LEAGUE SETUP

The file gallery now contains a Starter Kit for setting up your own league.

If you want to know how to setup your own league, this is the place to be.
This section will highlight how you setup your own esms plus league and talks about the different files that you will need.

Lets assume you want to start your own league called "Premiership" with 4 teams in the league.

These are the files that you will need for your league. Lets start with the files that have a "dat" and "dir" extension. These files are displayed in the image below.

dat and dir files needed for esms leagues

league.dat - this is the most important file that you should have to run your games. This is similar to a configuration file. You can modify different settings in there that will impact how your league is run.

language.dat - this file contains the various commentary lines that will be used in the match report. You can customize this file to include various match related lines that you want to have in your own match reports.

referees.dat - this is an optional file that contains the list of referees that will be used in the match reports. The usage of referees can be set in the league.dat file. The referees.dat will contain the referee name, the nationality of the referee, the strictness of the referee and the number of games he is used in.

team_data.dat - this is another optional file that contains the details of each team, with the fullname and the stadium name. This will then be displayed in the match report. The usage of team data is also configured in the league.dat file.

teams.dir - this is another important file, that is needed to run the matches. This contains the list of the team rosters that you have in your league. In our scenario it will have all the 8 teams listed as such: xxx.txt, yyy.txt, etc.

files needed for esms leagues

The files that are shown above are included in the Starter Kit

Now lets get to work. The 4 teams in our league will be Monaco, FC Basle, Porto and Plymouth. There is no limit for the number of teams in a league, but for simplicity, I will assume 4 teams. The maximum I have seen in a league has been 20 teams.

Each team is represented by its roster. So you will have 4 rosters in your game.
mon.txt for Monaco
bas.txt for FC_Basle
pto.tx for Porto
ply.txt for Plymouth

Rosters can be created by a utility called roster_creator, which unfortunately, I do not have as part of the Starter Kit. The hard way is to create rosters manually. Creating 8 rosters should take you some time.

(All non-exe files can be viewed with Notepad or any other text editor. There are two ways to do this. Open your favorite text editor and select the appropriate file to be opened. The other option, Right click on the file, select "Open With" and choose either Notepad or Wordpad.)

Open the league.dat file in your folder. This contains a lot of details and all of them will be explained later. For now, move to the end of the file, where you will find the Abbreviations section as such
Abbrevations:

dep = Deportivo_La_Coruna
cdc = CDC_Athletico_Nacional
chi = Chicago_Fire
ura = Urawa_Red_Diamonds

Replace the lines in there with the rosters and the team full names that you have in your league
Your league.dat should now contain the following lines in the Abbreviations section:

mon = Monaco
bas = FC_Basle
pto = Porto
ply = Plymouth


Next open the teams.dir file.
This file should contain the names of all the rosters that you have in your league. So it should contain the following lines:
mon.txt
bas.txt
pto.txt
ply.txt


Next open the table.txt file. This is your league table.
Replace the team names in there with the team names of your league. The team names should be the ones used in the Abbreviations sections of the league.dat file.

We are almost done......
Open the teams.txt file and replace the names in the file with the teams that you have in your league. Its better to have the fullnames, so that you can upload the generated fixtures file to your site.

Thats it then.....
Run fixtures.exe -> This will generate a file "fixtures.txt" that contains your league fixtures.

Now you can run the matches based on the fixtures. Proceed to the next section to find out how to run your matches.

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