New to FM

I've never played FM before I downloaded FM for iPhone....great game!!

I have a few questions.

1) Why can't guys get work permits? They don't have a club, they are free, and yet, they can't play for my team. I tried releasing a few players and resigning them, but no, they denied work permits.

2) Can some one explain to me what training benefits what categories? I get the obvious ones, like shooting would be affected by attack training and tackling would be affected by defensive training, but what about technical? I mean, the manual says technical refers to everything while the ball's at your feet...but thats like everything involved with attacking...so...huh? Is there some kind of break down?

3) Also, in the player search, is there any way to only search for free transfer players? I've been having a ton of luck finding 17 year olds with 7 star potential that are free. I have signed a few of them, but then i started running into the issue in question 1.

4) Does the game randomly create new players, or does the game have an existing database of new players?

1) Only those capped at international level 70% of the time get a work permit, normally if you keep trying they can get them but not alot.

2) I use this training as it is known to help all aspects of the game but yes training does affect stats and such but it isn't vital.

3) Put the value as 0 in the customise menu at the bottom right of the screen.

4) Yes, these are called regens and they are random every game.

1) Only those capped at international level 70% of the time get a work permit, normally if you keep trying they can get them but not alot.

2) I use this training as it is known to help all aspects of the game but yes training does affect stats and such but it isn't vital.

3) Put the value as 0 in the customise menu at the bottom right of the screen.

4) Yes, these are called regens and they are random every game.

Thank you!

But, for #3 - I have been using the customize menu, but the only option is $0-$160 and there are like 30 pages of players that aren't free that I have to scroll to to get to the free players. Another idea would be to make the navigation buttons at the top left loop...IE go from the start page to the last page when you hit << on the start page.

There should be a £0 one before that I think. If not just set the contract to expired.

There should be a £0 one before that I think. If not just set the contract to expired.

It's not there on my game. I tried that, but it returned no players.....yet when I search for -160 and scroll over 30 pages, there are a few players with free

Make the value for all, then have just contracts expiring, though if you have intrested ticked it will return fewer.

Signing youngsters from abroad before they've made a name for themselves is somewhat problematic because (as in real-life) there are regulations designed to encourage stability of life for these kids (as often a hot 17 year old player will often turn into a discared 18 year old ).

As such if they haven't established themselves as a real force in football you'll have to use your clubs reputation and try and persuade the authorities to allow an exception to get such a kid. In the second circumstances (which is where I expect you find yourself) its very hit and miss although being at a larger club (who will have more clout both in terms of reputation and legal representation) does help ...

PS - I'm guessing that you're at a smaller club and that 'interested' filter is set to on which is one of the reasons you're not seeing so many players when filtering?

I'm at a Coke League 2 team, so I have zero rep. However, I turned the interested filter off because, well, I wanted to see who was out there and try to bring the free players in with high wages. It's been working well as I should receive promotion after the season, but there are a few guys that are just sitting there and wont sign with any team. I get what you're saying about hot prospects just sitting there...sucks to be them (and us) I guess.

Still, it would be nice if we were able to search for only free players, like in the transfer value option add another option that is just "Free" or "0" to search for those players. Right now the smallest option is 0-160, which is good, but if I dump all positions for players 0-21 years old, then I get like 30 pages and the last 2-3 are the free guys. It wouldn't be a big deal if I could scroll backwards through the list from page 1 to page 30, but I can't.....yet....

BTW Marc, I'm a software engineer so I KNOW it's possible to make the list go to the last page from the first without any GUI redesign.....here's the code in C#.....

Pages[] pages = new Page[]; //array of pages

int currentPage = 0; //whatever page the user is lookin at

function backButton_Click()

{

if(pages.Length != 0)

{

if(currentPage == 0 && pages.Length > 1)

{

currentPage = pages.Length - 1;

}

else

{

currentPage = currentPage - 1;

}

goToPage(currentPage); //function call to display the new page

}

}

As a software engineer I'm sure you understand that the game is fairly complex in scope (well over 250,000 lines of code) and utilises a heck of a lot of memory allocation (if you're using to coding in C# then bear in mind that uses 'garbage collection' whereas FMHi uses manual memory allocation - its like the difference between driving an automatic and manual case, manual can get better performance but is harder to do).

Its that allocation which is the issue not the 'raw' displaying of the page - in order to restart the game we need to clear down the current instance TOTALLY, this is possible (although somewhat complicated to implement for reasons I won't go into - but generally involving pointers being stored hash lists used to optimise performance), however it leaves the memory in a very fragmented state.

This can mean that while there is adequate free memory in the system the individual chunks aren't sufficient for the game to operate correctly.

Think of it like a cake - someone requests half of it, no worries you cut it in half and give that half out, then people asks for a smaller slice, you cut that off and give it to them .... they decide they don't want it any more and return it.

Now you have half a cake available BUT if someone asks for half a cake you can't actually give it to them because its made up of two smaller pieces.

PS - C# looks a fairly cool language, I haven't used it in 'anger' but have dabbled a little in it on my 360 for sh*ts and giggles, what do you think to it? (and what do you do purely out of interest?).

250K is a rather large piece of software!

I've never developed for the iphone so I didn't know if it used a managed language or not. Either way, in an unmanaged language (ie: C++) it's possible to write a framework to manage garbage collection for you, although I don't know how well it would work on an iphone (since I've never developed for iphone).

Would it be beneficial (or even possible) to defragment the memory (maybe in a background thread, which brings a whole new set of issues itself) to improve memory management? Or if someone is requesting half of a piece of cake and you have only quarter pieces, could you not store a list of pointers for each quarter size piece of cake required to construct the half piece? I think a Facade pattern would be the design pattern of choice here. That almost sounds like what you are doing already actually. Just tell me you didn't have to write your own hash function! All classes in C# derive from an 'object' class which has the standard methods "ToString" and "GetHashCode" meaning....we never have to write hash functions! Yay!

I used C++ and Java in college and then got a job at a .NET company after I graduated. I love C#, but Java isn't bad. C++ is fun, although I've developed the bad habit of not destroying my instances since it's taken care of for me in .NET. The real beauty of .NET development is Visual Studio, probably the best IDE in my opinion...ESPECIALLY the debugger!

We do a lot of government contracting software, which is fun. When I started working here I was a hardcore java/mac guy, but Microsoft's development of the .NET framework and Visual Studio has really impressed me. They should stick to that and avoid the operating system market Viva Linus Torvalds!!

Yeah its 'possible' - but tbh its extremely beneficial to the games performance and stability that we control the allocation/deallocation directly.

I'd prefer to leave the nitty gritty of allocation to the system - simply put I generally take the approach that lower level memory allocation/deallocation is a full-time job to learn and master in itself - hence its fairly likely the chaps who created the hardware/SDK will do a more efficient job with it than I might

Good thinking! And yet another reason why I prefer managed code

We already do some defragmentation and 'cleaning up' behind the scenes already (when the 'warning' page pops-up) - but there's a limit to what the OS will let us do outside of the program itself (and Apples code will take memory from time to time without warning especially if you're say listening to music or a text/call comes in).

That can be rather frustrating I bet!

Heh - bear in mind we work in mysterious ways .... while the iPhone utilises C# for system related stuff its actually implemented largely in C++ using cross-platform practices. This has several benefits - for instance FMHi shares a lot of its codebase with the PSP game, it can also compile up and run natively on Windows and MacOS (allowing us to test on these platforms which is VERY useful for testing and debugging purposes).

Wait wait wait....the iPhone utilizes C#? An Apple product utilizes a Microsoft product? Is it the Armageddon?!?

It also importantly allows me to use the .NET ide which I love ... although the Shark debugging/profiling tool on Xcode should get an honory mention here imho

I haven't used Xcode in about 5 years, and I was pretty new to software at that point, thus I don't even remember Shark on Xcode! Had I know about it back in college, it probably could have saved me hours of debugging! I had to do my debugging the old fashioned way....write to the console and figure out where it quit writing to the console!

Heh - if you're a Linux chap are you aware there is an opensource 'mimic' of the .NET ide available? ... can't recall its name off hand, but if you're interested I'll look around and rummage up details (haven't used it myself yet, but it does intruige me somewhat).

Yeah, Mono, we've actually been watching Mono at work to see if it's worthy of enterprise applications. It's gettin close...

PS - I'm not trying to blind you with science about the game, but suffice to say its a complicated little bit of software and there are sensible technical reasons why I'm not wholly comfortable with attempting to reset the entire app after its started - it 'would' work some of the time, but due to the issues I've mentioned I don't think it'd be 100% stable which is what I aim for as much as possible (bear in mind the 'wriggle room' with memory on the iPhone can be rather tight at times, the game has to cope with starting up and discovering that there is as little as 6Mb of memory available on some devices, which can be 'fun' ).

As with any mobile device, memory can be hard to come by, so I completely understand. I can't help my curiosity about the nuts and bolts of a piece of software, especially since I use it about 23.5 hours out of the day! It is a quality product, I've only noticed a few bugs here and there (like sometimes the back button doesn't take you to the previous screen until the 3rd time you click it), which is to be expected.

It's always a pleasure to talk to a another developer, especially a developer of a game that I'm currently consumed with! I do have another question: at what point in the season are new players generated? Or are they just randomly generated throughout the season? And I've read that the ratings are an average of a set of underlying ratings that the users cannot see...any plans for making those ratings visible?

Sorry I meant Objective-C, all these new fangled languages are confusing me

I was gonna say...

If you'd be kind enough to let me know the screens involved I'll look into that

I'll post something here as soon as it happens again, you're idea of the problem sounds exactly like what's happening.

normally if that occurs its not a 'bug' per-se, but multiple copies of the 'same' page being stored because of developer stupidity (ie. me ).

Isn't that the definition of a bug....just sayin...

I'm sorry I'm lost a little .... which ratings do you mean? - match ratings? (ie. the 1-10 rating you get during a match), player attributes (ie. the various skills in 1-20 range) etc.?

I meant player attributes, sorry for the ambiguity!

Also, does a player's potential decrease/increase over time? Or can a scouts report be wrong? I did sign 2 goalies that were like 6 or 7 stars on potential, one of them had 4 stars as their current form and the other had 1 star. I have yet to use the 1 star guy since my 4 star guy has been winning player of the month for league 2, but when I went to look at the 1 star guy his potential had gone down to 4 stars....does that even make sense? lol

Thats ok - not a problem at all, just wanted to make sure I was answering the right question

Yes visible attributes are aren't a straight correlation of the behind the scenes values, they're an amalgum of things and also contain a factoring in of the players current form etc.

This makes things a little less predictable and more realistic imho, thus a 'hot young striker' might come on the scene and initially be though of as '**** hot' because he scores in his first few matches (hence slightly higher stats) - however over the course of the season he's less impressive and his stats might settle down to a lower level ... or perhaps not, its your job as a manager to ascertain who's a flash in the pan and who has real star quality and that isn't a clear cut thing all the time.

The behind the scenes 'potential' doesn't change but the visible one can increase/decrease over time for various reasons.

As a player ages if it looks like he won't make his potential then it'll be 'capped' - players RARELY meet their full potential unless they're in the right circumstances (decent amount of football at a reasonable competitive level, avoid long injuries etc.) ... sometimes it might then rise again if the player perks up and performs well, giving faith that perhaps he will achieve great things.

(and yes a scouts report does have the potential for error in it, although they are generally at least fairly accurate)

All of this = freakin awesome! I'm just used to more obvious (and easier) games that are mass produced on xbox...I'm not mentioning any names....EA. Since this is my first time to ever play FM, I'm still getting used to the nuances.

You guys should look into staff stuff though. I like the idea of hiring/firing scouts/staff and having a him have his own potential to reach, which is in the full version of FM if I'm not mistaken (I've never played it).

Anyway, thanks for your quick responses!

Its something I'm considering BUT its not a certainty to be implemented purely because I'm being very careful with regards to trying to managed complexity/speed of the game to keep things feeling fluid and fast in the game.

A mobile game has to have pick up and play appeal imho - that is you need to be able to do something 'worthwhile' in it if you have only got time for a 5-10 minute blast on it, as such I don't want to bog things down by slowing down the games processing or adding in too much complexity that it removes the fun from the game ..... the game will definitely improve and evolve, but its important to take things slow and get it right imho.

Oh I completely agree! You guys seem to be doing things the right way over there at SI. BTW, how many developers you got on this game?

Oh yeah, I heard the new OS for iPhones will allow apps to run in the background, any plans to utilize this? Incorporating notifications and such, I can see a really cool application of the game running the simulation in the background and notify you of transfer requests, player signings, and the start of games. It would be cool, although it seems like something like that would almost be an overhaul, which is something you are (correctly) trying to stay away from!

... when my brains exploded ...

BEEN THERE

Anyway, good quality game buddy!

Aaaaannndd the previously mentioned bug has happened:

Go to club > squad

Clear the team

Pick the team (the all at once thingy)

then the back button takes a 3 or 4 times to get away from the squad view.

It doesn't happen every time either, so....have fun with that one