by searches in the program. Installation ------------- 1. Download the version of BreedingTool you need, either the full version which contains additional database support files from Microsoft or the compact version if you have lobo13's Race Scheduler installed (RS requires these support files to work, so if it is working for you, you have them installed). You will also need to download a breeding.txt from lobo13's site if you have not already done so. If you are using a version of breeding.txt from davarto's site you cannot use it to import into BT because of a slight format error in the file. You may have corrected this error if you have used the breeding.txt in conjunction with madman's SSS utility. 2. Double click on the downloaded file and go through the installation process. The install is set for a default directory, but you can change that. If you do change it please make note of where you install BT for reference during future updates. 3. Once installed, locate BT on your start menu and launch the application. Before you can do any searching with BT you must import at least one breeding.txt file. The import option is located under the "File" menu at the top of the screen. Select the breeding.txt file to import. This will build the database for searching. Please note: The importation can take up to 30 minutes depending on your computer. A "Done" dialog will appear when the process is complete. The main reasons for this slowness is that BT will allow more than one horse in the database with the same ID and all fields are indexed to make searching much faster. You will also note a slight delay when BT loads once the database is populated. This is because the dropdowns used to select sires are populated from the database. Using BreedingTool ----------------------- The main BT screen allows you to select any mix of sires/dam/sires/dam dam sires that are available in the database. The contents of the dropdown boxes are actually populated from the database, so if a sire does not appear under a certain heading, that means there are no horse in the database that contain him in the part of the breeding. Once you have selected the sires you wish for each part of the breeding press the "Search" button located at the bottom left of the screen. The grid in the middle of the screen will fill with all horses in the database that fit your search criteria and you will also see how many horses meet those criteria listed. You may click on the column name of any column to sort that column, clicking again will reverse the sort. You may view any horse in the grid by selecting the ID number of that horse and then pressing the "View Horse" button next to the "Search" button. Your default web browser will load, retrieve the horse's page from the sim site and display it. Please Note: Remeber the database can contain breeding information on horses that have been bred over. This search will only retrieve that current horse that has the ID number. You may also use this page to check the current breeding status of any sire that is listed in any of the sire dropdowns. Select the sire you wish to check in the dropdown and press the "View" button next to that sire's name. The sim's page for that sire's current breeding information will be displayed in your default browser. The second tab on the screen labeled "Sire of Sires" allows you to find all active son's of a sire and each of his progency that is in the database. Select a sire from the dropdown and press "Find Sons". The grid will fill with each son of the sire selected's horse that are in the database. The "View" buttons at the top of the grid allow you to launch the horse or sire's page on the sim in your default browser. That's it for now. More to be added. If you have suggestions please email me and I'll see if I can program them into the tool.