Exclusive FM2011 blog with Miles Jacobson day 20: the rise of the newgens!
Football Manager is unlike most other games in the market, as anyone who starts a new game on Football Manager gets their own unique experience. There is no set pattern to the game, no one way to play it, no time limits, and it's non-linear (unless you call time something that is linear).
But surely, as we pride ourselves on our database and its accuracy, once those real players retire, the game must be over as there'd be no players left, right?
The answer to that is a simple no, and it's one of the other reasons why everyone's game is different. And the reason for the no, is what we call 'newgens', which are players that we generate inside the game to ensure that there is still a good spread of players throughout the time you are playing the game.
So to let you know some of the changes we've made this year in this area, we've a two part blog written by Riz, who is the coder at SI responsible for this part of the game.
Part one: The newgen templates
The newly generated players, or newgens as they are often called, are created by the game each year to simulate a new generation of youth intake for the clubs. In the last few years, we have been constantly improving the modelling of these new players and for FM2011 we've again taken some big steps forward.
The biggest new addition for the newly generated players in FM2011 is the use of newgen templates. At the start of the game, we go through all the real players in the game database and analyse what type of players there are for different positions.
This analysis is based on how the player attributes are assigned in relation to their current level of ability, so in a way it finds different stereotypes of players regardless of the level they play at.
The result of the analysis is a set of templates that gives the game a guideline on how the player attributes for different types of players should be spread out. The templates are then used when creating new players to ensure their attributes look and feel more lifelike and that the key attributes that are essential for the type of player being created are all realistic.
When creating the templates, we first separate players based on position so each general position has their own set of templates. The game then keeps track of how many players in the starting database match each template for each position, so the player types that are the most common amongst the researched players for a specific position will also be the most common template types used for newgens in the game for that position.
As some player templates are closely linked to the player's physical build, such as the generic tall striker who is strong but not overly fast, we also separate the templates within each position by the general player height (short, average, tall) to make sure this connection is included in the modelling of newgens.
As you might expect, certain player stereotypes that the templates will be based on can be specific to a certain nation or a continent, so the templates naturally cannot be just a generic global set for all nations. This is why at the start of the game, we create a set of templates for each position for each nation with an active league selected. This results in slightly different sets of templates for the same position in different nations, depending on how the players from those nations are modelled in the game database by our researchers. And this again helps us create more lifelike newgens in the long run, as it will reflect the national characteristics of the players better.
But what if you have just one nation active, are all the newgens created in the inactive nations going to use the same templates ? Well, no. For all the inactive nations we split the player templates into continental sets, so South American newgens will use their own templates that will be different to the ones used by European newgens for example. So even when running only a few active leagues, the newgen modelling across the game world will be enhanced.
When it comes to creating new players based on these newgen templates, we will first pick the suitable set of templates based on the player nationality, position and height. Then a random roll of the dice decides which one of the templates from the set will be used (as mentioned above, some templates are more common than others) and that template will then be used as a guideline to give the player his starting attributes based on his starting level of ability.
Naturally we still have some random factors involved to make sure not all players of the same level using the same template are exactly the same, but the basic layout of their attributes is similar. All this results in generations of improved newgens in the game world with more lifelike attributes.
Come back to mirrorfootball.co.uk at 11.00am for part two...
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