Updating an fm20 skin to work on fm21 - how hard?

[Mikeonhisboat]

I made myself a skin on fm20. Not the world's most inepth, but I liked it. Took me forever as i'm not a natural to skinning. I also had plenty of time back then in lockdown 1... 

Then I got bored of the fm20 match engine.

But have heard fm21 much better and more varied, and i'm thinking of starting over on that version. How much work is it going to be for me to update my skin to work on fm21? Main changes were to layout of squad, team and player profile screens, some bits on the competition screen. Nothing much with the match screens. Or is it nightmarishyly complicated beyond being worth attempting?

[a31632]

There are a lot more changes in the panels when porting over from FM2020 to FM2021 than previously. Porting over from 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020 was relatively easy.

My suggestion to you is to extract the standard panels with the "resource archiver" and compare (quickly) every panel you manually changed in your skin with the code in the new 2021 version. In Notepad++ there is a "compare" plug in, so even if it looks very similar you can see exactly if other things besides the ones you made for your 2020 skin have changed.

I know; it's a lot of work, but it's the best way to go as simply "dumping the panels" in the new skin version will give you a lot of bugs and headache afterwards, as you will have to "track down" which panel in question is causing an issue.

I build up my skin from scratch and added panels one by one, compared and edited when needed, that way you avoid bugs and crashes (I had only one in the club overview panel that looked the same as in 2020 and prior but the new version didn't like some coding) and as a "bonus" you get some experience with part of the skinning process ;-) 

Don't forget to edit the "skin_config.xml" and update to:     <string id="required_version" value="21.0.0" />

Edited May 9, 2021 by a31632

[Olas Nick]

On 09/05/2021 at 19:06, Mikeonhisboat said:

Or is it nightmarishyly complicated beyond being worth attempting?

try to create new "сlean" skin and copy one by one panels from old skin. and check it after every iteration. if not work - compare old "bugged" panel and default fm21 panel.