First read part one of the Guide – This part of the Guide (and the future parts) will assume you have extracted all the required files from the fmf files and have already created the base of your skin (which will still be referred to as Test in the guide).
Before you start this guide I advise you have the following folder locations open:
The Folder that you extracted the fmf files to.
Your User Data folder open to the folder for your skin (\Documents\Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2009\skins\test)
The Fonts folder for your computer (if replacing the fonts)( C:\Windows\Fonts)
Football Manager 2009 (to test any changes)
Your xml editor.
And your image editing program to get the RGB values for colours from if changing the colours.
Editing the Fonts
First I will show you how to edit the font of your skin, so first we need to paste some extra code into the test/test.xml file, so open test.xml with your xml editor and paste the following code into the file before the </properties> line:
<real id="bgop" value="0.0"/> <!-- Background opacity to determine how see through this colour is -->
<integer id="cmod" value="1"/> <!-- Colour Mode -->
<!-- TOOLTIP PROPERTIES -->
<flags id="hnfn" value="fonts/vera" comment="hint font"/>
<integer id="hnst" value="0"/> <!-- Style -->
<integer id="hnss" value="8"/> <!-- Font size -->
<!-- TITLE PROPERTIES -->
<flags id="tlfn" value="fonts/vera" comment=" title font "/>
<integer id="tlss" value="17"/> <!-- Large font size -->
<integer id="tlsn" value="15"/> <!-- Normal font size -->
<integer id="tlsl" value="9"/> <!-- Small font size -->
<integer id="tlst" value="shadowed"/> <!-- title text style -->
<!-- MENU PROPERTIES -->
<flags id="mnfn" value="fonts/vera" comment=" popup menu font "/>
<integer id="mnss" value="7"/> <!-- Small font size -->
<integer id="mnsn" value="8"/> <!-- Normal font size -->
<integer id="mnsl" value="10"/> <!-- Large font size -->
<!-- BUTTON PROPERTIES -->
<flags id="cnfn" value="fonts/vera" comment=" Button Font "/>
<integer id="cnss" value="7"/> <!-- Small font size -->
<integer id="cnsn" value="8"/> <!-- Normal font size -->
<integer id="cnsl" value="10"/> <!-- Large font size -->
<!-- TEXT PROPERTIES -->
<flags id="txfn" value="fonts/vera" comment=" Text font "/>
<integer id="txss" value="7" /> <!-- text size small -->
<integer id="txsn" value="8" /> <!-- text size normal -->
<integer id="txsl" value="10" /> <!-- text size large -->
<!-- font settings -->
<list id="font_settings">
<record>
<flags id="font" value="vera" />
<!-- bold modifiers (modifies the base bold value for bold text) -->
<record id="bold">
<real id="horizontal" value="2.0" />
<real id="vertical" value="2.0" />
</record>
<record id="semi_bold">
<real id="horizontal" value="1.0" />
<real id="vertical" value="1.0" />
</record>
<record id="light_bold">
<real id="horizontal" value="0.5" />
<real id="vertical" value="0.5" />
</record>
<record id="very_light_bold">
<real id="horizontal" value="0.3" />
<real id="vertical" value="0.3" />
</record>
<record id="plain">
<real id="horizontal" value="0.5" />
<real id="vertical" value="0.5" />
</record>
</record>
</list>
That is the coding for the default font type, size and style.
To change the actual font you will need to create a fonts folder in your Test skins folder so you have skins/test/fonts and then copy the font file you want to use into the fonts folder and change the value="fonts/vera" line above to match the font you want to use, so say you wanted to use the tahoma font in your title text, you’d copy the Tahoma font file to your test/fonts folder and change the value="fonts/vera" line for the title text to value="fonts/tahoma"
To adjust the font size change the value for the large/normal/small line until you are happy, you can also change the text style (there is a list of working commands around somewhere – I’ll see if I can dig it out.)
The fonts for specific screens can be controlled by the code that calls the text – which will be in the various xml files from the panels folder, for example the match title bar.xml file controls the font used in the scoreboard – to edit these fonts you just need to edit the font="fonts/verabd" line in the line of code that calls the text, and these can be edited as above by changing the font name to match the new font you put in the fonts folder.
An alternative way to change the font is to rename your new font to vera (and verabd) and put the renamed file into the test/fonts folder – this is quicker, but you have less control as every instance of the font will be changed.
Changing the Text Colours
Next I’ll show you how to change the colour of the code in the game, first we need to copy some files into our skins folder, first make sure you have a test/settings folder, if not create it and then copy the following files from the fm09_extracted/settings folder to the test/settings folder – colours.xml, config.xml and fm colours.xml (you may already have the config.xml and fm colours.xml files in your test/settings folder if so you don’t need to overwrite them)
'colours.xml' – in this file you will only really be interested in the first two blocks of text, and this file controls the colour of the main text, menu text and tree text among others.
'fm colours.xml' – controls the special colours – attribute, loan player, user colours etc... the file is generally well commented.
To change the colour, just change the RGB values – they run from 0-255, where R=255 B=255 G=255 is white and 0 0 0 is black, 255 0 0 is red, 0 255 0 is green and 0 0 255 is blue.
If you don’t know what a line corresponds to change it to a colour that stands out and scan through the game screens until you see that colour.
And finally if you want to change the range each attribute colour applies to you just need to edit the following text from the panels/player profile.xml file (first copy it to test/panels/):
<!-- attribute colouring -->
<integer id="exca" value="16" />
<!-- excellent threshold -->
<integer id="excn" value="11" />
<!-- normal threshold -->
<integer id="excl" value="6" />
<!-- low threshold -->
By default:
1-5 low att.
6-10 normal att.
11-15 good att.
16-20 excellent att.
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