Graphics Issue

[Rumplebeanskin]

I recently took the plunge and picked this game up, it's a blast, really enjoying what I've done so far with a bit of experimentation and learning the ropes.

To start my "proper game", I wanted to create a fictional league with 32 new teams. The issue I'm having is that despite what I place into the pictures folder, replacing what is originally in there with files of the same name, I cannot get the game to pick up the new files. For example, the pictures folder has a file in there called ban94.bmp, which I placed in there and is the actual Dolphins logo (for now, anyway), yet in the game, when I look at the player card for someone on Miami's roster, it still shows the graphic of "Miami" written out, as is default, instead of showing the actual imagine of the Miami logo that is in the pictures folder.

I've loaded and reloaded FOF7, started new games as well just to see if that was the issue. I am running FOF7 using Wine on a Macbook, not sure if that is causing problems?

If anyone can shed any light on why the game isn't recognising the new bmp files, that would be ace. Thanks peeps!

[aston217]

If you're replacing the picture files in the INSTALL directory, don't. There's a separate data directory for FOF located under AppData. I'm not sure how this works under Wine; in Windows 7 the directory is

C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Solecismic Software\Front Office Football Seven\

(You can do a search for folders titled 'Front Office Football Seven', if that helps).

This folder contains your savegames. I believe single player games are saved under the universe subdirectory and multiplayer games under leagues. In any case, find the directory for your savegame and place your set of .bmp's there. That should do the trick.

[Rumplebeanskin]

This sounds like it might well be a solution, as that file directory in your post doesn't sound like the one I've been altering. At work at the moment, I'll give it a go when I get in tonight and let you know.

Thanks!

[Rumplebeanskin]

Hmmmm, can't even find the same games. They must be saved somewhere. What kind of an extension are they? a dot "something" file? Maybe try searching for one of those instead, idk!

[aston217]

You should search for a folder with the same name as your league ID (the 8 character name you chose for the save). All the various save files will be in that folder, and dumping the BMPs in there should do the trick.

[Rumplebeanskin]

Turns out the issue is Wine related, as far as I can tell. Wine has it's own file manager for the C drive that it creates and installs the game onto. I have found the file manager in Wine, and can find the bmp's that Wine is reading from.

The issue I have is that the File Manager in Wine is based on a quite basic level of windows, sort of MSDOS era, so it's not as simple as copying and pasting I don't believe.

I'm a step closer than I was yesterday though, and my next hurdle is a lack of knowledge of Wine, which is a different problem for a different forum and a different set of nice people to help me :)

I'll be sure to post a final solution in here once I have it though, just for reference in case anyone else has this issue in the future. FOF7 is ace, and should be enjoyed by as many people as possible, Mac users to!

[Rumplebeanskin]

In the end, I'm afraid to admit, I gave up on trying to get this to work. After about an hour of trial and error and trawling through various forums, I just couldn't make it happen.

I couldn't get the Wine File Manager to do what I wanted, and despite multiple posts saying that the copy/paste I needed could be done using the Finder on my Mac, I kept running into issues I didn't know how to solve.

It would have been nice to start a new game with a fictitious league and made up teams, but it wasn't to be. So instead I simmed through to 2020 and I'll be taking over the Jags ready for 2021. They're in quite the mess, so that should be fun!

[aston217]

Hm, that's too bad. I'm totally unfamiliar with Wine, but I would have thought if the game can write to the directory where it holds all its save files, then you could, too.

VirtualBox running Windows may be a better solution for those of you running Linux or Mac. Though it may be less convenient than Wine.