Twas a very busy weekend at SI Towers, with Steve in our QA room running the longest shift, having got to bed at 7.05am this morning. I feel a bit of a wuss for only having managed 3.30am on both Saturday and Sunday nights. The things we do to get games done, huh - and neither of us are coders, so it's even harder for them.
Still, we're very much getting there, and all the hours at the weekend were definitely worth it, with the 3d view making big strides. Although learning that most of the shops around our studio are closed on Sunday's left us without a decent supply of sweets. Which is probably a good thing.
Anyway, onto this weeks blogs. These, in theory, will be this one today, one on Wednesday, and one on Thursday and, as promised last week, there'll be some new info about the game in them, as well as answering some questions that have been sent in by you, the people reading this blog (to
blogs@sigames.com if you want to join in the fun!). On top of that, we hope to be able to finalise the minimum specs for the game tomorrow, Tuesday, which we'll post over at our website at
www.sigames.com, and then on Friday there'll be a new podcast, which will also have some new features for Football Manager 2009, as well as the normal football chat.
So, where to start. I've just asked Marc at SI to pick a random number between 1 & 6, and he went for 4, which means there'll be 4 new features metioned in this blog.
Let's start off with international "national pool" improvements. For those who like to manage international teams in the game, this will save them lots of time, as the multi-select actions on the national pool window have been improved to make moving players around national squads easier.
Which actually brings me onto something else, something that's been in the game for years, but someone brought up on our forums this weekend as a "good idea for the future", followed by lots of others that didn't realise that you could do it in game. You know when you are using email software, you can select multiple emails by holding down "ctrl" when clicking on them, and using "shift" to select a block of emails? You can do that in FM aswell, by clicking on the arrows to the left of a players name, or a news item name. It surprised me that people didn't know about it already but hey, who reads manuals nowadays, huh? If I read manuals, I'd be much better at putting IKEA furniture together, but it would take half the fun away, but we do spend a lot of time on the manuals for our games, and you will likely learn new stuff from reading them.
Anyway, I disgree. Another couple of nice little touches with the game this year are to do with "generated players" those being players that don't exist in real life, but spring onto the world football stage through the game in future seasons. The first is for players to have more likelike common names for players who like to be known by their nicknames, as many South American players do as their names are so long. Although some of them take it a bit far in real life, with players called Ice Cream and Potato in our database!
Second natioanlities are also now generated for these generated players, so you'll find more Argentinian youngsters with Italian parents, and more players in the future having to decide which nation they want to represent, their own, or their parents.
Time for a couple of questions now that have been asked through the
blogs@sigames.com address. Ignoring those that asked about specific features, seeing as I asked very nicely for people not to (which still stands, by the way), Daniel Griffin asks - "Can you buy the cool mouse seperately, as I vaguely remember it being sold in a seperate box at my local games store?"
Well, Daniel, the answer is no. In the UK, the mini-mouse is available only with pre-orders from HMV.com (and possibly instore too, but I'll let someone from HMV answer that [hmv: "yup, pre-order in-store and you'll get the mini-mouse too!"]). The mini-mice that were sold previously should never have been sold, and someone got into trouble for allowing that to happen.
Simon Howes asks "Just a quick question Miles, what would be a typical working day for you?" and, err, there isn't actually an answer I can give beyond there being no such thing. There's so many different things to do, the only thing that is typical about my working day is that it tends to involve using my laptop and talking about football a lot.
We even got an email from China, from someone whose email address includes yaomingxin in it, asking about a Chinese language release of the game. We've done this before with FM2007, but it hasn't been possible with the last couple of releases, and is pretty much out of our hands. We'd love to release the game in China as there are so many keen football fans and gamers there, but if it's to be done with a local translation, then it needs to be done properly, and marketed properly. Hopefully that will be possible some time in the future.
Right, I must get back to work now, and continue trying to get the game as good as it possibly can be before it's released on November 14th.
But one more new feature before I go... There have been some improvements to "team records" inside the game, including the addition of a "fastest goal" stat.
Cheers
Miles
