[FM20][GUIDE] FM20 Skinning Guide

[TCSSkin]

Probably the most common question I receive as a Skinner is how to make my own skin, and it’s a very tough question to answer because there’s a massive lack of documentation around with for FM Skinning. This is due to skins using XML, which is a very flexible and extendable language, meaning every XML program is very unique.

This guide will break skinning down into a handful of parts, and I’m going to try and keep it progressive meaning easier guides are early on, meaning all the coding and panels part will come at the end. If there’s requests for it I might also deep dive into certain panels to explain why they work they do. Part one will cover extracting the default game files, and Part 2 will cover making your first base skin , Part 3 will cover fonts and we’ll go from there.

Part 1: Extracting the Default Game Files

[TCSSkin]

FM21 Skinning Guide Part 1: Extracting the Default Files

Part 1 of this guide will cover how to extract the default game files. This gives us access to all the files used in the game, whether it be graphics or panels for skins, or even the 3D Match Engine, which are stored in a proprietary file format (.fmf). Thankfully, Sports Interactive provide us with the tools to open these files in the Resource Archiver. You can find a guide on how to install this here.

What we’ll need:

· An up to date version of FM2021

· The FM21 Resource Archiver 

NOTE: If you are editing the Touch Mode then replace any references below to Football Manager 2021 Touch from Football Manager 2021.

 

1.      The first step is creating a directory to store all the game files, this can be on your Desktop, your Documents or even External Storage. You’ll need around 3gb to extract all the files in  the game, but for just skinning, 2gb should be enough. We’ll call this “FM21Base Files”.

2.      The next step is to locate to where your game is installed. This is normally “C”:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common”, but if in doubt, right click on Football Manager 2021 in your Steam Library, press properties > Local Files > Browse Local Files.

3.      Navigate into the data folder, then game.

4.      The ones most relevant to skinning are panels.fmf and skins.fmf, and sitoolkit.fmf in the the data folder. panels.fmf will give us access to 99% of the panels, skins.fmf will give us access to the base skins and fonts, and sitoolkit.fmf will give us access to the graphics as well as a few other things, but they aren’t really relevant for newcomers.

5.      Open the Resource Archiver tool and in the bottom corner press Extract Archive, and find the game the previously mentioned game folder, and extract the three mentioned .fmf files.

6.      Go to “FM21Base Files” where you have extracted the game files, and you should look like this.