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发表于 2009-10-30 14:53:36
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Prize Money
I’ve yet to add any prize money for the leagues I’ve added – I’ve not been able to find any info on what realistic prize money would be. To be honest, I’m not convinced there will be any for many of these leagues in real life!
Attendances
I’ve also left most of the attendances at the default figures. I’m not sure that the clubs would be financially viable in FM10 if I put in the correct figures – this is an area (along with prize money) where I need feedback from the community.
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Cup Competitions
I’ve been a follower of Mangotsfield United (Level 8) for many years, and one thing that struck me is that they take place in a significant number of cups, which presumably form a vital stream of revenue (bums on seats, beers in the clubhouse etc!).
To this end, I have added or edited the following xx cups:
The FA Vase
- features all clubs from Levels 9 and 10, and a random selection of Level 11 clubs. The round dates, prize money etc. should all be correct – however, there are a handful of reserve sides that play in Levels 9 and 10, and these will also feature in the FA Vase. There is no way round this at the moment - I could’ve added each club correctly, but of course the first promotion would’ve gone against eligibility criteria already. Again, a gameplay call I had to make.
The FA Cup
- I kept seeing people asking about the additional qualifying and preliminary rounds for the FA Cup, so I decided to have a go at editing it. This was not a trivial task, nor one I could absolutely nail to my satisfaction. Firstly, and most importantly I feel – there are the correct number of rounds now, which take place on the correct dates, and the clubs enter at the right stage winning the correct prize money. To achieve this, and to satisfy gameplay constraints, this new FA Cup features clubs from Levels 1 to 9. There would not be room to add all the Level 10 sides, nor time in the season to add more qualifiers. There IS room to add SOME Level 10 sides – so if you want to attempt this in your own game then go ahead! Finally – the FM10 editor currently only permits FOUR QUALIFYING ROUNDS… in the FA Cup there ought to be six. I have raised this with SI; in the meantime, you will have to make do with the real-life Third Qualifying Round being called the First Round; Premiership and Championship clubs enter in Round 5. This is ONLY an issue of names, and will hopefully be rectified – in the interim, I felt it was a sacrifice worth making. If it’s too problematic, I did this competition last and have the xml file from beforehand, i.e. with SI’s FA Cup still in – contact me if you want it. However, I won’t be offering any support for this file, and going on the edited FA Cup file (i.e. the one in the links above) will be the only one I make edits to.
Other cups
- County FA Cups: Most English counties have a local FA, and most of these run at least one County FA Cup for sides in their locality. I’ve added ALL of these where I could find information on them, AND where they mainly involved teams from the top two divisions, AND where said cup took place during the season. I used data from this season where possible and last season when not. Again, where possible, the match dates and times are correct.
- Level 6-8 cups: There are a number of cups for the Southern League, the Isthmian League and the Northern Premier League sides. These are all in. The biggest deviation from reality here was that I had to move the Northern Premier Chairman’s Cup to the start of the following season – it should take place between the Division 1 winners some time in April or May at the end of the season, but when I tried that the draw always picked the winners from the previous season (Durham and Retford) instead of this season’s winners.
- The added County Cups are not dynamic; i.e. it will usually be the same teams entered in these every season. The non-league League Cups should feature whatever teams are in the appropriate divisions/leagues.
Clearly, with so many cups the competition menu in FM10 now features scrolling! The cups are listed in game in a logical order – so the Premiership at the top and the county FA cups at the bottom. Where a county has two cups entered, the more senior one is listed first. I’ve also deactivated the Conference League Cup, which I don’t think is actually running any more.
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Reserve and Youth Leagues?
These haven’t been the focus for me, for three reasons: (i) I don’t find it very interesting, personally; (ii) I wanted to keep the speed up as much as possible – adding all these would only have slowed the game down; (iii) I wasn’t sure that the financial model in the game would cope with all the lowest league sides trying to run reserve leagues!
That said, the teams should have youth sides placed into the standard youth leagues. I suspect, though I’ve never checked, that at the start of the second season any human-controlled club will most likely get offered the choice to enter a reserve (or youth) side in competition…
Also, some non-league sides (Histon, King’s Lynn etc.) do enter reserve teams in playable divisions in Levels 9 and 10. These are included (and unfortunately also enter the FA Cup and FA Vase – I am only human, I’m afraid).
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Speed & Stability
If you’re still reading, well done! You’re clearly in this for the long haul. Fortunately, the file won’t make you suffer. I’ve tested this on my new rig: a Pentium D running at 2.8GHz, with 1 GB of RAM (two when I get my motherboard to recognise the second stick…). I selected only England, but all 10 levels (including all the additional cups), with a small database (15,000 players).
Anyway, I digress. It took me 2hrs 40mins to holiday through to May 31st, 2010. This compares quite favourably with the standard SI England league structure, which took around an hour and a half. Considering you’re adding so many leagues and cups, that’s a pretty acceptable performance hit. If you’re actually playing, I’m not sure how much you’d notice the difference. The biggest impacts on Game Speed will be the number of divisions etc running in full detail, and the database size.
This file has been run through until September 2012, i.e. three and a bit seasons, with no crashes.
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What you can do to help, and how to do it
I’m very receptive to implementing further changes and tweaking what is in the file. I am also keen to make this into *the* definitive England xml file. If you have anything to contribute, here’s how to do it. I’m sorry for making this so draconian and specific, but the file is really rather large, and I can foresee adding in all the extra stuff will be quite a task. Also, bear in mind that issues with the file may actually be representative of bugs or limitations in FM10.
*For general submissions/corrections etc:
Please email me at nonleaguenikATgmail.com (replace AT with @). I will need as many details as it is humanly possible to give!
*If you want to submit staff or players for addition to the file, probably the best thing to do is discuss it with me first. This is probably the most simple way to produce data that I can merge into the main file:
1. Load the FM10 editor
2. Load the database
3. Make your changes
4. Save the file.
5. Email it to me at nonleaguenikATgmail.com (replace AT with @). Please include evidence for the inclusions (i.e. a link to a squad list on a website etc.)
DON’T make these sort of edits to main file if you’re going to submit them to me, as it will be impossible for me to identify the code in the xml file and copy it over. If the players/staff are at a club which does not feature in the original SI database, just leave that blank, send me the custom xml and tell me the club (and what division they are in) and I will assign them manually.
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As more things come up, I will continue to update this post with further/improved information. This has been an epic project, and I hope you can all forgive me for my decisions when I’ve had to make calls for what makes the best gameplay (both in Season 1 and beyond). Enjoy, and any questions – fire away. I’ll be the one with the bleeding fingers sobbing quietly in the corner!
Nik |
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发表于 2009-10-30 14:52:26
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发表于 2009-10-30 15:02:07