Which means the demo for Football Manager 2009 will launch tomorrow night at midnight (so that's Saturday/Sunday at midnight). Which means that there's lots of running around at SI Towers today trying to get things done so that it can be ready in time.
These things never go right first time. There's build after build, and test after test, to make sure everything is OK before launching. Then, tomorrow, we have to get them all up in the right place at the right time to make sure that the launch of the demo is as smooth as possible.
So whilst this blog was going to be live from the Golden Joystick awards, it isn't. The awards are over, and rather than sticking around (the post awards stuff carries on until the early hours of the morning), I've come back to the office to offer whatever moral support I can.
Oh, and we didn't win anything at the awards. Not that we were expecting to, with Rockstar North winning best UK developer, and Call of Duty 4 winning best PC game, both being very worthy winners.
For today's indepth feature look, it's over to Keith for a look at the new transfer code.
Overview: Football Manager 2009 has seen the underlying system for transfers ('shortlisting') undergo a bit of an overhaul. Although the module had seen quite a few changes over the years, it was starting to struggle when trying to accurately model some of football's newer legislation such as the home-grown rules and wage restriction rules. Detailed below are just some of the changes that were made for FM09.
Multiple Targets: One of the downsides of the old 'shortlisting' system was that the computer-controlled managers would only target one player to fill a weak position in their squad. AI managers will now target several players at once for each weak squad position.
To make a decision on which player to make an approach for, the managers will consider numerous factors including how much transfer budget they have remaining and how urgent it is to fill that weak position in their squad.
They will then decide what type of target is best for their club at that moment in time (long-term loan/short-term loan/transfer/trial/end of contract agreements) and finally what player in that category they will make an approach for.
Transfer Rumours: A pleasant side effect of having multiple targets per weak position in a squad has been players having a lot more teams showing interest in them. This has led to the natural inclusion of a 'Transfer Rumours' section on the competition screen.
Long Term Loans: In real life clubs have focussed a lot more on season-long loans. The changes to the shortlisting system have encouraged a lot more of these types of loans to happen.
Offer to Clubs: This part of the transfer system has been helped a great deal by the changes made to shortlisting for FM09. Whilst still being restricted by wages and availability of transfer funds, selling players via this method should now be easier in FM09.
End of Contract Deals: For many years a common way of improving your squad and/or finances in a short space of time has been to sign a lot of players on pre-contract agreements.
In a lot of these cases the human user has had little or no competition for these players signatures.
For FM09 we have concentrated on trying to ensure a fair amount of competition for managers when they are trying to sign players on pre-contract agreements.
Thanks Keith!
I'm going to go off now to crack on with more demo type stuff, so next week I'll get round to answering a load more questions from your good selves. You can still send more in to
blogs@sigames.com, but please avoid asking about any specific features, as you can do that kind of thing on our forums.
And don't forget to stay up to grab the demo tomorrow night at midnight -
www.sigames.com is the place where we'll be listing where you can download the demo from, and what leagues are in the 2 different versions that we're releasing.
Cheers
Miles (and Keith)
