Archive for the ‘Game Development’ Category
The most controversial of additions mentioned in the roadmap blogs, match plans are a certain addition for 1.3 and as such worth a detailed look. However much people dislike the concept of offline management in FML, it’s a necessity, and something which will remain. Addressing the reasons why people dislike this area of the game though is a major part of what the match plans are about. From both sides the current “AI manager” leaves a lot to be desired. For the casual manager it’s clear the AI manager fails to deliver a consistent match result and feels like a penalty for not being able to live online. For the more active managers it varies between being a…
This week we’ll take a look at the further advances in the match engine since the ’09 version, but before we do a bit of clarification. In light of Stephen’s comment last week I thought it important to clear up any misunderstanding about what a “new” match engine is. The match engine used in FM and FML is not totally rewritten each year, in fact it has not been rewritten since CM4. The new engine has had a complete rewrite of the underlying physics that govern the ball movement, but beyond that it’s improvements and additions to the previous version. Each version is built on top of those before it, not in place of. Whilst at times some portions may be…
With the feature lock of 1.3 imminent (apparently it will happen on a Friday, although which one is open to debate) I thought it would be a good time to start looking at some of the new features that it introduces. Post feature lock 1.3 goes into it’s bug fixing and QA stages, generally around 5 weeks, so although we can’t offer a definitive time of release that should give you a reasonable indication of when it will come out, assuming there’s no major dramas. Last week we had a brief look at the roadmap and the ‘official’ threads surrounding those features, as the majority of those items are part of the 1.3 rollout we’ll begin to look at each in more…
Finally the roadmap of future features, and an estimate of when they can be expected, has been revealed. Over three parts Marc Duffy’s blogs talk about some of the new features that will be coming to FML throughout the coming months. If you haven’t read them yet they can be found on the official Football Manager Live Blog. All I’m trying to say is that with the roadmap and the timelines within 4-5 months we’ll have removed pretty much all of the key issues that have been widely reported on the forums. It’s up to us somehow to convince you the long term subscriber that this will be good enough to attract new people to the game (and keep them) and somehow tempt old…
1.2 brings in a lot of changes, tweaks and fixes. Beyond the bigger issues that are easily identifiable I thought I’d alert you all to some of the minor changes that may have an affect on your game play. Important Note – 1.2 no longer allows you to change your name, so whatever it is at the time of rollout is what you will be stuck with (barring support involvement). Beyond that there are many changes, below I have separated some of them into relevant headings to better highlight how they may affect you. Managers Friendship is a two-way thing in this version. Firstly ‘Contacts’ have been renamed to the less corporate-sounding ‘Friends’, and the system now…
The long-anticipated 1.2 update for Football Manager Live is on its way: the wait will soon be over. It has been announced for 30 June 2009. Put it in your diaries, book the day off work, and get your teeth into the new features. One of the biggest headline changes this time is the new tactical interface (some call it the “wizard”) which, hopefully, will give users a whole new edge to their tactical play. With that in mind, what are the major changes on the cards, and how will they affect the way you play the game? We’ll go into more depth with the specific features over the next week or so in this column and in the podcasts. For now, however, he is a brief…
One of the biggest challenges for FML into the future will be making the game attractive to new users. The current trend of ever opening new worlds cannot continue for long, if nothing else the cost of hardware and staff to constantly grow the number of worlds will become prohibitive without a stable long term viable base. It’s therefore reasonable to expect that the day of no more new worlds is fast approaching, so attracting new users to older worlds is a necessity for long term survival. From day one of launch the exploit of new users has reared it’s head in a variety of ways, from the simple cases of prior knowledge of the data base and game mechanics through…
Player regeneration is one of the keys that make FML such an intriguing long term prospect, the unknown factor of player development is what keeps the majority of long term players involved. Since FML began all game worlds have started with a slice of SI’s latest real player database, approximately 50,000 players per world. These players are all real players from real teams somewhere in the real world, and the fact they are known in real life makes many of them very attractive to all types of players. Once a game world has launched though it cannot have it’s player database updated, so it needs to grow on it’s own for the longevity of the world. This occurs…
