Welcome to the fifth part of my updated Skinning Guide for FM2015.
Before reading this guide make sure you have read the previous parts of the guide as well as the extracting files guide, as this guide will assume you have followed those guides.
The previous parts of the guide talked you through creating a new skin, changing the fonts, changing some of the font settings and colours, with the last part detailing how to change the skin graphics.
This part of the guide will talk you through some of the basics of how the xml files work. Due to how Football Manager works it isn't possible to give you a full guide on how to edit the xml files however this guide should give you some basic information to get you started. I also have some more detailed posts on this forum/my website that talk you through modifying certain screens and if you combine those guides with the basics learned here you should get a good understanding of how the xml coding in Football Manager works, after that the best way to learn is just from the experience of looking through and editing the xml files.
Editing the xml files is fairly simple once you know where to start and as such it doesn't actually require any coding experience, though some very very basic knowledge of coding or even webpage editing will give you a quicker start (even the simple knowledge of how to manually format your posts when posting on the forum is all you really need to start with).
You should also only rarely need to actually write your own xml code, most if not all of your xml editing will involve copying code from one place/file to another to change where it displays or will involve deleting of some code if you want to hide certain things, so you mainly need to know how the code links together and what is part of the same code. The hardest thing you'll probably have to do is to adjust the code you copied so it matches the format of the existing code as the code can change slightly depending on where and how it's displayed.
Before starting I advise you have the following folder locations open:
- Your 'Working' Folder Location from the previous guide (which is where you extracted the default game files to).
- The my_first_skin folder within your Saving Location.
You will also need to have your preferred xml file editor open as well as FM2015.
