League Swap Guidance - Help Please

Have any editing experts got any dos and donts for me?

I’m working on swapping the Scottish structure with the Spanish one.

I read Dave’s league swap guide which gave a good start, but I’m sure there’s some changes to the new editor and its now easier to do.

Couple of things:

> Do I still need to manually change a club's “last position” and “last division”? I think I read that the editor’s Swap Function now takes care of this.

> Do I still need to manually delete competition histories? This caused a problem with comps like English Charity Shield where last season’s league and cup winners play. Is this still the case?

> If I change League Names in the Editor, but I also have DDT file to correct Comp Names – which takes priority? Will the DDT overwrite any changes I make within the Editor?

Any other pointers from people who've done similar things would be greatly appreciated.

Once complete, we will have an interesting looking Scottish set-up.

Scottish Premiership (20 teams) = SPL + 8 x SFL1

Scottish Championship (22 teams) = 2 x SFL1 + SFL2 + SFL3

4 x Divisions 1 A to D (20 teams each) = Highland League, East of Scotland, South of Scotland and Selected Junior Clubs

There is also relegation from the Divisions 1 so there will be new entrants into the leagues each season.

Also am working on graphic packs which will include logos and kits for the teams who don’t have any in-game yet.

Want to get this up and running so any help would be much appreciated.

You relly should give up the league swapping thing, as SI has destroyed it!!!!

Give up? Giiiiiiiiiiiivvvvvvvvvvvvvve Up?

I didn’t get to where I am today by giving up.

Come on. This has got to be achievable. Its what the ‘Swap’ team function is for……… Isn’t it?

I think what Veg meant is that sometimes, after swapping teams, you find out that the league you picked can not be chosen, FM just crashes.

Sometimes league swapping works, others not. I don't know why.

I think Veg means that SI have taken our opportunity of making unplayable leagues playable away. Don't know why since we were such a helpful bunch. Then again Cadijk is right too, we should strive for some form of swapping, moan about it at very opportunity(which I will most certainly do) and make sure people understand that they are killing of a community that brought forward some very interesting mods, most prominently, so I like to think, the African Continent patch (not mine, but the one that followed. The one that was truly awesome and almost professional).

I think Veg means that SI have taken our opportunity of making unplayable leagues playable away. Don't know why since we were such a helpful bunch. Then again Cadijk is right too, we should strive for some form of swapping, moan about it at very opportunity(which I will most certainly do) and make sure people understand that they are killing of a community that brought forward some very interesting mods, most prominently, so I like to think, the African Continent patch (not mine, but the one that followed. The one that was truly awesome and almost professional).

You are right but how can you swap the leagues if you cant change the nation but don't worry the way SI are headed the FM 2010 will be without the editor so we wont be able to change anything and no league swap crying

If they take away the editor I highly doubt I would buy the game. Does anybody know of any leagues that can be swapped for sure yet?

Okay so is this doomed to failure before i really start?

I mean, I can swap teams around - that does work. Can't i do anything else though?

Why won't my league names change? Doesn't the Editor actually change them?

I can change the nationality of the Spanish comps to have Scottish nationality. But is there something not apparent that will stop this working?

If SI have disabled this, why?

Just trying things out.

I think:

> I can change nation of Spanish Comps to Scottish

> I can create DDT file to rename, e.g. La Liga to Scottish Premiership

> When you are starting a game, the amended leagues do still appear under 'Spain' when selecting leagues, but when you get into the game everything is indeed Scottish and the comps have indeed been renamed.

Make sense to continue?

Try to play a season and start playing the second season then you'll see what I mean

This whole thing has happened to me before. With Tiger Woods series by EA.

In 06 we had an 06 architect for making custom courses for the game..

In 07 we still had an 06 architect but we could easily add custom courses.

In 08 we still had the 06 architect but it was almost IMPOSSIBLE to add a custom course. The servers went from 80% custom courses/20% stock courses to about 2% custom! from 07 to 08.

Why does this keep happening to me???

Ok this is going to be a longish post.

You CAN do a league swap... but it requires a hell of a lot of effort, is incredibly time consuming, and may still have some issues. I have managed to add an Egypt league in place of South Africa. But the way to do it is to RENAME (not swap) everything. Basically you rename all the South african teams, cities, players, staff, stadiums, media,.... with Egyptian teams, cities, players, staff, stadiums, media,.. and vice versa. You need to rename all the teams, cities, staff in the database in order for the game to accurately reflect an 'egyptian' scenario. This method will also ensure that regens have egyptian names rather than south african names.

If your simply trying to create a playable league, then it can be achieved fairly efficiently. But if you want to include real players with real details, then that will require a serious amount of effort.

Once you have amended the editor by doing the renaming on both sides, you then need to swap graphics (e.g. Kaiser Chiefs, with ID no 000000001, will have been renamed to Zamalek. Howeverm the graphics will still all be the Kaiser chiefs ones. You simply need to add in the Zamelek grpahics and name them 000000001 (or whatever the correct ID was)

I have managed to create the league and have run it on holiday for 10yrs without any crashes. As I mentioned, all regens come through with Egyptian names.

Loads of efforts, but ultimately very satisfying.

Now some other points to note. The league structure will, obviously follow South Africas.

I am not sure if you renamed say the Scottish league with an Egyptian league, and then tried to make this an 'African' league, whether that would work. i have not tested this.

Renaming the players was the hardest part. there are so many. You dont have to change their cities (as this is doen when you rename the cities anyway). I ended up using a random name generator which i populated with Arab names and used that to help me name the players.

The one thing I have not been able to do is to work out how to sort out the facegen so that the regens are more region appropriate. At present the regens are, as expected for the south african league, black. This obviously is an issue when playing an Egyptian league wehre the majority of players would be arab. Still trying to sort this one out. Any help would be appreciated.

O.T. sorry, just noticed your very comprehensive post now. Thats one heck of an effort you've put in there, I'd not have the patience for renaming the approx 160 clubs i moved!

Good work there by you though.

nice post old timer. will be trying to do a league swap with india to include a playable filipino league. the hard part like you said will be creating all the players.

Will edt files work.

Sorry don't have FM09 yet.

hi all, just did a quik league swap which was succesful.

So was just wondering if its possible to change the flag at the start of the game where you select playable nations? lets say change the singapore league flag to the vietnam league flag? is this possible at all?

Yes Fred you need to create an XML File with the picture of the Vietnam Flag in a folder of graphics, same as for a logo pack. So basically you give Vietnam flag the Unique ID of Singapore

As for the league swap and making the nationality etc say Scotland (OP) just change the name of the Nation itself, so change Spain to Scotland, if you wish to make Scotland and Spain the same rep then copy the old Scotland's details across, it is a fair amount of work, but it does work.

Basically to do a league swap properly, i guess we have to swap countries also. When you say copy the details across do you mean manually doing it and typing every stat and info in. or is there a drag and drop option wer u take a file and just find a replace certain things? cheers for your help.

just tried swapping countries. looked good at the start but because data editor doesnt let me change some of the info of the the countries im stuck with the domestic leagues on the wrong sides as well as the player pools on the wrong side. it was fun while it lasted.

What do you mean leagues on the wrong sides? And what details would it not let you change?

lets say u click on the domestic clubs on the left nav of a country you get the old countries teams i just swapped.

It also seems data manager wont let u edit a countries players pool?

What do you mean leagues on the wrong sides? And what details would it not let you change?

The clubs all need to be swapped individually and as for the players you also nneed to swap them.

A League swap is a massive change and not much you can do about it to make it easier.

yeah it is a big job. i did a league swap. well i replaced the singapore league with the recently newly made filipino premier league replaced all the singapore teams with filipino teams and then edited all players countries and languages to filipino categories and now have a working filipino league.

still have a few glitches to iron out like theres a team which i have edited name shortname and 6 letter name but when you play the game it still comes up as the original name.

i also have a team thats generating japanese youth players instead of filipino ones (it used to be a japanese team in the s league) but ive changed the stadiums to be in philippines so not sure why it keeps doing that.

Ffred for some reason some of the Asian teams names are hardcoded into the system, no idea why this is. i would try doing a swap instead of renaming it.