FIFA 11 Creation Master V 11.0 Released

Thank you for trying CM 11. If you are familiar with CM10 or previous versions you just need to know one major difference about CM11. You must always Save before to Exit the program if you want to make your changes effective, also if you are just changing graphics.

Disclaimer

This is not an official tool from EA and the behaviour of FIFA 11 is still unknown in many aspects. This tool has been developed for modifying the database files and the graphic files according to the current understanding of the author and of the modding community but  the final result in game may be different from what expected.

Absolute Beginners

If it is the first time you try to edit a FIFA game this is the right point to start. FIFA 11 can be modded heavily but there a few things you should know just before to start:

1)      Backup your original game: modding FIFA you risk to damage the game, I mean it will crash to desktop. So it is a good rule to keep a backup of your original files and of your “working” modified files when you reach a working situation.

2)      Use a small steps approach: do not try huge changes, rather do a small change, save and try it immediately. If it works you can keep it and move forward. If it doesn’t work you can quickly move back to the previous situation and try again (see point 5 below)

3)      Modifying FIFA 11 using CM 11 is incompatible with modifying the game with the internal editor of FIFA 11. Going a little bit deeper in detail you should know that CM 11 modifies the main database of FIFA 11 EA SportsFIFA 11Gamedatadbfifa_ng_db.db while internal editors create come squad files in the DocumentsFIFA 11 folder. The squad files require to have the main database existing at their creation time. If you change the main database the squad files may not work. But if they work, because the changes you did to the main database are compatible with them, all the information saved in the squad files override the information saved in the main database. So it may appear that your changes are not effective in game though they appear visible in CM. In order to avoid this effect you should remove all squad files.

4)      Modifying FIFA 11 can make impossible to continue a career that you started before to edit the game. The reason is the same as described above. Also the manager files require to keep the main database unchanged in order to work. You can anyway do in this way: make a copy of the fifa_ng_db.db file at the moment you start a career. Now you can use CM 11 and modify the database. When you want to continue your career you can just restore the copy of the database previously saved and it will work.

5)      CM 11 automatically creates a backup copy of your main database every time it is modified. The file is renamed as fifa_ng_db.db.bak and is overwritten every time you save. In order to restore the previous situation delete the current fifa_ng_db.db and rename fifa_ng_db.db.bak to fifa_ng_db.db

You are now ready to move to the next chapter and learn something more about the structure of FIFA 11.

FIFA 11 File Structure

CM 11 does a lot of job for you in order to access the FIFA 11 files hiding the details complexity. Nevertheless I strongly recommend you spend a few minutes here because the understanding of the file structure of the game can save a lot of time and avoid you to fall in very common errors.

When you install FIFA 11 you will find in the folder FIFA 11Game some files named data#.big and data#.bh where # is just a progressive number. The data#.big files are archives (similar to zip files) containing many archived files and data#.bh are descriptor of the files contained in the data#.big. Therefore each big file should have its corresponding bh file.

When FIFA 11 needs a file it first looks in to data#.bh files and checks if the file is present, if yes it gets it out from the corresponding big file. if not it searches in the Game subfolder for finding a file with the correct name. This description has just a few exceptions that we will see later.

CM 11 will not modify your big files, the reason is that they are too big and a write access to them is dramatically slow. Instead CM 11 will add the modified files directly in the proper Game subfolder and then will hide the file in the data#.bh  so , when FIFA 11 will go to search for the file, it will not use the original file (still present in the big archive but hidden) and will use the modified file instead.

The only exception to this mechanism is the locale.big file because it does not have a corresponding bh file. Locale.big archive contains all the database for language localization and CM 11, in order to modify them, will extract all these files from the locale.big physically removing them by the archive.

Online Help

More information and tutorials at www.fifa-master.com

License

Creation Master 11 (CM11) is freeware and is provided 'as-is', without any expressed or implied warranty. In no event will the author(s) be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Credits

Thanks yo all the Beta Testers that allowed the development of this tool.

History

Release 11.0= First release