Modding Player Cards

[JeffR]

The game's hockey cards are now customizable as of today's update.

The cards are built from data stored in the save's \graphics\cards folder, and, like other mods, can be installed in the equivalent quickstarts folder (e.g. \Documents\Out of the Park Developments\Franchise Hockey Manager 8\quickstart_games\Current.quick\graphics\cards) where they will be applied to all new games of that type. Each card design gets its own subfolder in that directory. The subfolder names don't matter, the game will check anything in \cards.

For an example of how the cards work, I suggest looking at the default modern card's subfolder in \Documents\Out of the Park Developments\Franchise Hockey Manager 8\quickstart_games\Current.quick\graphics\cards\mo dern - that folder stores an info.txt file with the card's details, as well as however many .png files are needed to construct the card.

The info.txt file contains the instructions the game uses to build the cards, broken down into sections. Any section except ORDER and YEARS can be omitted, those two are needed to make the card work. The elements of the file are as follows (I suggest using a copy of the modern card's info.txt file as a template, since it contains all the usable elements in the proper format):

ORDER: list as many .png files and facegen in the order that you want them to appear. For example, the modern card has the _top image on top, then the player's facegen image (so it will be partially covered by the non-transparent areas of the top image), the_background image (much of which is covered by the facegen and the non-transparent areas of the top image), and finally the _teamcolor image (note how the transparent areas in the cards above it are designed to allow specific parts of the teamcolor image to be seen, so the lower section of the card, a border area, and the team logo background are displayed in a different color for each team.) The files can be named as you wish, but must be .png's and a .png with the _teamcolor extension will replace any black in the image with the primary colour of the player's team. Leave the .png extension out of the file's name in this list.

Below the order, list the card's other elements, one section for each. You do not have to include any of them, e.g. the default 1910's card omits the position.

Each element has a list of data describing it as follows:

TEXT OBJECTS: NAME, SURNAME, and POSITION. NAME and SURNAME show the player's first and last name from the database, respectively, and POSITION shows the position name (LD and RD both get the Defenceman description.) The case of the 3 text elements can be specified - either all-caps or mixed.
font: The font must be installed in the game's fonts folder (\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Franchise Hockey Manager 8\data\fonts or \Program Files (x86)\Out of the Park Developments\Franchise Hockey Manager 8\data\fonts) - note that we've added a bunch of fonts that aren't actually used elsewhere in the game, so you have more variety to choose from. The name has to be the correct name of the font and not the filename of the ttf file (e.g. "Roboto Slab" and not "RobotoSlab-Bold", "Lato" and not "Lato-Thin")
fontsize: font size in pixels (px)
fontweight: bold/italic
fontstyle: normal or any style included for the font in the fonts folder (thin, light, etc. - note that not all fonts have these options)
color: HTML colour value
boxsize: the size of the box on the card's surface allocated to contain this object, expressed as HeightxWeight in pixels. Note that if a text element is too large for a box, the font size will be reduced to make it fit.
position: x,y coordinate ot the top-left corner of the box created above (the card must be a 200x300 rectangle, so 1,1 is the upper-left corner, and 200,300 the bottom-right corner)
horizontal: horizontal alignment of the text within the box, expressed as left align, right align, or centered
vertical: vertical alignment of the text within the box, expressed as left align, right align, or centered

NON-TEXT OBJECTS: TEAM LOGO and FACEGEN - these allow the team logo and the player's facegen image to be included in the card. They use the same settings as the text objects, but not all of them - TEAM LOGO uses boxsize, position (upper-left corner of the logo image), horizontal, and vertical, and FACEGEN uses only position (upper-left corner of the facegen image.)

Finally, the YEARS list the starting and ending years for the logo's use. Note that these always refer to the season start year, so if e.g. you want a card to appear in 1976-77 only, use 1976 in both fields. If more than one card is available in a year, the game will choose randomly from all the available types, so you may want to modify the default files to avoid years you have created your own cards for.

Edit: The version 8.7.102 update added some new Text Object options:

FULLNAME (uses the combined First Name + Last Name of the player, e.g. "John Smith", rather than having to use separate NAME and SURNAME, which makes it very difficult to put names horizontally on the same line)
TEAMNAME (full team name, Name + Nickname, e.g. "Boston Bruins"), TEAM (just the team Name, e.g. "Boston")
TEAMNICK (just the team Nickname, e.g. "Bruins")

[Nickphillies]

Here's an idea of what we can do. This is off a 1990s O-PeeChee style card.

Trickiest part is lining up the font and logos.

[jumpSeat]

This is great! Opens up a whole new area to have fun with... Greatly appreciated, thanks Jeff!

[ThatSeventiesGuy]

Originally Posted by Nickphillies

Here's an idea of what we can do. This is off a 1990s O-PeeChee style card.

Trickiest part is lining up the font and logos.

This is why I miss the like button, right here. Great work! Looking forward to some mods being released, and might work on a few of my own if I can.

[sk78]

So I did a mod of a card where "name" and "surname" are sitting in one line (posted here).

I set the text boxes to about 50% of the picture, first name to the left side, last name to the right. Then aligned "name" horizontal to "right align" and "surname" horizontal to "left align".
The result is looking good when both names have about the same length/amount of letters. But the bigger the difference is, the more it's starting to look odd and offset (example attached).

Is there any way/workaround to prevent this?

Ideal would be to have an additional option with the ability to put name and surname into one single text box.

[wiggleman83]

Originally Posted by Nickphillies

Here's an idea of what we can do. This is off a 1990s O-PeeChee style card.

Trickiest part is lining up the font and logos.

Do you have this xard available to mod into games? I'm looking for a vintage one.

[silvam14]

This is really cool

I would think the Jersey # would be a great token addition

[Nickphillies]

Originally Posted by wiggleman83

Do you have this xard available to mod into games? I'm looking for a vintage one.

Like this?

[JeffR]

The updated add a few new text object options, I've listed them at the bottom of the first post.

[GeeMike]

Hi! Has anyone been able to get the "TEAMNAME" to work? They're not showing up on my cards

[ThePriceIsRight]

would love to have the card design if possible. I'd like to add it to my 1990's games

[Greenert11]

I'm not able to get the TEAM or TEAMNICK options to work. I just copied the same format as the other text options and replaced the title. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[TheAdamBn]

I have raised this and Jeff said that somethings not working at the game end.

I’m hoping it’s fixed in an upcoming patch

[TheAdamBn]

For those tempted to give it a go themselves, I’ve put together a handy guide

https://youtu.be/lnH27vjGkoU

[BoiledEgg]

This YouTube video is fantastic - check out his other videos as well, well worth the rabbit hole adventure!

Originally Posted by TheAdamBn

For those tempted to give it a go themselves, I’ve put together a handy guide

https://youtu.be/lnH27vjGkoU

[TheAdamBn]

Originally Posted by BoiledEgg

This YouTube video is fantastic - check out his other videos as well, well worth the rabbit hole adventure!

Awww thanks for that.