Start date year change

Hey,

What difficulties are we facing with changing the year of the start date? Let's say, can we start FM 2024 in 2006? Is that hardcoded in the game files? Can we alter that potentially? I sincerely hope FM will bring historical seasons at one point to FM.

Hi mate

not possible to do that  I'm afraid

cheers

Actually, it is possible to start in past years, with the resource archiver and other stuff, you can edit the amount of start year offset and with the correct date, it would be possible for the game to start in 2006 for example, i have an image even.

Anyway when starting this far past may cause some issues tho

Hi 

can you show how you did this and on what version of the game

are you just extracting the file into xml format and changing the start date there using notepad etc?

as there is no way to add - minus values in year offset dates only positives work

would be interested to see screenshots of various squads as none of the players in current squads would be born in 1978😉

cheers

@pepesa16 

 the dates do not match?

responding to the latest comment, the dates do not match because when it is so far back, i think it simulates so fast that the date on the main part, that is simulating, has a stuck date, while the other one on the background constantly updates

also when i have time i will explain how to do the far past start date

That makes sense 🙂 

No problem just update when free 

There is no rush just interested 

Cheers 

please tell us how to do it

sorry i forgor

I have tried to do that for many years and I could get the same result as pepesa16 only. 

I would love to have a way of start a game in a previous year with a classic custom database, but after so many years trying, I got to the conclusion that it is not possible.. at least not possible without break the game code and remove some “blocks”.

When we manage to start in a previous year, the game starts normally, but the fixtures matches are never created.. days keep passing by until you reach the game version year, and then the fixtures are generated…

I tried many workarounds, change championship's rules, country rules, and nothing seems to work.. if you start a game around 3 years before the game version year, it always happens (game does not generate fixtures).

I've been trying in many FM versions, since 2016 and I got stuck with the same result. Looks like we would need to change the hard code of the game to allow the calendar to generate the fixtures in previous years, and I don't have knowledge about coding to even think in a start, and actually I believe it is pretty hard if not impossible.

I'm not trying anything anymore but I can cooperate with anyone that would like to keep trying. 

The way you can start a save in previous years is the following:

You need to go to "Advanced Rules / Start Dates" and change the "Year Offset" to something negative, like -20 if you want to start 20 years back in the past of the game version. However, the editor does not allow you to write numbers less than -1 if I'm not mistaken. The way you need to go around that, is to go to the editor files and folders, find the template files related to this section of the editor and open it on notepad or similar to modify the range of allowance of numbers to this section. (Example, if the editor allows you to write from -1 to 5, you need to modify the range to -99 to 99. So basically you will be able to come back to the editor and write any number of this range, and it will allow you to start a game in any year that you choose in this range.

I hope I was clear, let me know if you have any questions.