How are fictional leagues?

[beadlejuice44]

I am a HUGE fictional league guy in OOTP, but the Fictional league creator in FHM has always been a disappointment. What, if any, updates have there been?

[krownroyal83]

Originally Posted by beadlejuice44

I am a HUGE fictional league guy in OOTP, but the Fictional league creator in FHM has always been a disappointment. What, if any, updates have there been?

What part of it has been a disappointment? I play strictly fictional in OOTPB just because i don't follow baseball too much but as far as hockey i follow the NHL really closely thus i don't have much experience playing a fictional league.

[Orioles1966]

It looks like the most teams you can start with is 31 and that's based on NHL structure.

Don't know about expansion because I haven't read anything stating what the limits are and what's the max amount of teams.

I also would like too know about expansion with the other versions of FHM6.

[beadlejuice44]

Originally Posted by krownroyal83

What part of it has been a disappointment? I play strictly fictional in OOTPB just because i don't follow baseball too much but as far as hockey i follow the NHL really closely thus i don't have much experience playing a fictional league.

The customization is OOTP is God Tier so I have been spoiled by it, it does seem a bit limiting when creating a league (A pre-set structure of how many teams and how many games are played). The financials are also more restrictive of how you can adjust them. Basically, OOTP is a blank canvas (For the most part) and FHM feels more like Im picking from stencils to draw from

[krownroyal83]

Originally Posted by beadlejuice44

The customization is OOTP is God Tier so I have been spoiled by it, it does seem a bit limiting when creating a league (A pre-set structure of how many teams and how many games are played). The financials are also more restrictive of how you can adjust them. Basically, OOTP is a blank canvas (For the most part) and FHM feels more like Im picking from stencils to draw from

Got it. I've really only ever played fictional in OOTP so i know what you mean when you say you can do everything. I've been playing the same fictional league for like 3 years. It has spoiled me as well. Fictional is not something i will be playing much in FHM 6 but i might take a look at it at some point. I'm just hoping some of the aspects of the game i wasn't happy with in the past are better.

[DirkGildun]

Have the schedules for fictional leagues been fixed yet? Or is there the ability in FHM6 to import and/or edit a schedule? The crap default unbalanced schedule(s) (specifically for an 8-team no-division league) in the previous versions of FHM are the only thing keeping me from buying FHM6.

[Cadieux39]

I keep poking around the forum and reddit to get more info about FHM6 and its options for fictional play. I've played nothing but fictional in OOTPb. Things i'm looking to do are :

Starting a fictional league in the 1940s.
Expanding the league from 6 teams eventually to 12 or 18 over time
Having one or two Minor leagues affiliated to the majors
Having a Junior league in Canada, in USA and Europe to feed talent
Control and change the Nationalities of the created junior players over time
Have an independent league run along side the fictional professional league.
Have a World Championships Tournament every 4 years.
Have a yearly Under21 world championship tournament

That list would be best case senario for me. I could still enjoy it, without tournaments or a separate independent league. But overall thats what i'm looking for.

I did buy FHM5 to explore what can be done with fictional leagues, but found myself disappointed and went back to OOTP19

[IamJustin]

So, I run a fictional online league. We are going into our 4th season. The things you can do are, follow a NHL structure or have less teams and you can expand each season by one team. You're offered a farm league for your major teams. Also, a junior league where your draft guys come from. Typically the drafts each year are extremely top heavy, so some editing of rookies is needed.
The option to download league files via the game, like OOTP, is still not available. It's all 3rd party ftp downloads and uploads and over writing files.

[jeffineastyork]

It older versions, when you tried to expand fictional leagues, you could not expand the farm league, meaning the new teams didn't have a minor league team. I haven't played since 3 or 4, but that was a real buzzkill for me.

Has this been fixed yet?

[sgrondin98]

In fictional league someone know the limitation ?? (team-league structure-schedule)

I have about 60-70 person to create a fictional online league but as far as i know in FHM 5 the max team is like 40-45 ???

Thanx for your answer.

[NolaSola7]

http://manuals.ootpdevelopments.com/...6&page=modding

There are a number of different ways you can modify your FHM6 game, from adding customized graphics to editing game data to create new quickstart files.

Important! Customizing your game can often involve modifying the files that are installed with the game, so there is some degree of risk involved. The best protection against problems is to back up, back up, back up! If you're modifying something related to one specific game, you should back up that game using the in-game "save game as..." save option to create a new version of it for editing. If you're modifying the skin, graphics, or individual text files, you should back up those individual files or folders before modifying them. On top of that, customization often involves a decent amount of trial and error. It's much easier to restore a single backed up file than having to reinstall the game from scratch! There's no measuring the amount of frustration a good backup can save!

As for specific modifications, at the simplest level you can use Commissioner Mode and the edit buttons to modify data for leagues, players (see the Attributes and Templates sections for additional details), and teams. Much of the data can only be edited on July 1 or at the start of the game, and is inaccessible the rest of the time (changing league rules and settings in mid-season could seriously destabilize the game, leading to crashes.



Changes you make in this manner can also be used to create a new Quickstart File - just use the "save as quickstart" option on the game menu to create a new start file with your changes. That way, if you have a particular set of edits you want to make to any game you play, you only have to enter them once.



Graphics Modification is another popular way of customizing your game. Among other things, the team and league logos and facegen uniforms and helmets can be changed:

(Note that all files must be in .png format, with that extension!)

Team and league logos must be 150*150 pixels in size.
In-game backgrounds are shown while watching games play live; the background displayed belongs to the home team. Three sizes are supported (just like the default background): 1024*768, 1280*800 and 1920*1200. The naming format is similar to team logos: teamname_size_year.png, where teamname is the exact team name (separate individual words with _), and the size is 1024, 1280 or 1920.
Facegen jerseys and helmets can be completely customized. Creating these files can be somewhat complicated, so please check our modding forums for advice from users who are experienced working with them, as well as templates that will give you a big head start on producing your own.
In order to make finding the correct graphics folders easier, there's a shortcut in the troubleshooting menu in the preferences section of the start screen - just click on "Open customizable data folder" and the correct top-level folder will open, and from there you can go to the subfolder of your choice. To have your custom graphics appear in every game you start, you'll need to add them to the graphics subfolder within the appropriate quickstart directory, e.g. Historical.quick, Majors.quick, or OpeningDay.quick. Inside the graphics folder, you may need to create subfolders of your own if they don't already exist:

Folder Name Location For
arena_backgrounds Arena background images to be displayed during games
helmet_pics Cap, helmet, and goalie mask images for facegen
jersey_pics Jersey and staff suit images for facegen
logo_leagues League logos
logo_teams Team logos
Naming Coventions for Dynamic Updating
FHM6 will automatically update logo, jersey, and helmet files to a new version at the start of the season (July 1) if one is available. So, if the correct naming conventions are followed, there'll be no need to manually copy the files over every season to update a team or league's graphics. The naming system works as follows:

FHM will use the best matching file. For example, if the current season is 2015-16, it will use montreal_canadiens_2015.png for the logo. If the current season is 2010-11, 2011-12 or 2012-13, it will use montreal_canadiens_2010-2012.png. In any other year it would use montreal_canadiens.png.

File Type Name Format
League Logos national_hockey_league.png or national_hockey_league_2015.png or national_hockey_league_2010-2012.png
Team Logos montreal_canadiens.png or montreal_canadiens_2015.png or montreal_canadiens_2010-2012.png
Jerseys jersey_montreal_canadiens.png or jersey_montreal_canadiens_2015.png or jersey_montreal_canadiens_2010-2012.png
Helmets helmet_montreal_canadiens.png or helmet_montreal_canadiens_2015.png or helmet_montreal_canadiens_2010-2012.png
Goalie Helmets helmet_g_montreal_canadiens.png or helmet_g_montreal_canadiens_2015.png or helmet_g_montreal_canadiens_2010-2012.png
Determining Player Names
To make it easier to determine the correct names to use for player/personnel picture files, there is an export names feature that can be activated via command line parameters. To use it, add these parameters: tracemode printplayers printpersonnel - e.g. on a Windows system, right-click the game shortcut, select properties, and chage the target field to "C:Program Files (x86)Out of the Park DevelopmentsFranchise Hockey Manager 6hm5.exe tracemode printplayers printpersonnel". With those parameters active, open a saved game and FHM will add a line for each player and personnel to the debug trace file like this:

2016-11-03 13:38:38 PlayerID LastName FirstName FranchiseId TeamID TeamName PictureFileName DOBYear DOBMonth DOBDay

2016-11-03 13:38:38 1 Vinogradov Andrei 742 911 Bars Andrei_Vinogradov_5_7_1995.png 1995 7 5

2016-11-03 13:38:38 2 Afinogenov Maxim 736 736 Vityaz Maxim_Afinogenov_4_9_1979.png 1979 9 4

The colums are separated by a tab, so you can easily copy/paste the data to a spreadsheet. You could also use this data to create a DOS batch script to convert "old" picture files to the new naming convention by copying the old file to another folder using the new file name.

Steam Workshop
If you're playing the Steam version of the game, the The Steam workshop is now enabled in the game, which should simplify the distribution of your mods significantly. To upload them, please follow these instructions:

Open the Steamworks tab in the start menu.
Click on "Create Item".
Enter a name and a description and click on OK.
The new item will be created and published as a private item which is not visible to the public yet. You’ll see it the “your published items”.
Open the Workshop in your Steam client with “Open workshop” or go directly to the published item with the “Show” link in the table.
In this screen, you find options to delete the item, to edit it, to make it visible to the public, subscribe to it, and so on.
To add a preview image, click on "Change" beside Preview Image and select the path to your preview picture.
To add the data itself, you must navigate to the folder you're keeping it in. However, this folder must follow a specific format:
For example, you want to make a modified staff picture. Create the folder C:FHM6projcustdataquickstart_gamesOpeningDay.quick graphicspersonnel_pics (i.e., you need a top-level directory, then one named custdata, and below that the precise path that the file needs to go to within the Franchise Hockey Manager 6 folder - it needs to match exactly.)
To upload the file(s), click on "Change" beside Source Folder and choose your top-level directory - in the above example, it's FHM6proj. Do not go further down than that, or your mod will not install correctly.
Once that's done, you're finished. To test it, subscribe to the mod from the workshop screen of your Steam client, exit the game, then re-start it. You should see the message "This item is downloaded, click here to install it." Click that, and it'll install.

Editing National Player Generation Quality
The basics first:

-this allows editing of the general quality level of fictional players that are generated each July 1 in modern games
-this only applies to the modern games - historical and fictional have their own player generation systems that don't work in the same way.
-effects will begin on the following July 1 from the changes (new players are generated at the start of that day)
-editing is done on the individual national data screens (World-National Data, choose a country, then use its editing tab)

You'll see 10 "Hockey Quality" ratings, from 0 to 0.9999. These must total 1.000, and that doesn't get tracked at the moment, so you'll have to watch what you're adding and subtracting carefully.

The quality ratings are (very, very approximately) equal to the 1-10 player ability ratings (subtract 4.5 from those to get the approximate number of stars shown in-game for the player's talent and ability), plus or minus about +0.5 to -2.0 depending on the individual level (the lower you go, the more it tends to be on the negative side.) There's also a very small random superstar generation chance independent of this system. Again, this is a huge oversimplification of how the generation system works, but it's enough to give you a general idea of what these numbers do.

The decimal number indicates what percentage of players generate with this quality as their potential. So Canada's HQ10 of .0006 means 6 Canadians in 10,000 generate with quality 10.

But it's absolutely essential to remember that different countries generate very different amounts of players - the Under-14 (not individual national U14 leagues, just that one league specifically named Under-14) and Bantam leagues are where these players show up. Canada has 37 of these teams, where, say the Czech Republic has 4. So the individual Czech hockey quality settings at the higher levels tend to be better than the Canadian ones (and looking at them, I suspect they're a little low, I may need to adjust that.) They need that to keep generating enough good quality players to keep their normal international standard of play up from a much smaller player base (which is the way it works in reality, too, the Czechs produce a disproportionate number of NHLers relative to their overall minor hockey enrollment.)

Again, don't assume that just adjusting quality up or down will get the results you want - you have to consider how many teams are generating new players for that country. I can't emphasize that enough.

Note that the country name and abbreviation are editable, but it won't really work well if you e.g. change those and edit the Under-14 teams to try to create your own new country - the cities of the original country will still be connected to the new country name, and many, if not most, of the U14 teams have uneditable hidden data that ties them to a specific region. So if you change Spain to Atlantis and "Spanish U14" to "Atlantean U14" the players generated will still have Spanish cities as their birthplace and Atlantis will, for all intents and purposes, be Spain.

Finally, remember that the players generate at age 13-14 and it'll take a long time for them to reach the top levels of play, so the results of your changes won't become fully evident for a decade or so. But you can get a rough idea if it's working by checking the player search feature, filtering by year and possibly nationality, and sorting by potential to see if it looks like what you expect.

[redtiger7]

Originally Posted by jeffineastyork

It older versions, when you tried to expand fictional leagues, you could not expand the farm league, meaning the new teams didn't have a minor league team. I haven't played since 3 or 4, but that was a real buzzkill for me.

Has this been fixed yet?

Yep. That came in last version