FM's Match Engine - live sim or not?
FM's match engine is the closest you can get to a real football game on your computer screen without watching an actual match. I had no doubts personally about this being a real-time simulation, rather than a semi-sim relying on scripts and pre-calculated results. After spending my first days watching entire matches in awe when I fired up my first demo of Football Manager, I was given no reason to. But recently I stumbled upon forum threads arguing just that: that this isn't really a real-time s
It's a slightly difficult one to explain, but I'll try.
When you start an FM match, it plays the match through in order to determine what the key highlights are, in order to show them.
This is done on-the-fly - for example until a goal is scored, nothing knows the goal is going to be scored. It's done by playing out all the events, player positions, interactions on the pitch using 'weighted' random numbers - the 'weighted' being the key bit, that ensures that better players by and large out pe