It’s been an ongoing project for our teams for around six months. Due to some underlying platform differences between FM and FML it’s been a much longer setup time that we would have liked but we’ve got the 3D and the core match engine sharing between games now so new developments in other areas will be ready and available to FML much quicker in the future.

 

We’ve found that the FML architecture allows quite a few managers that had troubles running 3D on their machines with FM to happily enjoy the 3D in the FML beta which is great news. FML has always been a very light client working on pretty much any hardware so we’re keen to keep that up even with 3D.

 

 

Yes, although as a first pass they won’t strictly look the same. The long term goal is to be able to create a stadium in FML and go on a virtual tour around it.

 

 

There’s really no problem or differentiation when it comes to people playing and watching matches in 2D or 3D. The rate of recent fixes and polish we’ve added in beta has been amazing and I think that more interesting to people will be things like weather conditions for your home matches  based on the weather in your real life location…English matches played in English conditions! Similarly, we track the sunrise and sunset hours to ensure that the correct lighting conditions are used for the match. If you’re someone who plays all his matches in the dead of night, then expect all your matches to be floodlit! Pitch condition now comes into things for the first time in FML – the higher the reputation of your club the better quality of the pitch with the ball physics and certain aspects of player behaviour varying according to the pitch quality – play on a waterlogged one and you’ll see the ball slow down rapidly when it hits the surface.

 

 

We’ve had all the same compatibility tests (and issues) that FM first went through ensuring that the game works across all the major operating systems and with as many graphics cards as possible. Most of the issues I’ve seen that have been fixed were around launching the client and not actually on match day , that’s not to say there haven’t been any issues on match day! Although I can’t rule out launch day issues (history has proven that no matter how much testing we do nothing can prepare you for live and all the variants of machines and specs) I can say that we’ll be able to get changes and fixes out to people quickly and easily with our auto patching system.

 

 

1.6 will be out on Wednesday [Today]. The 3D engine is the headline act for this release and the rest of the changes are overall a little bit of spit and polish. Once this is out we’re going to kick on and start on our next roadmap phase of development.

 

 

We do try and keep the games separate and follow their own paths, however in the areas where we’re code sharing (such as the match) we are looking at things like the FM in-game analysis to help FML managers try and understand a bit more about how and why their team is performing the way they are.

 

 

That is one for Miles [studio director at Sports Interactive].