Application Programmers Interface?

Hi,

I was wondering if Football Manager has an API? I'd like to write my own features which would work on in-game data, such as player attributes. This would allow me to develop an automated way to do things that I do frequently, such as judging a players best position by summing his attributes in an automated way.

Whether this API runs as a separate app reading game files or inside the game in a plug-in model doesn't matter, the important bit is accessing game data.

My assumption is that such an API exists given there are some other tools out there such as FM Genie Scout.

John

No, it doesn't, but FM10 had a .NET framework written by someone within the community, and there are a few for FM11, although I don't think they've been updated for the most-recent patch.

Cheers x42bn6. There must be something available, FMRTE seems to work with 11.3

http://www.fmscout.com/a-FMRTE-for-FM2011.html

There must be some way to access the in-game data?

There's a way, but I don't think FMRTE uses a framework - ruci (or whoever the coder is now) probably wrote his own module to read the fm.exe process's memory.

Would be great if FM12 included an API. Just imagine what would be possible to do with an extensive API.

Yes FMRTE reads/writes the FM database direct from/to memory.

Hi,

I was wondering if Football Manager has an API? I'd like to write my own features which would work on in-game data, such as player attributes. This would allow me to develop an automated way to do things that I do frequently, such as judging a players best position by summing his attributes in an automated way.

Whether this API runs as a separate app reading game files or inside the game in a plug-in model doesn't matter, the important bit is accessing game data.

My assumption is that such an API exists given there are some other tools out there such as FM Genie Scout.

John

im not sure if Genie Scout is compatible with 11.3 yet but if and when it is, it already shows you the best position for each player. And if you dont agree with which attributes make up the positions, im sure you can edit it.

Also could you not use Genie as a base and modify it how you want it?

Yes FMRTE reads/writes the FM database direct from/to memory.

But how? To read the memory you must surely know something about its structure.

im not sure if Genie Scout is compatible with 11.3 yet but if and when it is, it already shows you the best position for each player. And if you dont agree with which attributes make up the positions, im sure you can edit it.

Also could you not use Genie as a base and modify it how you want it?

The Genie Scout options is a good one as it is a kind of API (even if not a published one). My only concern is it is kind of cheating. I wanted to automate something I do manually.

Do you know where its source code is? Has it been open sourced?

But how? To read the memory you must surely know something about its structure.

you could ask Barca for some help. he seems like a good guy who could point you in the right direction, and maybe even explain how FMRTE works, you can find him in the editors forum or the FMRTE website.

But how? To read the memory you must surely know something about its structure.

If you don't know where the data is stored, but do know the values you can search for them in memory. While this can be tedious to do, if you have a few players and know all their stats (including hidden, from the editor) it shouldn't take you too long (relatively speaking) to discover how this data is represented in memory.

This is no different from how trainers and some cheats (ever seen those "dongles" that allowed you to cheat on the old machines in the good old days?) work - someone searched for the memory location where the value is stored and the trainer allows you to edit it. The person discovering where the value is stored most likely just searched in memory until they found the correct storage location. Of course, if you get it wrong an modify the wrong memory address, you're liable to crash the PC.

There's no lack of suitable literature on the web, and as I'm not sure what the forum rules relating to "hacking" are, I won't elaborate here