Our fourth update for FHM2, version 2.4.29, has just been released. Your existing savegames will be compatible with the updated game, but any fixes involving the database updates in the update will require a new start to be fully effective, and some of the update's fixes may not retroactively correct certain problems in existing saves.

General notes: First, and most importantly: this update is dedicated to our friend Matthieu LeClair (Penfold on our forums), who passed away suddenly last Friday. Despite an ongoing illness, Matt had been a huge contributor to FHM2's testing and research efforts over the last year, and we'll miss him greatly. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.

We've expanded a bit more beyond bugfixing in this update, making some larger changes. All-star games have been added, and the German league is, at the moment, a testbed for some roster-rule changes that will eventually be expanded into other European leagues with similar rule structures. The reported-bug list is now 63% cleared (from 40% last update; includes newly-discovered bugs added since then.) With the extensive work on the larger new features and bugfixing, we didn't have time to implement that many smaller user-suggested features this time, but still have a long list of those to consider.

The database in this build is the product of last week's research update, so it's a few days behind real life. The "Current" starting option is beginning to diverge more from the Opening Night one now.

Changes:

1. Clarification made in labeling of Fatigue column on Lines screen during games (it shows current Game Fatigue, not the skaters's fitness value.)
2. Adjusted the maximum value the AI will assign to lower-round draft picks. This was intended to encourage the AI to make more trades involving picks, but the effect hasn't been as noticeable as was hoped, so we're going to try another approach next that should result in more active attempts at acquiring/trading picks by the AI.
3. College-bound players should now be a little less willing to sign professional contracts.
4. Scouts assigned to the KHL draft should now scout more appropriate regions.
5. Player health status colours reversed so green = good, red = hurt.
6. Defencemen should now be somewhat less likely to be named playoff MVP.
7. MHL/MHLB (Russian junior) maximum age is now 20.
8. Czech relegation system corrected.
9. Corrections made to starting injury data.
10. Spelling of many Belarusian city names switched from Polish to Belarusian versions.
11. In leagues where money can be included in trade offers (e.g. the KHL), the dollar amounts will now be valued more accurately by the AI.

New Additions:

12. The (modern) NHL and KHL now play all-star games in midseason. Unfortunately, the NHL surprised us with the new all-star game format for 2016, and it's going to be difficult to get that 3-on-3, 20-minute game setup working in FHM, so for now the NHL game approximately follows the format used in recent seasons, with two captains selecting the teams. We can't rename the teams annually according to the captains' names, though, so the normal naming format of "Team Crosby" is replaced by the two teams being designated "Red" and "Blue". The KHL uses its conference vs. conference format. A special set of game settings and AI tactical choices are used to simulate the wide-open nature of all-star games with many goals and few hits or penalties, although the scores usually still fall a little short of the basketball-like ones in real life. All-star game stats are recorded in player histories (in addition to the existing preseason, regular season, and playoff stats.) All-star games will be expanded to other leagues and historical seasons soon, and the basic functionality will serve as the foundation for other non-club games, like international play, that will eventually be added in future versions of the game.
13. The incorporation of Eliteprospects player history data continues; we've experimented with a few more leagues and are now adding new ones regularly. In this update, we've added player histories for skaters from the Swedish SHL and Allsvenskan, Finnish Liiga, Swiss Nationalliga A, Asian League Ice Hockey, and the Federal League. The American Hockey league, Finnish Mestis, and Austrian EBEL have partial updates (the AHL one going back 25 years, enough to cover all active players.) The process isn't quite perfect yet, so you may notice some players with missing history when the all of the steps we've taken to match EP's player ID's to ours have failed, but it's a fairly small number (~2%); we'll be going back and correcting those manually later. Same with a few cases where the team histories had some flaws that caused the player stats to import without a team name or not at all, we're still picking those out. We're hoping to get all of the remaining playable leagues done by the next update; however, it's proving a little more time-consuming than we expected translating their data into our database structures, so we have to balance that with making other changes to the game. Nonplayable league histories may take a while longer because of that, as well as some concerns about the amount of memory and save file space they'll eat (although so far it's been much less than anticipated), and the necessity of fleshing out the framework history for some of them in our database. Special thanks to Duranium and Lazion for helping out with the stat imports.
14. The German league's roster limit and injury list have been removed to make the roster handling there more realistic; teams can now add as many players to their roster as their budget and annual contract maximum (32 per team) allow. The AI in this league has been adjusted to deal with these circumstances and to make better choices about the use of foreign players (it should now hold out for better foreigners, rather than signing weaker ones at the start of the season.) As mentioned, these changes are test runs for improving the way European leagues handle player movement, and may also be useful in improving the roster AI as a whole (although we still intend to make more direct changes in that area.)

Bug Fixes:

15. The AI should now always attempt to use the special teams units designated in the tactics screen instead of trying to choose its own. This has resulted in a slight scoring increases and changes in icetime for top-level players, we'll likely have to do a little more fine-tuning of this next update.
16. Game view slowdown when player is in penalty box fixed.
17. Goals scored while playing 4-on-4 should no longer end the penalty on the scored-upon team in some situations.
18. Asian League schedule should no longer change length after a few seasons have been played.
19. Season stats for goalies and skaters should now export to the appropriate CSV files properly.
20. The leaders and goalie leaders screens should no longer exclude players from categories for counting stats (goals, shutouts, etc.) if they haven't played a minimum number of games.
21. Using a special character in save name will no longer result in multiple copies of the save being created.
22. Opening Day quickstart now has the correct presets.txt (pre-existing injuries) file.
23. Hall of Fame Qualifications +/- field should now save edits properly, and has been adjusted to a starting value of 300.
24. In leagues with non-sudden death overtime, games will no longer progress to the shootout if the game is decided at the end of OT.
25. Potential crash in September 1980 of historical game fixed.
26. Russian under-18 teams should now have enough players at the start of the game to supply the first KHL draft properly.
27. Repetition of team name in one news headline fixed.
(continued in next post)