Tons of Lovely Data

Yup, that's a screenshot. Unfortunately for you, it's just of the editor. Remember what I said earlier about funbots (clearly in a moment of drunken madness, may I add)? The editor is currently the main focus of my work, as it's through the editor's creation that the database structure is defined. But look at the snazzy kit colours! Ooooh!

If The Complete Football Game is to successfully simulate the entire football world, it would need a lot of data. Teams, players, competitions, nations, cities, stadia, league systems, regions, ex players, defunct nations and clubs, currencies, spoken languages, injuries, rivalries and more need to be stored to keep the game ticking along, and with over 250 nations in the game you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a struggle to get them all in.

Yet TCFG's database currently weighs in at a relatively paltry 63MB, uncompressed. The structure is not yet complete - leagues still need to be catered for - and when the game's running it needs a lot of space to store all the fixtures and results that don't get stored in the database, but ultimately TCFG is surprisingly space friendly.

The above screenshot shows the main club edit screen. Now, I dunno if Newry City are that rich in real life, and the layout isn't fantastic, but the editor's more about function than style right now. Each club has two kits, three teams (each with their own stadium if necessary), a maximum of 80 players (which ought to be sufficient), and various other titbits of information. Enough for a club.

Players are even more detailed. Each player in TCFG has his date of birth, nationalities, international record, spoken languages, a rating for each of the 16 positions in the game, his career history, which foot he kicks with, how good his weaker foot is at various tasks - enabling a right footed player to have poor accuracy with his left but still be able to give it a hefty whack - forty-eight attributes and information relating to his overall ability. And on top of that, there's his height, skin colour, hair and beard styles and colour, and even an attribute to let the game know that he changes his appearance more often than Djibril Cisse.

All that - and the database is capable of storing 375,000 players.

Now, that ought to give some insight into how complex the game is, and why it's bloody taking so long.