The Football Manager: Enhanced Environment Overhaul - ALPHA

This is an alpha.

It's me showing you what I've been building, not a finished mod. As it is an alpha things can go wrong. I have polished the current release enough I think to allow it. It won't cause crashing, game breaking bugs, but some things can look a bit unfinished which is well... Because it is.

It doesn't replace your stadium pack, and it works on FM's own grounds as well as custom ones.

The sky

FM's sky is a photo. This one is built from nothing, every frame, and it's actually up there. The clouds have depth. They grow, tower up, and fall apart on their own, and they drift on the same wind the match is being played in. Leave a game running and the sky opens and closes without any weather event happening.

They also put shade on the pitch, and it isn't a texture scrolling over the grass. The shading is worked out from the same clouds that are drawing the sky, traced along the angle the sun is actually at. Thick cloud overhead and the pitch goes dark. The deck breaks and the sun comes back across it. It won't be an exact cut-out of one particular cloud, but it moves with the sky because it comes from the sky.

The sun knows where the ground is

It reads the stadium's real coordinates and the date of the fixture, then works out where the sun sits the same way an almanac does.

A January afternoon in Manchester never gets the sun higher than about 15 degrees, and it's gone by quarter past four. Take a summer game in Rio and it's almost directly overhead at noon. Play Bodø in November and you get four hours of daylight: sunrise at 09:45, dark by 13:50, floodlights already on for a 3pm kickoff.

12 year old me wished he knew how cool mathematics would be, now that 25 year old me knows I think it is really cool ha!

Weather that reaches the pitch

The floodlights come on when the weather turns, not just when the clock says night. A downpour at two in the afternoon lights them up, the way a real ground does. Rain lands on the grass and splashes. Heavy cloud pulls the sun down to a fraction of its strength and greys the whole place off.

Puddles

Standing water forms where it actually forms: the goalmouths first, then the centre circle, then out into the channels. How much you get depends on your pitch. It reads the real pitch quality out of your save. A Premier League surface is built to drain, so you'll hardly see a puddle on one. A knackered non-league pitch holds water and turns into a swamp in the same rain. Astroturf never puddles at all.

So even Messi will have a tough time on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke.

No two matches look the same

Every fixture gets its own sky and its own puddle layout. Load the same ground twice and the clouds won't be where you left them. The colour shifts with where you are and what time of year it is. Northern skies in winter run deeper blue with a short, tight sunset. Somewhere hot and humid gets a hazier sky and a broad orange one that spreads right along the horizon. Wind clears the air and deepens the blue.

Note, there is no "real" simulated wind as of this moment, as such a feature is down the pipeline. It uses the base wind values from FM itself. I want to make this distinction as to not raise false expectations.

Known rough edges

• It's an alpha. If something looks broken, it might be.

• There is a HUD on your top left of the screen. This will be off in the UI sections, but on by default in the match. This is so screenshots will display accurate information.

• Puddle water is still being tuned. Shout if it looks wrong.

• Players don't get wet yet. That one's next on my list.

• Rain still comes from Weather Overhaul, so it isn't tied to the clouds overhead yet. That's another big build.

Telling me things

Screenshots help more than descriptions. And you can send screenshots in the group chats here:

https://www.patreon.com/messages/b0dcd3df63aa42e08cbd0ffd196fa2a2

or

https://www.patreon.com/messages/c7f8994aeb6d48128de30d0f4c7f4639

If a sky, a sunset or a pitch looks wrong, send the shot and say which ground and roughly what date it was. That's usually enough for me to find it.

There is also a package of updated stadiums included in this post too. It contains 8 updated stadiums and re-adds Copenhagen, PAOK and AEK.

Installing

1. Download and unzip the attached zip files.

2. Find your FM26 folder.

• Installation paths:

  • Steam: Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Football Manager 26

  • Xbox Game Pass: XboxGames\Football Manager 26\Content

  • Epic Games: Program Files (x86)\Epic Games\FootballManager26

3. Drag the "BepInEx" folder from the zip into that folder, next to the game's .exe.

4. Windows will ask about merging or replacing files. Say yes to either.

5. Start the game.