[FM15] [WIP] The Three Nations Project: A Fictional Database

THE CONCEPT

Three completely fictional nations, isolated from the rest of the world, only allowing players from within those three nations to compete. Each has their own domestic league structure and cup competition, as well as Champions League-style competitions between representatives of each of the three nations.

This is an ambitious long-term edit with no deadline, with a view to creating an interesting alternate world setup which contains genuinely fictional players, teams and staff, rather than the in-game's reskinned versions of the real world.

PLANNED DATA

Nation 1: MARBLEMOOR (replacing Antigua)

Capital: Marblemoor City

Number of teams: 64

League Structure: Four tiers of 16 teams (Division 1, Division 2, Division 3, Division 4). Three promoted, three relegated between divisions

Cup Competition: Straight knockout involving all teams.

Nation 2: FRANXIA (replacing Guadeloupe)

Capital: Belfort

Number of teams: 32 + non-league

League Structure: Two regional conferences (French region, English region), with a playoff between the winners to decide the champions. Bottom club from each conference is relegated.

Cup Competition: Straight knockout involving all league teams.

Nation 3: NEW ELIZABETH (replacing Montserrat)

Capital: Freckleton

Number of teams: TBC

League Structure: TBC

Cup Competition: TBC

Every league team starts with 30 fictional players, as well as managers, staff and owners. In addition, free agents (players and staff) of all ability levels for every country are created, leading to a total world of 3500+ fictional people in the DB.

PLANNED ARTWORK

• Nation flags.
  
• Competition and team badges.
  
• Home and away kits for all teams.
  
• League and club-specific ad boards.
  
• Facepacks for all fictional players.
  
• Non-game background "factfiles" on all clubs.
  

CURRENT PROGRESS (10/04/15)

• Marblemoor League & Cup Structure complete, with all clubs, cities and stadia created.
  
• All flags created.
  
• Map of region created for Franxia & Marblemoor.
  
• Fixing club kits following move from FM14 to FM15. Current status: All D1 & D2 clubs complete. D3 in progress, complete up to Denletham Villa.
  
• Creation of home and away kits with Smart Shirt Designer. Current status: All D1 & D2 clubs complete. D3 clubs up to New Gare Town complete.
  
• Creation of badges. Current status: All D1 & D2 & D3 complete. D4 in progress, clubs up to Denletham Eagles complete.
  
• Creation and implementation of ad boards. Current status: All D1 & D2 complete. D3 in progress, clubs up to Yewham Estate complete.
  
• Creation of non-game club factfiles. Current status: All D1 clubs complete, and visible online HERE. D2 in progress, complete up to Gare AFC.
  
• Creation of club history, records and previous league tables: Complete for all four divisions.
  
• Creation of cup history: Not yet started.
  
• Creation of player data. Current status: All D1 & D2 complete. D3 in progress, complete up to Central.
  
• Creation of staff data. Current status: All D1 & D2 complete. D3 in progress, complete up to Central.
  

Please do not request release dates. This is a long-term WIP, and I will release if and when I feel things are ready, including anyone interested in testing. I do hope to have an FM15 release for the first complete DB, and feel this is an achievable target, although will not hurry things if FM16 starts looming on the horizon. This is a one-man project undertaken in my spare time, so progress is likely to be slow but steady- I will ensure I keep this topic updated. I have previously created numerous smaller fictional databases for previous versions of the game, as well as various graphics packages, including for Milo Bloom's excellent American Projects DB back in FM12/13. I was inspired to undertake this by the tales in LewisQ's thread in GD.

Any assistance with graphics, particularly with facepacks and ad boards, is more than welcome- please do get in touch if this is of interest to you. Words of encouragement and signs of interest are also certainly welcome.

Nice, will definetly test it when its out. Whats the country and league reputations of the fictional countries may I ask?

It is a nice idea and an impressive work that you will have to do...

I hope you will make it. Creating all the players will take you a lot of time . And I don't even think about the artwork !

Heh, the artwork is there for when I need a rest from entering in all of the players!

Marblemoor's national rep is 7500, the same as England's, with teams in the league modelled on the reps of the English league, on a scale from 2500 to 8500.

The other two nations will have slightly lower national reps, although I haven't edited those yet- somewhere between 6000-7000. The top teams in each nation will also be somewhere around 8000-8500, and the lower end no lower than 2500.

Looking good

Wonderful! I love the idea. Facepacks scare me, but I'm willing to offer adboard + some other graphic help if you still want it.

Good luck with this... it is a huge project!

Just updated the original post with progress- I'm at a rate of adding a couple of teams worth of players each night, as well as doing a little bit of testing, and I think things are moving quite nicely- the badge creation is now keeping pace with the player creation.

For the time being, I'm only adding very basic information about the players- name, club, DOB, hometown, height and weight- and letting the game generate the rest, which it seems to be doing reasonably well- once all of the entries are in place, I can look at giving the players and clubs a bit more individuality, setting them positions and particular strengths to make it a proper standard DB, rather than letting the game decide things at random with each new save.

With regards to artwork, if people are interested in helping with adboards, all I need is links to boards for fictional companies that I can save, and I'll do the rest. If you want them to be spoofs or satirical ones, more the better, or even if you want to advertise something yourself, please feel free. I've reached out to the Real Time Football Manager project, and am pleased to be able to include a few boards for that in the pack. Right now, I've got 42 different boards which sounds a lot but really isn't when there are 64 clubs to give 10 each to- that's a lot of repetition. I don't mind repeating boards, but the more variety of got, the more individual each club will be.

I figure I'll also give a quick list of all of the teams in Marblemoor, to whet your appetite a little:

=================================================================
DIVISION ONE                                         DIVISION TWO
=================================================================
Aunway Boys Club                                   Arnett Station
Bladeley                                          Backerhampstead
Bowminster Ash                                 Bowminster Casuals
Cedar Court City                                Brockway Athletic
Denletham                                           Brockway Park
East Munstead Town                             Cedar Court Rebels
Frixbourne Reds                                     Coombe County
Goldbridge International                                 Gare AFC
Lassiter Park                                         Gough River
Marblemoor City                                   Highwater Falls
Marblemoor Ravens                               Morristone Rovers
Morris Baysiders                                Old Morristonians
Morristone United                           South Marblemoor City
Port Samson Town                           Twerton Manor Cascadia
Rexmire Vale                                    Vinchester United
Whiteacre Bay                                  Wilcox Engineering
=================================================================
DIVISION THREE                                      DIVISION FOUR
=================================================================
Bowminster Blues                                  Cornerside Road
Central 2000                                     Denletham Eagles
Denletham Villa                                 Dewcaster Vandals
Frixbourne Wanderers                              Goldbridge High
Gare Gremlins                                          Iffhampool
Marblemoor Phoenix                            Lallenhall Athletic
Morris Bay Naval Forces                          Molonia Crescent
Moose Valley                               North Eckley Islanders
Morris Bay United                                 Phillipsborough
New Gare Town                                  Queambreagh Forest
Park Street Stars                                Royal Morristone
PlayNet Communications                      South Eckley Pioneers
South Eckley Originals                              St. Michael's
Whiteacre Bay Whites                             Upper Bowminster
Yewham Estate                                    Village of Light
Zero Squad Morristone                        Zero Squad Whiteacre
=================================================================

Man, this is amazing! Any chance you could put up some shots of the artwork?

Zombie Squad

Gremlins, Village of Light

Very odd names. I am curious to see the team behind this

Zombie Squad

Gremlins, Village of Light

You should have added that kind of clubs in your Gaïa update, you foolish chocolate bar

Will be following this with a lot of interest - I've been trying to build similar for about six months now, and have made some strides in FM15. In fact, you've inspired me to start a new thread about it in this similar style...once I get the information up to as good a standard as you have of course.

Have to say, hats off to you for committing to all the creation of players, and all the artwork that goes along with it. I've managed to create all the teams, cities and structures for the World, but haven't even started on setting the team colours yet, as I found that immensely long-winded in FM14. God knows what I'll do when it comes to the players!

Hah, as I say, the artwork is mostly there to give me a break from just mindless entering of players.

In terms of the player and staff names themselves, I used this site to order a few thousand generated names, which also gave them their height/weight/DOB.

Otherwise, a lot of the content is generated randomly by Excel documents, using the LOOKUP or RANDBETWEEN functions, where a cell is randomly filled from a selection of choices or a range- this was the case for the players hometowns, the kit colours and styles, stadium names, divisions, team nicknames etc. Obviously, there's a little bit of a tweaking required, especially if you notice some of the player names cropping up over and over, but it's a solid enough base for basic data. I'm also doing a little bit of testing with randomly assigning positions, but for the moment I'm letting the game generate those on game start, which means they're different each time- I keep ending up with squads of 30 that only have one or two goalkeepers.

A few of the club badges (the centre is Morristone United):

A few of the ad boards:

And finally, the one existing "factfile":

I haven't started on any of the kits yet- for some reason my SSD has decided to die a death. I'll have to see if I can get hold of it again.

Sounds fantastic

Love the graphics.

Not a big fan of some of the club names - the zombie clubs, for example, sort of break the suspension of disbelief for me.

HOWEVER, great work mate!

Love the graphics.

Not a big fan of some of the club names - the zombie clubs, for example, sort of break the suspension of disbelief for me.

HOWEVER, great work mate!

For what it's worth, the Zombie Squad clubs do have a backstory to the name- they're not actually meant as zombies, and are represented in-game as "ZS Morristone" and "ZS Whiteacre", so hopefully it's not too intrusive

Let's be positive and enjoy your free time far from the editor (because of the new bug from 15.1.4 version) to do a lot of artwork

Heh, you read my mind.

Is there a site where we can read more factfiles and see more graphics, etc?

At the moment, there's not, but it's a good idea, particularly since I have started fleshing out the background of the clubs a bit more with the factfiles now. I'll have a think about getting some kind of site together later this week.

Excellent!

So, as stated in the OP, it looks like I've lost a bunch of player data that's unretrieveable. This means that although I'm now going back over myself, at least I am starting to edit again.

OP has been updated with a link to factfiles for all of the Marblemoor Division One clubs, for a bit of background. Very basic site at the moment, but progress is coming along with getting players re-entered, so I'm focussing on that more.

Here is a set of 15 adboards, which you are free to use for any purpose https://www.sendspace.com/file/prlfh4

If they're any use to you, I can make many more, but just putting a sample out there first.

Enjoyed the factfiles.

Stadiums are huge - what is the national population?

LazyFig - that's something I need to figure out a bit further down the line, though I'm aiming at slightly bigger than the UK. At the moment I haven't played with the attendance figures outside of the stadiums themselves, so testing has them all getting somewhere around 10-15k regardless of stadium size.

Levigu- I like those ad boards a lot, I'm definitely keen on using them if that's cool, and if you've got any more you'd like included, by all means send them this way. The more the better.

As for everyone, to celebrate getting to the end of entering the Division One team players (well, re-entering), a little sneak preview picture:

There you've got a shot of the Marblemoor Ravens stadium, with the season predictions and the Marblemoor national team generated at the game start, just to give you an idea of the kinds of names that the DB has included.

Really great work. Looking forward to playing this!

Is there still time for me to be included in the DB?

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.

This is my 2,000th Forum Post, so I figure it's a good time for a bit of an update.

• Player Database: I'm very close now to having the Player DB back to where it was before the hotfix killed so much of it (Cedar Court Rebels in D2)
  
• Staff Database: This has now caught up with the Player DB, so I've started putting staff and players for teams in at the same time.
  
• Club Badges: Nearly completed all clubs in Marblemoor Division Two.
  
• Club Kits: Continuing to fix them after the change from FM14. Also just started creating D1 teams with kits from the Smart Shirt Designer.
  
• Club Factfiles: Started with the creation of Division Two factfiles.
  
• Stadium Adboards: Started with the creation of Division Two stadia.
  
• NEW FEATURE: Club & League History: I have created a basic league table generator in Excel, which I'm using to create ten years of history for the league. This ties in with the factfiles, is shown in-game and should help provide some background, depth and a better idea of the kind of club they are. All clubs will have a founding date, as well as stats and records for the seasons they have competed. The history is as follows:
  - 2004/05: Marblemoor Division One founded with 16 teams.
  - 2006/07: Marblemoor Division Two founded with 16 more teams.
  - 2008/09: Marblemoor Division Three founded with 16 more teams.
  - 2010/11: Marblemoor Division Four founded with 16 more teams.
  At present, I have input all league data for clubs to the end of 2009/10.
  

There is still an issue with the game generating players with female names, but SI don't appear to have any kind of fix for this in the works. I'll keep bugging them about it. Otherwise, progress is coming along slowly and steadily.

In terms of adding forum users to the game (as I have done previously with other databases), I am happy to accept submissions, but only want a bare minimum of information. I will put these people into the database as free agents eligible for the clubs to sign, and treat them as any other player in terms of CA/PA/positions- ie, it'll be randomly generated when I get to that point of editing. If you want to be in, just give me the following details- anything further will be ignored:

First Name:

Surname:

Date of Birth:

Height:

Weight:

If you are over playing age, I will include you as a staff member.

Finally, a screenshot of a random club page:

I'll add myself

First Name: James

Surname: Richardson

DoB: 06/09/1990

Height: 6ft 3

Weight: 13st

I've made myself a bit beefier.

By the way, cracking effort so far, will be interesting to see what this turns out to be over the coming months/years.

First Name: James-Robert

Surname: Knight

Date of Birth: 31/03/1996

Height: 178cm

Weight: 120kg

deleted

Can we have a look at the maps, flags, etc?

Oh and more club fact files would be cool!

And, I'll add myself...

First Name: Aldo

Surname: Zaratan

Date of Birth: 13-08-1991

Height: 183cm

Weight: 95kg

First Name: Jonathan

Surname: Lehmann

Date of Birth: 04/04/1990

Height: 178

Weight: 68

I've updated the OP with current progress.

There'll be some new factfiles when I've completed the Second Division ones- at the moment I'm working my way through them. I can, however, give a sneak preview of a few of the kits, as well as a map of Marblemoor.

Map linked due to it being a large image: http://i.imgur.com/8gcgDbC.png

Frixbourne Reds:

Morristone United:

Goldbridge International:

Very cool!

What did you use to make the map?

What did you use to make the map?

I'm also curious to know this as I'm working on something similar - mapping it all out to fit the data I've (randomly) created is going to be "fun"...

Honestly? Paint Shop Pro and a steady hand- I have one master map of the whole region that is a massive picture (there are ultimately seven or eight nations), and just took the Marblemoor part of it. At the moment, Franxia also has the same level of detail as Marblemoor's map, while New Elizabeth and the other nations are a blank canvas.

The outlines of the nations were actually traced versions from real landmass borders- in fact, they're districts of Manchester, although they've been be repositioned in relation to each other, resized and rotated as to be unrecognisable. If I remember rightly, Marblemoor was loosely based on the shape of the Wigan district. Otherwise various things like towns and cities, the flag, the fog of war, the rivers (not shown on this copy) are just on different layers that can be shown/hidden as required.

Most of the artwork is from PSP. The kits come from the Smart Shirt Designer, and the flags from a piece of software called Flagmaker, with the shading added in PSP.

Double post.

Just a thought... If you created players by duplicating a real player instead of starting from scratch it would save you a lot of time as they would already have positions, etc set. You could do a player search with defined parameters and then randomly duplicate.

Just a thought... If you created players by duplicating a real player instead of starting from scratch it would save you a lot of time as they would already have positions, etc set. You could do a player search with defined parameters and then randomly duplicate.

I may try this approach once I start one of the other nations, although a lot will depend on whether it's any quicker to keep filtering in the editor for every single player. I'll have a play around and see whether it's worthwhile, but it's not something I'm sure I want to switch half-way through the creation of Marblemoor, as it could end up with an unbalanced DB.

I have also now updated the original post with the current status of the edit.

Also, the two Zombie Squad teams have now been renamed to Zero Squad- I had no idea there was actually a band named Zombie Squad, and that link wasn't intentional.

Have you been testing the leagues so far? I've just transferred my custom league from FM14 to FM15 and have noticed in testing that the AI clubs don't sign any players!

Have you been testing the leagues so far? I've just transferred my custom league from FM14 to FM15 and have noticed in testing that the AI clubs don't sign any players!

Can't speak for Lawlore, but I did something similar to his, and in the initial testing (not that I was looking for it specifically) I did notice that teams were signing players. Too many in fact, as I'm planning on denying any transfers from outwith the fictional nations

Can't speak for Lawlore, but I did something similar to his, and in the initial testing (not that I was looking for it specifically) I did notice that teams were signing players. Too many in fact, as I'm planning on denying any transfers from outwith the fictional nations

I've got a similar setup in place to forameuss- none of the sides sign anyone from outside the three nations, as though they exist in a bubble. There is an OK transfer market in testing, though it's a bit slow- I'm hoping once I get most of the player data in and start to give the sides themselves a bit more of an individual identity this might create supply and demand. The market does seem to pick up a few years in, once there are more regens around, so in part it may also be to do with the length of the essentially new contracts players have, just keeping things quiet at the outset.

Great work this Lawlore, looking forward to giving it a go.

and I always put my lads into some of my games so here go a few more for your pot....

First Name: Gregory (Greg)

Surname: Alderton

Date of Birth: 01/08/1994

Height: 190.5cm

Weight: 90.3kg

Place of Birth: Crewe (UK)

Position: DC/DR

Best Attributes: Positioning, Anticipation

Favoured People: Jude Alderton, Matthew Alderton, Martin Alderton

First Name: Jude

Surname: Alderton

Date of Birth: 29/04/1997

Height: 180.3cm

Weight: 83kg

Place of Birth: Crewe (UK)

Position: AMC average AMR also

Best Attributes: Creativity, Passing

Favoured People: Greg Alderton, Matthew Alderton, Martin Alderton

First Name: Matthew (Mattie)

Surname: Alderton

Date of Birth: 14/03/1999

Height: 186cm

Weight: 88kg

Place of Birth: Crewe (UK)

Position: DMC/MC

Best Attributes: Tackling, Positioning, Stamina

Favoured People: Jude Alderton, Greg Alderton, Martin Alderton

And may as well add me as a manager

First Name: Martin

Surname: Alderton

Date of Birth: 04/07/1968

Height: 182cm

Weight: 95.3kg

Place of Birth: Chester (UK)

Position: Manager

Best Attributes: Tactical, Man Management

Favoured People: Jude Alderton, Matthew Alderton, Greg Alderton

Cheers CF2, you're all in

Have you solved yours problems with unsaved changes in the db with the newest update ?

I've caught up and passed where I was with the data that I lost, although every time I save I do still have to create a new file, which is a bit weird.

I've caught up and passed where I was with the data that I lost, although every time I save I do still have to create a new file, which is a bit weird.

I'm curious as to how you're going about adding all these players in the game. Is there a way to import sheets from excel into the editor that I'm missing? Or are you in the editor adding one by one?

Nah, I'm inputting them one by one by one by one by one. It's not a fast process.