Editing SWOS

There are mainly 2 things that can be edited in SWOS.  This section tells you how to change them.

• Editing Teams Guide

• Changing SWOS sounds

• Editing TRIAL and RESERVE players in a career

Editing Teams Guide

If you are not interested in updating SWOS teams, or you want to preserve the magic of SWOS teams and don't want to know how it all works - then do not read on.  However, read on to find out how SWOS teams are made up and how you can change them.

Introduction

In SWOS, the teams you play with are found in the data folder in your SWOS folder (C:\swos\data).  In the folder is a large number of files which are named "team.###".  Each file contains a different group of teams.  Team.000 is Albania, and Team.008 is England for example.  All these teams can be edited using the brilliant SWOS Editor for Windows by Pablo Fridlender (you can find it in my downloads).

The Editor

When you use the editor you can see all the stats from every team in SWOS.  The screen shot below shows what you would see.

You can edit the player names, nationality, shirt number (1-16), position, skills (passing, shooting, heading, tackling, ball-control, speed, finishing), price value (£25k- to £15m+).   You can also edit the details of the team; team name, coach, formation, home kit and away kit.

How SWOS uses the data

The team details and player details are pretty straight forward.  The player skills are a little more complicated though.

Each skill is rated from 0-15.  There are some rules though.  There are only 8 skill levels, but the skills can be represented as in the 0-7 range or 8-15.  What this means is that 0 is the same as 8, 1 is the same as 9 ... 7 is the same as 15.

In career mode when SWOS calculates the player salaries, I think it pays more money for a player's skills in the 8-15 range than in the 0-7.

General Player Rules

A Goalkeeper on SWOS has 0 for every skill.  You'll notice that no 'keeper on SWOS has any skills.

Outfield players have 7 skills, each with a rating.  In the screen clips below the teams' values are made by using the "original SWOS formula"

Here is a quite average team

As you can see, there is a pattern. A player has two key skills which are in the [8-15] range, and the rest of their skills are represented in the [0-7] range. If you knew a team quite well you could make exceptions, like a fast central defender, a striker with more shooting or better tackling etc.

If you had a better, even higher quality team with star players you might have some stats like below (which would also produce higher values).

As you can see in the prices here, the goalkeeper and some midfielders are probably famous players. All the others are probably well-known also. If you know the teams well you should be able to represent players in SWOS quite accurately using this way.  The better players have higher skills in areas which wouldn't necessarily be their key skills.  This will increase their price when you run the formula.  For example, the LW is priced at 3m; his 3 best skills have a value of 15, and to the rest of his skills are also quite high, remember - 4 and 5 are the same as 12 and 13 respectively.

If you stick to using the original SWOS formula for prices when making your update, the finished update will be realistic and will play very well in SWOS.  Remember, today's transfer values are probably over double the values in SWOS.  In SWOS, the highest price is a value of 15m+, so only players who would be 40m in real life should have the highest price.  Try to use the same ratio when thinking of every player (that's about 3:8).

When you are using the original formula you can get a good idea of the standard of a team by the overall skill value.  Top, world-class football playing teams have more than 870 points.  Other very strong teams have between 750 and 870.  I don't think that is is realistic to ever give a team more than 1000 points. 

Of course, you don't have to stick to the original formula with the prices, you could use a different formula or pick values yourself.  You might decide that a player is not very skillfull, but has a high transfer fee.  Or you might decide that a player is quite skillful, but has not earned a high price yet. Just dont forget that 0-7 = 8-15 !

Making sure your update doesn't crash in SWOS

With updates SWOS will crash at the end of a season if the size of any league is altered from the original game, so make sure you correct any mistakes and then SWOS will run fine.

For help in editing SWOS click here to see the list of Team numbers and the list with the League sizes for SWOS 96/97.

Changing SWOS sounds

All the sounds in SWOS are in "RAW" format.  The sounds that you can change are all the commentary and crowd chants which are loded from your HD in a game.  All these sounds can be listened to and edited using a good sound editing program.  I recommend using a program called GOLDWAVE which can be found by searching for it in good search engines.

All the sounds are located in the HARD folder in your main SWOS directory, these are the crowd chants that you can change.

Cheer.raw
Easy.raw
Erewego.raw
Fivenil.raw
Fournil.raw
Notsing.raw
Threenil.raw
Fournil.raw

All files need to be saved as RAW format, 8 - bit Mono, and sampling rate of 22050.

You can go straight in and change the sounds that are already there or make your own sounds from scratch and just save them with the filename of the comment you want to replace.

Commentry can be changed but unfortunately you can only change comments for throw-ins, bookings, subs and everything else that happens when the ball is out of play.  The rest is all loaded from the CD.

Again all files need to be saved as RAW format, 8 - bit Mono, and sampling rate of 22050.

Click here to see the entire list of commentary used in the game.

Some SWOS commentary from the English commentator Barry Davies can be found on the downloads page

Editing TRIAL and RESERVE players in a career

You need a hex editor program to do this.   I recommend a good editor by John Durward.  Just search for "John+Durward+Hex+Editor" in a search engine and you should find the software.

What to do:

In your career file a lot of information is stored.  The careers you save in SWOS are saved as ********.car files in C:\SWOS.   Before you open the file using a hex editor it is best to backup the file you intend to change, just in case you make a mistake.

Search on the ASCII (right) side for your name which you entered at the start of the career.  I would search for "PAUL TURNER" for example.

Under your name will be your entire squad, including trial and reserve players.  Go down until you find your trialist players, at the start of a career there should be 2 reserve players and 8 trialists.  They all have made up names.  Below you can see the entire entry for a player called "PAUL MELLON"

The player has many different attributes which you can change.  You can change nationality, shirt number, name, hair+skin, position, passing, shooting, heading, tackling, control, speed, finishing, value.  Every detail is represented by HEXIDECIMAL numbers on the left side of the display.  On the right is the ASCII equivalant of the HEX numbers.

The player's record is 74 HEX numbers long. Here is a diagram of how the record is set out.  Remember that the numbers are saved as HEXIDECIMAL, If you don't know the code, click here for a conversion chart.

NATIONALITY - corresponds to the team file which the player comes from.  English is 08, Austrian is 01, but there is not a file for every number, so because there is not a file for 09, the file 10 takes the number for 09.   This all gets a bit confusing, so reluctantly I had to draw up a chart of all the nationalities I know (click here to see it)

SHIRT NUMBER - TRIALIST don't have shirt numbers, so you don't need to change this.

NAME - The record for name is 23 ASCII characters long, or 46 HEX numbers.  Edit the name on the ASCII side of the editor, you must keep the field 23 characters long otherwise the file will be corrupt.  Your saved file must always be the same as the original - make a note of the correct file size from the bottom left corner of your HEX window before you start to edit.

POSITION & SKIN/HAIR - Here is a chart with all the codes you need for this field:

	G	RB	LB	D	RW	LW	M	A
	00	20	40	60	80	A0	C0	E0
	08	28	48	68	88	A8	C8	E8
	10	30	50	70	90	B0	D0	F0

7 SKILLS - In order the skills are Passing, Velocity of shot, Heading, Tackling, Control, Speed, Finishing. Each skill takes a value from 0-16, but they are in HEXIDECIMAL of course.

VALUE - There are 50 different values for price, in English Pounds ranging from 25k- to 15m+.  Here is a chart for all prices from 0-49.  Remember to use the HEX value of the numbers shown.

When you are happy with your changes, save the file and exit the HEX editor.  Load up SWOS and load your saved career and hey presto there you go!