I love playing Football Manager. Something I discovered recently, is that you can create your own custom regens that will come through the youth facilities. This is done by creating a .edt file with a very specific line of text, detailing the properties of the player.
Looking around to find a tool to automate the making of this file resulted in discovering that this doesn't exist yet. So, being a programmer that loves Football Manager, I created my own tool for it.
This simple tool allows the user to set the properties of the regen they want to create. In the background, the tool makes sure that the properties are saved into a string correctly, so that the player is generated correctly.
There are 2 pages with properties that can be filled in:
The first page holds the required properties. These properties are required to be filled in by the game in order to create a player. The second page holds the optional properties. These properties are not required to create a player and, if left blank, will be randomised by the game.
This tool was made using Unity and UI Toolkit. I've been using UI toolkit in my job, but not yet for any personal projects. Time to change that and there is not better way to try it out than this project.
I tried to use as many features of UI toolkit as possible, to get more familiar with them. I created templates of the 2 input screens. For the player list, I spawn a template using code. I also used the data binding system.
All of the UI that is used to add to the player data uses a 2-way binding system with a scriptable object to hold the data. I went for the 2-way approach because this gave me an easy way to clear out the UI by just clearing out the scriptable object.
I also created my own visual element for the date of birth of the player. This element consists of a label and 3 dropdown-fields for the numbers (See final image). This was a challenge, especially with the data binding in code. I am very pleased that I got it all to work.
I will update this tool in the future because I liked working on this, it brings my 2 passions together. But also because I want to keep learning about UI toolkit and everything it has to offer.
Some future features I want to add are:
Importing previous files
Warning pop-ups in case something goes wrong
Better styling with Unity's style sheets
This tool now gives you the ability to create custom regens really fast, giving your FM save a new twist.
