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Key: Name: Description: Creator (Creation Date): (Nov 23, 2007) Last Modifier (Mod. Date): sam deane (Dec 11, 2007) SIOS SIOS

Available Pages
Resource Tool User Guide How To Browse An Archive How To Create An Archive How to Enable A Skin In The Game How To Extract An Archive How To Extract Individual Files How To Work With Archives Where To Put Archives

Document generated by Confluence on Jan 25, 2008 12:52

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Resource Tool User Guide

This page last changed on Jan 25, 2008 by ruben gomes.

Introduction
Starting with Football Manager 2008, we have added the ability to package up groups of game resources into single files, known as Resource Archives. This means that skins, facepacks and the like can be distributed as single files. An obvious side-effect of this is that you can't just look inside a pack like you could with a folder. People in the FM community who make skins and other add-ons need a way to unpack these archives so that they can examine or modify their contents, and they also need a way to create new packs. The Resource Tool allows them to do this.

Contents
How To Work With Archives Where To Put Archives How To Extract An Archive How To Create An Archive How To Browse An Archive How To Extract Individual Files How to Enable A Skin In The Game

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How To Browse An Archive

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

Selecting The Archive To Browse To extract an archive, click on the "Browse Archive" button and use the "Choose A File" dialog to navigate to the archive file that you want to browse.

Highlight the archive and click "Select". Browsing The Archive The "Current archive:" area at the top of the window should now indicate the name of the archive that you're browsing.

Under this should be a list of the files and folders at the top level of the archive. The browsing interface works like a "Choose File" dialog: Double-clicking on a folder in the list will move into it so that you can view its contents. Clicking the "Up" button at the top right of the Resource Tool window will move back up one level. Clicking on the "Location:" button will pop up a menu showing the full path of the folder that you're looking at.

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How To Create An Archive

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

Selecting The Folder To Archive To archive a folder, click on the "Create Archive" button. Use the "Choose A Folder" dialog to navigate to the folder that you want to turn into an archive.

Highlight the folder and click "Select". Selecting The Destination Archive Now use the "Choose A New File" dialog to navigate to the folder into which you want the new archive to be saved, and give the archive a name. Highlight the destination folder that you've chosen, navigate into it, enter a file name into the "Save as:" box, and click "Select".

The New Archive Once you've selected the source folder and the destination archive, a progress dialog will show whilst the archive is created (if the folder is small, this may happen pretty quickly). You should find that a new archive has appeared in your chosen destination folder.

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How to Enable A Skin In The Game

This page last changed on Jan 25, 2008 by sam deane.

In order to use a skin you've put in your user data folder, you should: Start the game Go to Preferences screen Select Display & Sound In the Windows Settings section, open the pull-down menu "Skin" and select your new skin Click "Save Changes"

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How To Extract An Archive

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

Selecting The Archive To Extract To extract an archive, click on the "Extract Archive" button and use the "Choose A File" dialog to navigate to the archive file that you want to extract. Highlight the archive by clicking on it, then click "Select".

Selecting The Destination Folder Now use the "Choose A Folder" dialog to navigate to the folder into which you want the archive contents to be extracted. Highlight the destination folder that you've chosen by clicking on it, then click "Select".

The Extracted Archive Once you've selected the source archive and the destination folder, a progress dialog will show whilst the archive is extracted (if the archive is small, this may happen pretty quickly). You should find that an extracted folder has appeared at your destination. The name of the folder will match the name of the original archive - for example if the archive was called "Archive_1.fmf", the extracted folder will be called "Archive_1".

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How To Extract Individual Files

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

Choosing Items To Extract If you only want to get hold of one or two files in a large archive, you can achieve this without unpacking the whole thing. First, open the archive for browsing. Now, navigate to the the file that you wish to extract, and select it by clicking on it. If you wish to extract multiple files, you can click on additional items whilst holding down the Control (or Command on the Mac) key. Once you have selected the items you wish to extract, the "Extract Selected..." button will become active.

Extracting Items Click on the "Extract Selected" button. Use the "Choose A Folder" dialog to navigate to the folder into which you would like the extracted items to be placed. Highlight your chosen folder and click "Select". The Extracted Item(s) The items that you selected will be saved out into your chosen destination folder. If the items were inside sub-folders in the archive, the structure of these sub-folders will be created in your destination folder. For example, let's say that you opened the archive "graphics.fmf" and navigated to "icons/stars/gold/" and chose to extract the file "1star.png". Now you select to extract the file into a folder on your hard drive called "Extracted Files".

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Once the extraction has completed, if you look inside "Extracted Files", you will see that a folder "graphics" has been created. Inside this is a folder called "icons", inside that a folder called "stars", inside that a folder called "gold". Finally, inside the "gold" folder is the file you extracted. Why does it work like this? So that you can extract files a few at a time, but still preserve the overall structure of the archive. If you always choose the "Extracted Files" folder as your destination, each time you extract some more files from the archive they will be placed in the correct relative positions inside the "Extracted Files" folder. This is useful if you have extracted an entire archive, and then want to re-extract just one or two files into it (perhaps you messed up the original copies). It's also useful if you want to extract one or two files, but need to remember where they lived inside the archive - the folder structure will be created for you, making it obvious where the files originated from.

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How To Work With Archives

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

Although the Resource Archiver Tool allows you to browse the contents of an archive and extract individual files, we generally recommend that you use the following technique when working with archives: To start with, either unpack an existing archive into a folder (if you are going to modify an existing skin or pack), or create a new folder if you are starting from scratch. Whilst you are developing your skin or graphics pack, work with the folder. As long as it is in the right location, the game will pick up the folder in the normal way. When you are finished and want to distribute your work, use the Resource Archiver Tool to pack your folder into an archive, which you can then make available to whoever you want.

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Where To Put Archives

This page last changed on Jan 24, 2008 by neil dejyothin.

The golden rule here is never modify the FM data folder. All data that you've downloaded or modified should go into your user data folder instead. Any files you place in your user data folder will be picked up and used in preference to the equivalent file in the game data folder. This allows you to remove the files in your user data folder at any time and return to a "clean" installation of FM. Just to clarify this point further: don't drop new archives or folders that you've downloaded into the FM data folder; put them in your user data folder instead. don't uncompress the default FM archives into the data folder; if you want to examine or copy their contents, uncompress them to a different location. don't replace archive files or folders in the FM data folder with versions that you've modified. Where Are These Folders? By default, the FM data folder is located in the same directory as the FM executable (fm.exe or wsm.exe). If you installed to the default location it will probably be one of the following locations depending on your version: PC Mac /Applications/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008/data /Applications/Sports Interactive/Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008/data /Applications/Sports Interactive/Futbol Manager 2008/data C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008/data C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008/data C:/Program Files/Sports Interactive/Futbol Manager 2008/data

If you installed FM to a custom location, you'll find it there instead. By default, the user data folder is located in: PC My Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008 My Documents/Sports Interactive/Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008 My Documents/Sports Interactive/Futbol Manager 2008 Mac ~/Documents/Sports Interactive/Football Manager 2008 ~/Documents/Sports Interactive/Worldwide Soccer Manager 2008 ~/Documents/Sports Interactive/Futbol Manager 2008

(~ indicates the location of your Home folder - typically /Users/yourname/) You can customise this location from the Preferences screen inside FM.

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