Oliver Collyer talks Football Manager Live
Average Rating: 10/10 Hits: 241 Submitted: Sep 4, 2008
Here you can find a very interesting look at FM Live from its creator and Football Manager found, Oliver Collyer. It includes a look at how FM Live could implement the 3D Football Manager match engine, the mistakes that have been made along the way with FM Live and what we could expect to see in upcoming versions of the game.
What follows are quotes from the main man behind FML, which should be helpful to everyone looking in from outside who doesnt have access to the beta forums, enjoy…
Ov Collyer…
…On the 3D match engine coming to FML
I wasn’t closely in-touch with the development of the FM 3D, so in some ways I was able to see it ‘fresh’ when I did see it running for the first time, which was fairly recently when Miles popped over here to Istanbul.
I was skeptical about the idea, but when I saw it I thought it was really fantastic - and that was with many animations missing. I made the mental decision there and then to get this in FML asap.
I’m thinking that FML’s take on it could be to run the match in it’s own window on your desktop; so you’d have the chat window stuff going on, the main window in which you could show the stats of the players/browse off etc and then this floating window showing the 3D.
…On making FAs more in your face (and my idea of having a forum tab for each FA built into the game)
Thats the sort of thing I’m thinking Robert, yeah.
I mean, at the moment, I see people creating groups, forums, etc on the Web for FAs - it would be great to support these within the game itself.
And yeah, links to these pages from the FA chat rooms would help too. One of the things we wrote the other week was the means to change the chat text at the top of a chat room, aswell as stopping it scrolling out of view, so in theory any links could be placed here to anywhere within the game.
…Even the gods make mistakes
Just to clarify where this issue came from - basically over the weekend we did some optimizing of the auto squad selector, and some other general contract-related areas.
The reason was to try and improve performance during the early days of a GW when everyone is trying to choose their squad (those who witnessed last Friday’s stress test will know what we are talking about!)
Unfortunately as with many optimizations, there carries a risk of breaking something else, which is what happened here. It was literally a single character typo, which meant it couldn’t complete an auction, which had the knock-on effect of blocking all other auctions too.
Anyway, once the optimizations have been finished and we’re no longer changing any of the code, other than making other fixes such as this one, then things will settle down. Until we reach that point, things may occasionally get broken such as this, despite our best efforts to the contrary.
…On talking about a young Marc Duffy
Marc used to write me letters about Championship Manager when he was aged 14 and a half
They arrived complete with little sketches and ideas as to how he imagined things to be in his little World.
True story!
Unfortunately it all went downhill after we foolishly made the mistake of hiring him
…Home advantage?
Just to confirm - there is indeed home advantage, our stats prove this to be working.
We don’t see a problem with adding features to the game later, such as supporter confidence, if that turns out to be something people want.
Spinsaweb - the version 1.0.1 code will be released to beta GWs before October, so we can start its testing and be able to release it to the wider World as soon after release as possible.
…Squad numbers coming
Yep, squad numbers will be implemented. As a result of your post I was thinking earlier about how best this should be implemented in FML.
I’m guessing that your squad numbers become “unlocked” during the 1 week off-season, during which you can freely assign and change them as you wish.
Once the seasons lock down (i.e. FA deals go through etc.) then thats it, whatever you have chosen is locked.
It would be entirely up to you what number you assigned players.
Hmmm, might have a crack at this this week.
…International management in FML
International management will definitely find its way into FML in time - I think the 1 week gap between seasons is made for international tournaments.
I would favour a voting system to decide who the manager is, with a new vote after each international tournament perhaps, so that everyone gets chance to be voted in.
The main thing to decide, and this has been discussed before, is whether it should be International football in the real-World sense (so Brazil, England, Argentina, etc) or whether it should somehow be based on FA XI teams.
Maybe it could work like this:
1. Any manager, regardless of nationality, can put themselves forward for any international job (whether we would limit it to one job, or be able to apply for multiple jobs I don’t know). If nobody puts themselves forward, the national team doesn’t compete.
2. Managers can vote for the job of their own nationality (and maybe their residence too?) So Brazilians or Brazilian-based managers can vote for who should be the Brazil manager etc.
3. What to do about situations where there aren’t enough managers to make a vote viable? maybe certain ‘respected’ members of the community are able to additionally vote in votes for different nationalities to their own? Who is ‘respected’? Moderators? FA Organizers? People with good feedback? Active users? Me?
In terms of whether to make it true international style with real teams, or some kind of FA XI system, or both.
I think to begin with it maybe should be true international teams.
In some ways this would add an additional community element to the game - e.g. all Dutch managers would have a common goal in the game, in deciding who to vote for, and following the fortunes of the Dutch national team.
To support this we could maybe have an additional chat room for each nation, and a mailing list etc.
Kind of adds a new grouping to the game, in addition to FAs.
Later, we could look into FA XI matches, as these would be cool too.
…On injuries
To clarify for those new to beta; the chances of having an injury occur during a match are the same for all teams, however, the chances of the injury “sticking” and becoming a more permanent injury is related to how active the team is.
A team that plays tons of matches will see far fewer injuries “sticking” then a team who players less matches.
Generally this is an area that has been tweaked during the course of beta, and I think the balance is pretty much right now.
…Whats coming in version 1.01
By way of a little taster, here are some 1.0.1 features already implemented, off the top of my head:
- choose which news items you want to ignore (kind of like an email SPAM filter)
- daily news summaries produced each night which “swallow” individual news items and make signing-in more palatable if you’ve been away
- enhanced match report news items containing player ratings, links to goals, stats etc. Useful when you’ve been away to see an overview of your matches without having to download them.
- enhance market place - “Place Advert..” button and a zone which cycles through all the placed ads
- ‘TV Lounge” chat room; enter here and watch the goals fly in as they happen (plays the clips directly in the chat room)
- additional shortlist player options - choose whether to receive news items, whether to allow player’s owner to mail you anonymously
- ‘Transfer List’ option - place players on here to indicate you might be open to offers, but without committing to sell.
- new competition play mode “Quick Play” designed for competitions that intend to complete in one “session” (no more hold-ups due to Fred going offline and not coming back!)
- be able to leave some of the chat rooms (tactics, market place etc) and it remembers this when you sign back in.
- draft mail system - save as draft so you can come back to writing it later
- hidden FA rankings which now drive your team’s reputation, rather than the World Rankings.
- player agent fees now payable on all transfers (payable by the buying club)
- “tax on profits” system, tax paid at the end of each season
- Enhancements to the auto team selector, including a team selection ‘Optimizer’ which means that when you switch between different formations it automatically reshuffles your selected XI so they are in their optimum positions.
- It now shows ‘Distance Covered” for each player, in miles or Km in the match stats
- Player psychology now displayed during the match - who is looking complacent? Who is looking confident?
Mostly “bitesize” features, and there are more, but I can’t remember them right now.
Ov Collyer…
…On the 3D match engine coming to FML
I wasn’t closely in-touch with the development of the FM 3D, so in some ways I was able to see it ‘fresh’ when I did see it running for the first time, which was fairly recently when Miles popped over here to Istanbul.
I was skeptical about the idea, but when I saw it I thought it was really fantastic - and that was with many animations missing. I made the mental decision there and then to get this in FML asap.
I’m thinking that FML’s take on it could be to run the match in it’s own window on your desktop; so you’d have the chat window stuff going on, the main window in which you could show the stats of the players/browse off etc and then this floating window showing the 3D.
…On making FAs more in your face (and my idea of having a forum tab for each FA built into the game)
Thats the sort of thing I’m thinking Robert, yeah.
I mean, at the moment, I see people creating groups, forums, etc on the Web for FAs - it would be great to support these within the game itself.
And yeah, links to these pages from the FA chat rooms would help too. One of the things we wrote the other week was the means to change the chat text at the top of a chat room, aswell as stopping it scrolling out of view, so in theory any links could be placed here to anywhere within the game.
…Even the gods make mistakes
Just to clarify where this issue came from - basically over the weekend we did some optimizing of the auto squad selector, and some other general contract-related areas.
The reason was to try and improve performance during the early days of a GW when everyone is trying to choose their squad (those who witnessed last Friday’s stress test will know what we are talking about!)
Unfortunately as with many optimizations, there carries a risk of breaking something else, which is what happened here. It was literally a single character typo, which meant it couldn’t complete an auction, which had the knock-on effect of blocking all other auctions too.
Anyway, once the optimizations have been finished and we’re no longer changing any of the code, other than making other fixes such as this one, then things will settle down. Until we reach that point, things may occasionally get broken such as this, despite our best efforts to the contrary.
…On talking about a young Marc Duffy
Marc used to write me letters about Championship Manager when he was aged 14 and a half
They arrived complete with little sketches and ideas as to how he imagined things to be in his little World.
True story!
Unfortunately it all went downhill after we foolishly made the mistake of hiring him
…Home advantage?
Just to confirm - there is indeed home advantage, our stats prove this to be working.
We don’t see a problem with adding features to the game later, such as supporter confidence, if that turns out to be something people want.
Spinsaweb - the version 1.0.1 code will be released to beta GWs before October, so we can start its testing and be able to release it to the wider World as soon after release as possible.
…Squad numbers coming
Yep, squad numbers will be implemented. As a result of your post I was thinking earlier about how best this should be implemented in FML.
I’m guessing that your squad numbers become “unlocked” during the 1 week off-season, during which you can freely assign and change them as you wish.
Once the seasons lock down (i.e. FA deals go through etc.) then thats it, whatever you have chosen is locked.
It would be entirely up to you what number you assigned players.
Hmmm, might have a crack at this this week.
…International management in FML
International management will definitely find its way into FML in time - I think the 1 week gap between seasons is made for international tournaments.
I would favour a voting system to decide who the manager is, with a new vote after each international tournament perhaps, so that everyone gets chance to be voted in.
The main thing to decide, and this has been discussed before, is whether it should be International football in the real-World sense (so Brazil, England, Argentina, etc) or whether it should somehow be based on FA XI teams.
Maybe it could work like this:
1. Any manager, regardless of nationality, can put themselves forward for any international job (whether we would limit it to one job, or be able to apply for multiple jobs I don’t know). If nobody puts themselves forward, the national team doesn’t compete.
2. Managers can vote for the job of their own nationality (and maybe their residence too?) So Brazilians or Brazilian-based managers can vote for who should be the Brazil manager etc.
3. What to do about situations where there aren’t enough managers to make a vote viable? maybe certain ‘respected’ members of the community are able to additionally vote in votes for different nationalities to their own? Who is ‘respected’? Moderators? FA Organizers? People with good feedback? Active users? Me?
In terms of whether to make it true international style with real teams, or some kind of FA XI system, or both.
I think to begin with it maybe should be true international teams.
In some ways this would add an additional community element to the game - e.g. all Dutch managers would have a common goal in the game, in deciding who to vote for, and following the fortunes of the Dutch national team.
To support this we could maybe have an additional chat room for each nation, and a mailing list etc.
Kind of adds a new grouping to the game, in addition to FAs.
Later, we could look into FA XI matches, as these would be cool too.
…On injuries
To clarify for those new to beta; the chances of having an injury occur during a match are the same for all teams, however, the chances of the injury “sticking” and becoming a more permanent injury is related to how active the team is.
A team that plays tons of matches will see far fewer injuries “sticking” then a team who players less matches.
Generally this is an area that has been tweaked during the course of beta, and I think the balance is pretty much right now.
…Whats coming in version 1.01
By way of a little taster, here are some 1.0.1 features already implemented, off the top of my head:
- choose which news items you want to ignore (kind of like an email SPAM filter)
- daily news summaries produced each night which “swallow” individual news items and make signing-in more palatable if you’ve been away
- enhanced match report news items containing player ratings, links to goals, stats etc. Useful when you’ve been away to see an overview of your matches without having to download them.
- enhance market place - “Place Advert..” button and a zone which cycles through all the placed ads
- ‘TV Lounge” chat room; enter here and watch the goals fly in as they happen (plays the clips directly in the chat room)
- additional shortlist player options - choose whether to receive news items, whether to allow player’s owner to mail you anonymously
- ‘Transfer List’ option - place players on here to indicate you might be open to offers, but without committing to sell.
- new competition play mode “Quick Play” designed for competitions that intend to complete in one “session” (no more hold-ups due to Fred going offline and not coming back!)
- be able to leave some of the chat rooms (tactics, market place etc) and it remembers this when you sign back in.
- draft mail system - save as draft so you can come back to writing it later
- hidden FA rankings which now drive your team’s reputation, rather than the World Rankings.
- player agent fees now payable on all transfers (payable by the buying club)
- “tax on profits” system, tax paid at the end of each season
- Enhancements to the auto team selector, including a team selection ‘Optimizer’ which means that when you switch between different formations it automatically reshuffles your selected XI so they are in their optimum positions.
- It now shows ‘Distance Covered” for each player, in miles or Km in the match stats
- Player psychology now displayed during the match - who is looking complacent? Who is looking confident?
Mostly “bitesize” features, and there are more, but I can’t remember them right now.
