Front Office Football Eight news & patch notes

As part of Steam's week-long Sports Fest, Solecismic Software is offering a 20% discount on Front Office Football Eight. The sale begins on May 15 at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. In Front Office Football, you play the role of your favorite team's general manager. You determine your team's future through trading with opponents, negotiating contracts, bidding for free agents and building through the annual amateur draft. You can also play the role of the armchair coach, setting game plans and depth charts, or even calling each play from an extensive playbook. You can determine ticket prices and submit stadium construction plans for public approval. You can even move your team if the public won't properly support your franchise. Front Office Football Eight includes a multi-player career mode with full ftp support, allowing you to compete in a league with up to 31 other enthusiastic general managers. Front Office Football was first released in 1998. This is the eighth full version of the game and came out in 2016. The current version includes the 2020 rosters and schedule.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly,” - Henri-Louis Bergson Today marks 23 years since I was last employed. I’ve enjoyed creating Front Office Football and shepherding it through eight full versions and numerous large updates. I’ve learned to solve a wide variety of issues related to running a business. And now it’s time for something new. This week, I began a job with a startup company. This is an exciting opportunity for me, one that will bring brand new challenges and use many of the skills I’ve built over the last 23 years. The computer gaming industry has grown enormously during that time. When I started, computers simply weren’t big enough to support the development work of many programmers. A lot has changed since the ‘90s. About ten years ago, I started to feel I couldn’t work on the heart of Front Office Football as much as I desired because making the game prettier and maintaining a GUI took up too much time. I never did catch up in that regard. I knew I needed to find a team willing to put together a new GUI and provide artwork and formal marketing if I wanted to continue developing this type of game. I thought I had found the right opportunity four years ago, but what looked perfect at first ended up not working out. At that point, with three more years essentially lost, I had to decide whether to continue along that path or move in a new direction. An offer arrived, and it appealed to me in a way that seems suited for this stage in my career. I am selling the Front Office Football code to this new company, where we will use it and algorithms based on its concepts to power some of the features in a new sports gaming venture. It took a while to finalize this offer and get the new team and its funding together. That is why I’ve had to remain quiet about it for the last few months. We’re not ready to make any announcements about the project, so I’m going to keep my head down and not discuss it while we’re in the early development stages. When it’s time, we hope that it will appeal to many of you. The new project isn’t like anything you’ve seen before, and that’s a big part of why I’m excited to get started and use my experience to help shape it and become part of something cutting edge. It’s time to let go of the past. What will happen to Front Office Football? Since I was waiting to get started on this new project, I decided to go ahead and create 2020 data files. Those have been added to Front Office Football Eight with a new update along with this announcement. No code, other than the few lines needed to support the 2020 starting option, has been changed since the last update. It wasn’t feasible to go back and add the new features I had created for FOF9 since that project was using very different data structures. The Steam versions will remain on sale as they are, with no future updates or patches planned as I no longer own the code. The ViaTech versions (including the seriously outdated College Years) will no longer be available, though ViaTech still maintains its electronic licensing system. Nothing is ever certain, but I think it’s unlikely that there will ever be a new Front Office Football stand-alone game. I enjoyed being part of this community, but this is the right move for me at this time. It’s an opportunity to reinvent myself and be part of a team that I think will shape future sports simulations.

This is a small update to allow players to begin new careers with the 2020 season. - Added player and other data files for 2020 season - Modified chooser, to allow start in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 or 2020

We released version 8.2a in an attempt to handle an issue where the game doesn't properly handle some display requests on systems using 4K resolutions. Hopefully, this will solve all of these display issues. We apologize to those affected. It was an inadvertent issue caused by updating our Microsoft Visual Studio version. There are also fixes in place designed to ensure that the playbook and offensive game plan screens react properly to play deletion.

Front Office Football Eight has been updated to Version 8.2. The update contains the 2018 player file, coaching file and schedule. New games will default to using these files and will begin in 2018 with the current salary cap structure This update will not affect saved games, though you should review the notes below for key details. The update includes new intermediate game-planning screens. These allow a little more fine-tuning of playbooks and game plans without having to design everything from scratch. You will still benefit from doing everything by hand, but the guided plans will allow considerable customization of your offensive game plan without having to spend hours working on every play. During the season, you will able to install up to 12 new plays to your playbook each week. If you're at the limit of 200, you will have to delete plays to make room for the new ones. If you are continuing a saved game that's in-season, you will have to simulate a week before you can add new plays (this applies to multi-player as well). The update includes a new blitzing designation screen that gives you a lot more control over which defenders blitz out of your basic personnel packages. Your saved defensive game plans will still work, but you will have to add blitz settings and then save them again to continue to use them. The update includes a new drag-and-drop interface functionality for the main offensive and defensive game-planning screens. This will allow for quicker fine-tuning of game plans. There are a couple of minor bug fixes, one that corrected an error in the in-game simulation play-by-play report involving who was blitzing on a play (the error did not affect the integrity of the simulation itself). Finally, there are a couple of tweaks to the process of evaluating free agent signings. First, the game will be a little less forgiving about correcting rosters that don't meet guidelines and will try to sign only rookie free agents. And second, players will be much stricter about letting their agents talk them into assigning much value to back-loaded offers.

Front Office Football Eight has been updated to Version 8.1. New games now default to using the new 2017 player file and coach file, and use the 2017 schedule. This update "moves" the San Diego franchise to the Los Angeles area for new careers. In order to have this reflected in new careers, you will need to delete the files beginning with frfoot.* in the universe folder where saved games are stored (see the FAQ at solecismic.com for instructions on how to find this folder if you're not already familiar with saved games). There are also a few minor AI tweaks, bug fixes and interface enhancements. Nothing earth-shattering. None of this will affect saved games. The only bug fixes relate to removing players from IR and a couple of penalty decision quirks. The biggest AI tweaks relate to late-game defensive calls (this is very tricky for many reasons), AI passing targets and classification of offensive play styles. Oh, and overtime during the regular season is now ten minutes long. This will greatly increase the rate of tie games. You can continue existing careers without any disruption. Thanks again for supporting Solecisimic Software. Almost 20 years now!

Front Office Football Eight has been updated to Version 8.1. New games now default to using the new 2017 player file and coach file, and use the 2017 schedule. This update "moves" the San Diego franchise to the Los Angeles area for new careers. In order to have this reflected in new careers, you will need to delete the files beginning with frfoot.* in the universe folder where saved games are stored (see the FAQ at solecismic.com for instructions on how to find this folder if you're not already familiar with saved games). There are also a few minor AI tweaks, bug fixes and interface enhancements. Nothing earth-shattering. None of this will affect saved games. The only bug fixes relate to removing players from IR and a couple of penalty decision quirks. The biggest AI tweaks relate to late-game defensive calls (this is very tricky for many reasons), AI passing targets and classification of offensive play styles. Oh, and overtime during the regular season is now ten minutes long. This will greatly increase the rate of tie games. You can continue existing careers without any disruption. Thanks again for supporting Solecisimic Software. Almost 20 years now!

The 8.0a update was uploaded late on November 30. Your Steam installation will update automatically. You can check which version you have by looking at the About box (Solecisimic icon on the menu bar). There's a lot in the update. As always, if you have any customer support issues related to the game, check the game's help file (F1 from any screen). Go to http://www.solecismic.com if you need additional support.

The 8.0a update was uploaded late on November 30. Your Steam installation will update automatically. You can check which version you have by looking at the About box (Solecisimic icon on the menu bar). There's a lot in the update. As always, if you have any customer support issues related to the game, check the game's help file (F1 from any screen). Go to http://www.solecismic.com if you need additional support.

The initial 10% discount on Front Office Football Eight sales expires on Wednesday, one week from the initial release of the product. We also plan to release a minor update some time on Wednesday (these are usually late at night) to address issues found in the last few days. Not everything will be included, but a large percentage of the initial bug and suggestion reports. When there's an update, you'll usually receive it automatically at some point that day. If you are using custom graphics in the installation file, it's likely those will be replaced. So it's a good idea to keep those custom graphics backed up and ready to put right back in there.

The initial 10% discount on Front Office Football Eight sales expires on Wednesday, one week from the initial release of the product. We also plan to release a minor update some time on Wednesday (these are usually late at night) to address issues found in the last few days. Not everything will be included, but a large percentage of the initial bug and suggestion reports. When there's an update, you'll usually receive it automatically at some point that day. If you are using custom graphics in the installation file, it's likely those will be replaced. So it's a good idea to keep those custom graphics backed up and ready to put right back in there.