Our third update for FHM2, version 2.3.19, has just been released.

General notes: With this update, we've begun to address some of the issues that required more labour- and time-intensive fixes. Generally, the most serious bugs (crashes and very intrusive problems) took precedence, but we also made some changes that only required minimal adjustments to the game's code and were easily tested. As of right now, we've cleared about 40% of our reported bug list and 20% done with the suggestions list.

We're also happy to announce that we've partnered with Eliteprospects.com to enhance our player and team histories with data from the massive Eliteprospects database. You'll be able to see the first step in this update: full KHL player histories for all skaters who've played in that league. It's a little complicated translating their database conventions to ours, since there are a few things we do in fundamentally different ways. So, we'll be introducing the data slowly and carefully to avoid the big, ugly errors that would result if we tried to do one massive data dump. But we should pick up speed as we get a little more experience with it, and intend to get the histories as complete as possible, so you can expect to see more and more data being added regularly as we update the game. We'll likely cover the playable leagues first, in order of their technical challenges, and then move on to the others. Many, many thanks to Johan Nilsson, Eliteprospects' founder, for his help and cooperation; being able to import the data like this will save massive amounts of time and open up some interesting new possibilities for us.

The database in this build is about a week behind our current research and editing, as it would've required a few additional days of testing to check this week's changes properly and the rest of the update was ready. So, no Tortorella in Columbus yet. We have, however, added a "Current" quickstart as a startup option in modern mode in addition to the Opening Day one; there won't be much of a difference at the moment but the Current quickstart will, in the future, be the one that has rosters updated with mid-season player moves.

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.

Changes:
1. The processing time for the July 1 season-to-season transition has been reduced by approximately half.
2. Staff can now be re-signed anytime during the expiration year of their contract, instead of needing to wait for the email that announces their contract is expiring.
3. Player popups now identify player's current league in addition to the team abbreviation.
4. Team histories now show previous names the franchise has played under.
5. Name searches will now return results that include special characters with diacritics, e.g. "Lagace" will also show played named "Lagacé".
6. Commissioner mode now allows the editing of player uniform numbers.
7. The ABI column on the Dressed List of the lines screen now shows all numbers with one decimal place, instead of alternating between one and none depending on whether or not the number is whole.
8. The wording of the "Can't remove so much money from payroll" warning from the user's assistant during trade negotations has been changed to something that's a little clearer on the exact nature of the problem.
9. Goalie Games Played are now displayed on various non-goalie statistics views.
10. The Contracts tab on the roster screen now opens to the Contracts view by default, instead of the Info view.
11. The Injury List tab on the roster screen now opens to the Health Status view by default, instead of the Info view.
12. Human owners will now receive a warning after the expansion draft if they are below the cap floor and will need to take on additional salary before the season begins.
13. The free agency preview message now lists the position of each player.
14. The "Force Trade" option is now available in commissioner mode of single-player games, not just multiplayer.
15. Clarifying tooltip added to Roster Screen Action button about the effects of using "AI Setup Organization" with certain AI settings active.
16. When a player is sent down to a farm team but is still visible on the league Leaders screen, the team abbreviation shown will be the parent team, instead of the farm team.
17. In the initial draft in fictional leagues with salary caps, AI teams should now be much more conservative with their cap management. Having too many teams at the cap maximum was causing the AI considerable problems with roster management; while the fictional AI will likely need more work, as will player generation in fictional mode (appears to be generating too many middle-high quality players and not enough at either extreme), this should resolve some of the player movement oddities being reported in fictional leagues, and is a necessary first step to delving deeper into the AI issues.

New Additions:
18. The player view on the game screen (visible only at resolutions at least 1280 pixels wide) has been replaced by a Penalty Box that shows the currently penalized players.
19. The player award icons and trophy background are now removed from the skin and part of the quickstarts (like logos), so they can be customized more easily. They can be made league-specific by adding the full league name to the filename, e.g. national_hockey_league_po_tropy.png.
20. An age option has been added to the player creation screen, so the age of a newly-created player can be specified.
21. User will now receive notification if a player is signed off his roster (e.g. an NHL team signing a player from a junior or European team.)

Bug Fixes:
22. Various crash bugs in rare circumstances fixed (e.g., occasional crash while viewing first preseason game, crash while attempting to advance a day with an empty spot in the lines, crash on "saving continents" while saving, etc.)
23. Change made to player salary demands for NHL-caliber players signing in non-NHL leagues that should prevent the movement of decent players out of the top-level leagues to much poorer, lower-level ones that shouldn't be able to afford them.
24. Most special characters being displayed as "?" should now be fixed, with a very small number of exceptions that we're continuing to work on. This should permanently fix the problem and solve the issue with it reappearing after it's apparently been fixed, as has happened a few times in the past. You may notice a long loading time when you first load an older save, particularly if you've been playing it for several seasons, as news stories need to be re-generated to be fixed properly. This will not retroactively fix the '?' in roster (and similar) screens in older games, but new players generated in those games will no longer have the problem.
25. The AI should no longer reassign scouts in multiplayer games when scouting is under user control.
26. The AI should no longer sign players or make other roster moves in multiplayer games when roster management options are set to user control.
27. Users should now be able to set training for their team when training control is set to them.
28. Manager options for for minor league affiliates should no longer revert back to Assistant control in multiplayer.
29. Deleted emails in multiplayer will no longer reappear after the commissioner simulates games.
30. Mismatched and missing columns fixed in CSV export.
31. Personal.dat file in multiplayer games should no longer expand to massive sizes for some owners.
32. Game previews at the beginning of the playoffs should no longer show players with "-1" games played.
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