'Read from 3D image' kit data toggle

[Jamaicaman90]

This is a little bit of a complicated one to explain, but with AI image technology where it is a feasible feature to implement, I would hope.

We all like to spice up our saves as they go through the years, particularly if we're building up a club from obscurity, and even more so in an obscure league. I am sure that the dev team are sick of requests like 'add a feature to create new kits every season' from myself and others.

How about an alternative? People use tools or even manually create custom kits for their clubs and rivals, but sometimes not until they are fully emotionally invested in their saves. I myself must be on my 7th or 8th revision in my 20 year save so far in FM22 with my custom club, and have created custom kits for every league opposition in Wales for some time. However, part of the process is extremely manual when I believe it shouldn't be, and that's setting up the game to recognise the colour scheme of the kits to manage the in-match indents as well as manage clashes.

Couldn't this be automated at this point? If custom kits are added to the game files, can't the game use AI to read the colours (and general patterns to work out if it's a striped, hooped, chequered etc. kit) and do all this without the need for lengthy pre-game editor work or in-game editor adjustments? It could be a toggle function to allow players to manually manage it if they so wish (if the AI fails with a complex kit or if players wish to add alternative configurations), but it seems to me at this stage to be a lot of busy work being done for little benefit, while I would also imagine making it easier for non-tech savvy players to integrate custome kits into their saves using growingly-popular tools may draw players away from plug-and-play authentical-but-unofficial kit packs for teams that aren't licenced by SI.

To make the case for this as strong as possible, I will also add a business reason to consider this. A percentage of players will not buy the game until late in the cycle because they don't want to start a save until the community has created all of the editor data content that will make their game more true to real life, because once they start their save they are locked out of being able to have those changes done for them without the use of the in-game editor. If players can start a save knowing that the kit data can be changed on the fly and will not leave them with messy mismatches between kit packs and kit data causing clash issues, more of them may buy the game on release. I couldn't begin to guess the numbers on that, but perhaps something to consider if the expense of implementation would be paid off by the increased earlier sales?

[wfm18]

I think having such a feature would speed up the process of adding kits to the database quite quickly. Every year, I add around 1500+ kits manually into the database with the editor. For me it's not only about using AI, but accelerating workflow when making changes to kits in the FM Editor.

Currently (sorry for the Dutch language) I have to click each field separately and change it accordingly. Of course, I can reselect a color I used previously, but it takes quite some time to change all colors on all different items.

Think about the situation I select all kits, there is no way for me to change the yellow/gold color for all at once, or all whites to another color. It's simply missing in the bulk edit functionality. Also, changing the background color in here is not working, it only shows what is filled in for each individual item.

 

Having AI would even accelerate quicker, but adding simple bulk edit functionality makes total sense. I understand that AI might be difficult to extract the right kit pattern for example, but it could work easily when you for example only can use it when the kit is empty, it adds a new kit from scratch and you can still make changes afterwards. It's about creating a super-fast foundation to work with, including the correct colors.

Edited November 23, 2022 by wfm18

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the detailed suggestion. This will be put under consideration by the developers.