Version Beta 6.3 of CM 11 is available for download. The most important improvements are in the creation of CMP patches. Now you should be able to create and load CMP patches quickly. I also added the possibility to follow the CMS (Creation Master Standard) so you can create patches that are world wide compatible with other patches. CMS is a little bit simplified this year, for example I did not assign a specific id for each team but I have reserved a certain number of ids for the teams of a Country, that the patch maker can freely use. On the other side Beta 6.3 includes the fixing of the latest bugs identified in the various forms.

Please consider that FIFA 11 for PC is quite different from the previous versions of the game, CM 11 is just a tool but it cannot guarantee that your changes work fine in FIFA 11. How to create a stable and robust patch is a know-how that we still have to develop as a community. For example I appreciate the effort  of sms_fede that is working on a patch for the Liga Uruguaya and is sharing in the forum what he discovered about the structure of the patch. I encourage all the patch makers to contribute to this learning curve sharing their knowledge. If you are willing to create a CMS compliant patch I am available to help you with some tips.

The only part that appears very poor in FIFA 11 if compared with the previous versions of FIFA is the Tournament Mode because, with the new structure of the database, it is impossible to create competitions like Champions League or Copa Libertadores. Or better, we can create the structure of the tournament but we cannot assign the teams properly.

Also in manager mode the tournaments seems to work differently from the previous year, for example it seems that FIFA 11 randomizes the teams participating to a tournament without considering the team look-up table of the database. For example: it is still true that the tournaments with id lower than 95 are played the first year of career and therefore, changing the id of Champions League and Europa League to 93 and 94, they can be played the first year but, every time you start a new career, it may happen that you participate or not to the competition according to the randomization done by FIFA 11. Btw. the randomizer seems not to work very well because many of the top teams are often excluded from the international competitions. I wonder if there is a way to control this behavior but, for the moment, I was not able to find it.

I want to give you also a short overview of the other modding areas.

Commentary: I have understood how to duplicate the name of a player in the commentary and I was able to figure out where the actual audio data are located in the file but I have no idea of the audio codec used. So I am still not able to export\import sounds to the file. Of course it is different from the one used the previous year.

Internal files: here we have still open the issue to find the CRC algorithm for these files. Honestly I don’t work on this argument from several months but it looks that nobody else has been able to find it in the meanwhile. So we can actually open and read internal files saved by FIFA 11 but we cannot modify them. A tool like Manager Mode is still impossible this year.

So, we still have a lot of things to discover on this game and we should just hope that FIFA 12 will not be too different from the point of view of the file structure or we should start again from scratch and, as you can see, it is a huge job. I understand that somebody is wondering that, after 6 months from the release of the game, we are still working to the first release of the editor. But you should consider that this year our staring point was that we were not able to open the database or any single graphic file of the game. And we did all the job without any support from EA, everything is the result of the job of passionate people that discovered things starting from scratch.

Nevertheless it seems that EA Sports trust a lot in our job. In fact when I started to develop tools for editing FIFA in 2005 there was a tool called the “Creation Center” developed by a programmer that was in touch with EA Sports and received from them many information about the structure of the game, but after a while I started to create and distribute my own tools this program disappeared and in the last years all the PC community of patch makers is alive thanks to the tools developed by me or by other passionate programmers.

Anyway I do this just for fun during my free time and I just hope you appreciate my effort.