Football Manager/coding experts? - If anyone has ideas as to a way of coding/assigning images from a folder to match a certain ethnicity in game then that would be a massive step forward - as far as I'm aware there are no current solutions to this and I wouldn't know where to start myself, so any expertise or ideas on this would be hugely appreciated.

Great concept and it's definitely doable to automate it. Genie scout is able to get all sorts of data from an open save, for example nationality, age and whether the player is a regen or not.

As for image finding, thispersondoesnotexist.com is a great place for finding decent looking sources. It's basically an AI that makes a randomally generated portrait, so there is no chance of it being recognicable. Here is a google drive folder with 100k generated images,

My quick work around for this was to download megapack version 3 and just use old faces to then manually replace the new gens. There are plenty of images in it and not easy to recognise hardly anyone plus the images are already cut and only need upscaling to 250x250. Hope this helps as your idea is really good and would definitely add to the realism as I replace the regens now manually. Good Luck

That's encouraging, hopefully there would be a way of incorporating a player's ethnicity or nationality to the config if that data can be exported. As for the AI generated portraits that's a fantastic idea. Could be a great way of working around sources if it could be trained specifically with footballer's/athlete's portraits, at the moment from that website it's a bit of a lucky dip with age/gender/too close a crop unfortunately.

at the moment from that website it's a bit of a lucky dip with age/gender/too close a crop unfortunately.

You should pitch the idea to the guys over at fmscout as they are responsable for genie scout. Maybe they can help you out with the coding. I have almost no knowledge on this stuff but I figure the hardest part is to extract the data. Once you've managed that you just need to generate a config based on age, role, nationality, etc.

As for the source collecting, thispersondoesntexist isn't perfect, but you won't run into problems where faces are recogniceable and you can get as many source as you'd like. The racial and age diveristy is not great though, it's mostly white or asian people between 30 and 40. Although, if you want all people ingame to have a real face, you'll also need staff pictures, which it can provide.

Alternatively you could use some like this to edit current cuts.

Edit:

You can train this AI on your own images. Although I'm very unfamiliar with both phyton and tensorflow so it's best to leave it someone else. Just don't delete the sources you already cut so that we can use those to train the AI.

Would also have no idea how to train the AI myself so hopefully someone would be able to lend a hand there.

Have you posted this over at sports interactive's forum? Maybe you could get some coding/training help from someone over there.

Another option is to use the export function on genie scout. If you tick the "is regen" box, you can generate either an .txt, .csv or .html file with all regens. If someone makes a simple program to read age, nationality and UID from one of the aforementioned file types and genereate a config file. It would require a lot less coding I would imagine.

Edit:
A exported html file looks for like this:

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The code used to generate the site is fairly simple so you can easily seperate the players from each other.

I imagine what you would need is a massive collection of images hosted on our servers tagged as different ages and ethnicities.

Then each individual who wants to use the pack would upload their personal csv of regen ids/age/ethnicities and then a config.xml would be generated.

An alternative might be a program that works on your computer and you just download the images once then the program generates a config.xml based on the regens in your game and the images you've downloaded (the images would come with a config stating age/ethnicity etc).

The cuts can be hosted at an external site to limit the bandwidth usage and the site would just be used to generate a config.

Would training an AI based on the cutout requests and other sites like transfermakt be possible with a mid-range desktop?

Almost the same as fmxml then, right? The only difference being that it works for regens rather than pre-existing players? Does this take ethnicity, age, etc. into account?

And training an AI you'd use something like AWS (Amazon Web Services) rather than your personal desktop. I'm not sure on the costs involved.

Pretty cheap it seems.

@krissmed @Footygamer I think the ideal solution would be a download similar to the megapack, separated into folders for the different in-game ethnicities, with a small piece of software similar to fmXML that can take a list of regens from a save file and generate a config using a method along the lines of "if Player ID **** has ethnicity 'African/Caribbean' listed, then that player ID is assigned an image from the sub-folder 'African/Caribbean'" (whatever that would be in code speak ). I don't know if a single config file could assign to sub-folders within the main folder, or if a separate config file would need to be generated for each sub-folder.

Of course the main problems with this would both what you previously mentioned @Footygamer that this would only work for one save file, and that you would need to repeat this process for every youth intake year in game when more newgens are generated, but this would all still be preferable to any existing alternative!

Are you able to specifically export the assigned ethnicity of a player using Genie Scout, rather than their nationality? I'm on mac so can't use the software myself unfortunately - I assume not as the ethnicity parameter holds no relevance for what Genie Scout does, but hopefully from the same way they extract the save game data the ethnicity parameter can also be extracted.

@krissmed what's the program for? Generating faces?

I wonder if it would work doing a face in the game type thing. I figure we could get a few thousand.

Just also looked at age progression stuff, i.e. if we could age all 20 year olds 10 years and deage all 30 year old 10 years it'd be like getting 100,000s of new faces

@HRiddick @Footygamer Apparently the guys over at fm-base.co.uk are already working on a project which does exactly what we want. The creator states "we hit a snag in writing up the code for XML style, we're in communications with people that can help, but translating the skin color codes to an XML might not be as straightforward as we hoped" in the thread, but that was a couple months ago. It could be beneficial to find out how far they've come on this.

Edit: Forgot to link to the actual thread.

Here you go: https://fm-base.co.uk/resources/zealands-real-faces-on-regens.205/

Edit 2: "Hey guys,

The reality about the ethnicity identifier, I can't for the life of me figure it out.

I looked into using conditions like if skin colour = (skin colour ID) then display specific faces. No luck whatsoever.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know!"

They've given up (for now) it looks like. Still worth a shot

Auto assignment based on ethnicity works now. There is a script available that does it but there's a paywall involved, l so I guess I can't advertise it here specifically?

@HRiddick I looked thorugh the ethnicities ingame and noticed that a lot of players doesn't have a assigned ethnicity. It could be an issue with my save or FM scout editor. Still, ethnicity isn't great to determine what a regen looks like. Mixed race for example. It includes players with light and dark skin. Therefore, I figure it would be better to use regions or skin color rather than ethnicity.

@Footygamer I found these frameworks which can read FM savefiles. Could be helpfull if you want to make a FMxml type program.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/fmsx/downloads
https://community.sigames.com/topic/191264-fm11sx/
https://www.fmscout.com/a-fmscout-framework.html
https://github.com/ThanosSiopoudis/FMScoutFramework

Edit: Just to clarify, these are the regions I'm talking about

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