Project Odyssey

miguelfcp

miguelfcp

Premier League
27 June 2009

Messi scores, Barcelona wins.
Dybala to Ronaldo, Juventus scores. Juventus wins.

Yawn.

It's cliché. Common. Ordinary. Boring.

Me and my friend @mattmid are tired of playing with the same old teams, and the same old players. The same old leagues and competitions.

We've had enough of it. We want more.

The world of football is immense and is filled with hundreds of leagues, teams and players from all over the globe. From gigantic countries such as Russia or the USA, to tiny ones like Andorra or Liechtenstein; from Greenland to New Zealand, Japan to Peru: football may be the only thing in common between many nations of the Earth, but it's such a wonderful sport that no matter the climate, the economy or the political situation of a country, they all manage to find a way to play the beautiful game.

All of those countries have their own story to tell. Each has its own unique players, teams, leagues and competitions. While those might not be the best of the world, nor the most popular, it's still part of each country's own brand of football, one that's irreplaceable and inimitable - and therefore, valuable.

Knowing about all this, it makes no sense to restrict ourselves to a handful of leagues and competitions.
It's time to let go of the shackles and open your world.
It's time to pack your bags, because we're going on a journey around the globe. We'll explore the football world in a fun, exciting and completely new way - helped, of course, by the game of PES. Welcome to Project Odyssey.

Next up: what is Project Odyssey?
 
miguelfcp said:

Messi scores, Barcelona wins.
Dybala to Ronaldo, Juventus scores. Juventus wins.

Yawn.

It's cliché. Common. Ordinary. Boring.

Me and my friend @mattmid are tired of playing with the same old teams, and the same old players. The same old leagues and competitions.

We've had enough of it. We want more.

The world of football is immense and is filled with hundreds of leagues, teams and players from all over the globe. From gigantic countries such as Russia or the USA, to tiny ones like Andorra or Liechtenstein; from Greenland to New Zealand, Japan to Peru: football may be the only thing in common between many nations of the Earth, but it's such a wonderful sport that no matter the climate, the economy or the political situation of a country, they all manage to find a way to play the beautiful game.

All of those countries have their own story to tell. Each has its own unique players, teams, leagues and competitions. While those might not be the best of the world, nor the most popular, it's still part of each country's own brand of football, one that's irreplaceable and inimitable - and therefore, valuable.

Knowing about all this, it makes no sense to restrict ourselves to a handful of leagues and competitions.
It's time to let go of the shackles and open your world.
It's time to pack your bags, because we're going on a journey around the globe. We'll explore the football world in a fun, exciting and completely new way - helped, of course, by the game of PES. Welcome to Project Odyssey.

Next up: what is Project Odyssey?
Click to expand...
I try to guess, it will be a pes 6 mod with many minor league that unfortunately are often forget
 
Really looking forward to seeing what you two have been up to. Still loving Amador and seeing more lower league representation is always nice. Where do you source your data for these projects, Football Manager?
 
What is Project Odyssey?

Project Odyssey is going to take you on a trip around the world, to experience football as it exists on the many countries of the planet. While both PES and FIFA typically focus on the top leagues, we wanted to go further and play with teams and footballers that we've never even heard about before. Fortunately, there is no shortage of leagues and divisions out there, and the vast majority of them were never ever present on any football game ever - besides CM/FM, but in there you can't actually play football.

Thanks to the progress that the PES6 editing scene has been making - albeit quietly -, with the help of people like @peterc10, it was never as easy and fast as it is now to shape the database of the game according to our every whim. The choice of PES6 as the platform for Project Odyssey was therefore a no-brainer: solid gameplay, endless editing possibilities and endless available graphic mods is a combination that no other game is able to match.


But as always, nothing is perfect and PES6 certainly has its own problems as well. First, how do we shape the entire database of the Option File to fit our Project? And second, how do we get around the fact that playing an edited PES6OF always brings about issues regarding the ML?

A PES OF has many different things to be taken care of: from National Team players to ML newgens, the many different leagues...so, all patchmakers over the years had to be sure that their work was 100% perfect, no rough edges, or else the community would have a say if they found, say, a player that wasn't supposed to be on said team, or a couple of player stats which weren't up-to-date. This not only takes a hell of a long time, but is also too much work for too few people with too little time to edit.

The second problem is also important to take care of. PES6's Master League is a world of its own, one that has very little in common with the football world as it exists now in real-life, with idiosyncrasies such as the fact that transactions are carried out through PES Points, not real money; the structure of the ML world itself, the ML newgens, the regens...and also here, patchmakers have been trying for decades to "fit" the real world in this make-believe fantasy land of PES, have been doing their best to try and provide a realistic experience within this platform; but ultimately they fail because the game's structure simply doesn't allow it.

How did we fix those issues for Project Odyssey?

We didn't.

For to address the first problem, we reimagined what a PES OF should contain. Unlike your typical patch/OF, we edited only a very small percentage of the data on each OF. Let's say you want to play the Angolan league, and you download our version of it. The OF you get will only have the teams of that competition, the rest of the file will remain absolutely untouched. What we do here is we edit every file according to its purpose, and anything that doesn't fit it is ignored.

Regarding the second problem, we just accepted that for the purposes of Project Odyssey, our files are shaped to provide an experience on the Exhibition/League and Cup Modes, and not on the Master League. We want to play a somewhat realistic version of each league we make, not a Master League where inevitably we'll see all the types of things that we're not seeing in real-life: such as player transfers that do not occur in reality, player stats evolution according to what happens on the game an not according to real-life, etc. So if you download the Season 2019 of the Angolan League, that's exactly what you'll be able to play.


By now you already have an idea of our method behind Project Odyssey, but I'll clarify it furtherly.

Other patches try to fit a world in a single option file for PES6.

Our world is outside of the game itself.

Every time we release an Option File, we're actually releasing a League. Every league that is released is added to our Odyssey Database, with the purpose of establishing the first-ever League database for PES. So, before you click on PES6's executable you're already playing the game, as you'll have to choose which league you'll play before you actually run PES6.

This is the perfect way to overcome the limitations of a database that has a fixed number of available - and editable - teams: by creating a database that lives outside of the game itself. And here, there are no limits. The database can grow, evolve, and include whatever we want it to have. PES6 becomes only the platform, the "provider of gameplay".

Next up: Meet the World of Project Odyssey
 
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Odyssey Database
(each Option File is a League, copy it onto your PES6 OF folder)​

Europe
 
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If you save a league, edit a player then re load the league, will the changes take effect or stay the same?
If it's the latter then it would be a possible to load an existing league without changing the OF.
I know in ML you can save individual teams as my best 11 and use them in friendlies but not in leagues.
 
@Titch In league mode if you make a change to a player it does take effect in your save. Also if you load a league that you saved with a different OF and load it up with another OF the teams will be the one's who are in the same slots in the new OF.

I think (can't remember for certain) but if you were to remove a player from the squad he does get removed but I seem to recall that if he's on the goals or assists list he stays on there at whatever total he had before you removed him.
 
What will a Project Odyssey Option File be like? As @miguelfcp alluded to it will largely be the default PES6 OF and that part will be irrelevant and not intended to be used to play against any teams in the Odyssey Leagues. Each of the Option Files will have one League on it (Although on occassion two if the Division level is split into two Leagues as will be the case with our first file) The League will be placed over the Team A,B,C... part of the original option file and work back in the file from there if there are more than 18 teams.

As Miguel mentioned, these will be Leagues that are virtually only ever to be found on FM, which is where the players stats will come from using my own conversions that are unique to these files. However there's a twist, well actually two.

The first one is that I've always found the one big advantage we have over the AI is it's reluctance to sprint unless we are chasing them. This allows us a big advantage in dispossessing them by charging at them while they are dawdling in possession. One part of reducing that advantage is that the maximum stamina in the files will be 80, meaning spam the R1 button and you'll pay for it later on. However an idea also came to be about the AI's lack of zest in possession and I tested it out. I wasn't sure at first as I thought it might also give us the player an advantage but it doesn't. I gave the file to Miguel to test and see what he thought and he was as amazed as I was at the difference in the AI's attacking. You'll have to wait and see what it is though.

A by product of that is I decided to watch a CPU v CPU game and then another, and another. Each game was a better watch than the real games I'd watched that weekend! So much so that I am seriously contemplating playing 'watching' out a complete league, something I'd never have considered doing.

The second twist is that again with the lower leagues, naturally the skillsets are lower, a good thing in my opinion, but if everything is too low it can become a midfield battle and result in a serious lack of goals. This was when I had my second idea and where the idea came from to have one league on it's own in each OF. What if each League was in it's own 'world' so to speak, the stats could be higher but still relative to each player so the players were still balanced to each other, a good player was still good, a weaker player still weaker than the good player.

My thinking was ok let's say Messi is a 20 for dribbling in FM for example, so he's the best player in the Spanish League for dribbling and would have the highest PES stat for Dribbling Accuracy. So extrapolating from there, Heddy Scaws of the Alaskan Premier (ok that doesn't exist) has a 15 in FM for his Heading and is the best of all the players in the Alaskan Premier for that stat. So he becomes the benchmark for the highest PES stat awarded for Heading. The stat is arbitrary to a degree, in that I have decided where it will be set at as the highest, but will work to a set of stat totals down to what a player in the league who has heading at 1 in FM would get. Usually the player(s) with the top stat will be getting around 90. This is done across the range of PES stats, using whatever the top FM total is for any player in the league as the top rating.

This leads to a nice range of stats and at the same time allows the league to be a competitive one for the player (and indeed AI v AI!). We have two leagues as work in progress, one almost ready to go, and there is a tangible difference between the two, you can see and feel that one league is of a better quality than the other even though the highest stats are similar, because the better league has more players with mid range stats where as the other has less, even though the top end of the players of both leagues are of a similar level. The other benefit of course is that the quality players in the league will now really stand out.


Here's some match stats of CPU v CPU games, note the foul numbers (turns out the AI is a bit of a hatchet man on the side!) yellow cards, plus some of the shot totals the AI mustered. All were 20 min games.

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I also had a CPU v CPU games with two penalties given, both of which were missed!
 
miguelfcp said:

Messi scores, Barcelona wins.
Dybala to Ronaldo, Juventus scores. Juventus wins.

Yawn.

It's cliché. Common. Ordinary. Boring.

Me and my friend @mattmid are tired of playing with the same old teams, and the same old players. The same old leagues and competitions.

We've had enough of it. We want more.

The world of football is immense and is filled with hundreds of leagues, teams and players from all over the globe. From gigantic countries such as Russia or the USA, to tiny ones like Andorra or Liechtenstein; from Greenland to New Zealand, Japan to Peru: football may be the only thing in common between many nations of the Earth, but it's such a wonderful sport that no matter the climate, the economy or the political situation of a country, they all manage to find a way to play the beautiful game.

All of those countries have their own story to tell. Each has its own unique players, teams, leagues and competitions. While those might not be the best of the world, nor the most popular, it's still part of each country's own brand of football, one that's irreplaceable and inimitable - and therefore, valuable.

Knowing about all this, it makes no sense to restrict ourselves to a handful of leagues and competitions.
It's time to let go of the shackles and open your world.
It's time to pack your bags, because we're going on a journey around the globe. We'll explore the football world in a fun, exciting and completely new way - helped, of course, by the game of PES. Welcome to Project Odyssey.

Next up: what is Project Odyssey?
Click to expand...
i love this group! Yeah good idea.
 
@Titch Thanks. Yes, judging from what I'm seeing with these it would work well. The first league we'll be releasing is very much that sort of level.
 
The idea I can think of an obscure league and be able to play it is crazy.
I also don't think anyone can steal from them. For instance, you would not be able to use teams from a Finnish OF and add them to a French one. The stats would not work together because of the adjustment. They only work stand alone.
 
Each league file contains:

  • Accurate team names and crests
  • Accurate player names and stats and information
  • Ingame-made and editable kits
  • Accurate team formations
Our focus is on getting the data right, allowing for a FM-type of experience within PES - one in which you're actually able to play the matches yourself using the data we provide. As such, though all the info about every player is correct, from height-weight to skin type, we don't go as far as to edit every single face to match its real-life counterpart. First, faces are mostly cosmetic acessories that only embellish the experience - a player having the correct eyebrow or nose type is something that will only make itself obvious very rarely, if ever -; but most of all, it'd be so much more time consuming for us to edit the faces in a detailed way - and we're only doing this for fun, not as a full-time job. Still, given we don't use any player face or hair that doesn't exist in the ingame editor, you're able to edit it all yourself if you, for example, download your country's league and - naturally - would rather play it with accurate player likenesses. This saves a lot of time which allows us to cover more leagues than we'd otherwise do if we had to channel much more hours into each of the files than we currently do.

As for the teams, they all have ingame-made kits that are supposed to imitate their current, real-life ones. The information available for some teams is quite limited, so we weren't always able to get every of the 4 kits for each team right, so you'll see a few invented kits here and there - but, as always, those were made with the ingame editor. Just like we do with the player faces, we want people to be able to edit all of the kits themselves if they want to, even if they end up creating or downloading kits done via an outside editor.

We also decided not to include sponsors or brands on our kits, in order to have a more classic, clean and simple look. Oh, and because if those sponsors and brands want to appear in our game, they'll have to pay us. :PIRATE:

The team formations reflect the info we find online, since we've never seen the vast majority - if not all...- of these teams playing football in real-life. The same goes for player transfers.
 
Just to expand on what Miguel said regarding formations, the file will be set with the formation and line up they used in their last game before the file's release (unless in a rare case we just can't find it, in which case we will use the latest we can find). So, of course on occasion one of the best players may not be in the lineup if he happened to be injured or suspended, just so you are aware.

As Miguel says face/hair we leave alone but do try to change any that look wrong such as bright blond hair on a skin of 4 etc, or dreadlocks on a 1 skin.

Now @peterc10 has added body part stats (arm width etc) into the csv import on the editor we've come up with a little formula to approximate that into body size, so you'll notice varying body shapes and sizes and will be able to tell the stronger players visually as they won't all be stocky like they often are.
 
With the first League release almost ready (should be tomorrow) it's time for a little peak at what the new @peterc10 Pes Editor Body Shape Diet © has done to PES6's tanks, I mean players.


Oh and the Tippeligaen ad is because I was playing in a Norwegian stadium and is not of any relevance. :)

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Project Odyssey: An arrow to the knee

Imagine the following: your local team is playing, you're in the stadium watching the game. Your team, currently on top of the league, is facing the bottom side who had won 2 matches out of 25 so far. Against all odds, your team concedes a goal on the very first minute, after the keeper fails to save a rather easy shot to get to. So far, he had only conceded 7 goals, and here he is, conceding against the worst team of the league after just 60 seconds of play. You can't help but close your eyes in desperation, while yelling "God, why have you forsaken me!??". No wonder: it's the very first time you come to the stadium to watch your local team and the unthinkable happens. Your buddy, sitting next to you, smiles sarcastically and says what no football fan would like to hear:

"Well, that was expected. Everyone knows you shouldn't play a goalkeeper with a down arrow..."

Arrows in PES determine a player's form. That form is reproduced ingame through the reproduction of dynamic upgrades or downgrades of each player's stats, according to the arrow each has.
The situation I described early on is absolutely unrealistic because in real-life, no one knows before any match how the player form will impact the game. Even a player who has scored 6 goals on the previous 4 matches can play horribly on the following one. There's only one way one can truly know how well a player will play.

By waiting for him to actually play. It's the only way.
Then, after he does play, you draw the necessary conclusions and are able to understand how on form he really was.

So, while we were preparing our Project, I said something about the irrealism of PES' form arrows, and Matt had this idea: why not hiding them?

He then edited the appropriate graphics and was indeed able to hide them. Here's how it looks on the ingame, mid-match "change player" screen:

C9yPhqa.png

Now, with this file, both before the match (while on the formation screen) and during it (formation + change player screens) it's IMPOSSIBLE to know the form of your players. This means you can't choose the players by form (unless you use autoselect, but that's cheating!) and therefore, it forces you to pick your players according to the tactical strategy you want to employ on a game. If any of your players end up playing badly, he might've been on a down arrow, but you as a manager can't know that beforehand.

This is another layer of difficulty we'll "install" on our Leagues.
 
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The first Project Odyssey release will be tomorrow evening, in the meantime we might as well announce which league will be the first.

As I mentioned in an earlier post this first release consists of two leagues at the same level. Two Division's of twelve teams each. All 24 teams are here with up to date squads, correct info (age/wt/ht etc) and stats and last weeks formations and lineups set. The league(s) in question is 2.Division in Denmark, the third tier of Danish football and one I would highly doubt has ever seen the light of day in a playable football game.

As we've been enjoying watching the AI play out some games on this file as we've been working on it and there was a game in the league tonight I decided to have the AI play out a 20 min game of it's own. Kjellerup (bottom) were home to table toppers. In the real world, Kjellerup appear to have made the mistake of upsetting Skive by taking an early lead tonight.Skive replied with 7 goals!


Here's the end game highlights and stats of how it went down in Project Odyssey...

Look out for the only Kjellerup highlight (playing in white as I put them in their away kit for some reason! :DOH:) which was a superb ball over the top of the Skive defence that really deserved a goal at the end of it.




Tonights real scorers were Jespersen (2), Mogensen (2) Bjerregaard (2) and Ostergaard

In Project Odyssey it was Jespersen Mogensen (2) and Bjerregaard

If you want to know tomorrow's 2.Division results, just let me know :PP:LOL:
 
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@mattmid: I'm tired of telling real-life players and teams to please stop copying the matches we run on Project Odyssey, but to no avail. Now this is getting out of hand, we might have to sue. :LOL:
 
mattmid said:
No just the form arrows, so you still get to know about injuries :)
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Amazing!
It's made me think about what else in the game can be hidden...
One thing about patches that get released is that you can still tell it's PES. I like the idea almost anything can be customised to whatever you wish.
 
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