NewGANS on Linux

Making it Work

NewGANS on Linux

Are you playing Football Manager 2023 on Linux? Are you having a hard time figuring out how to get the NewGANS facepack tool to work?

I know that I am.

For the life of me, I can’t seem to get the Linux tool to install. I suspect that I might be missing a dependency, but it seems that I’ve already installed everything that I need. And I’m not really interested in throwing around bug reports and waiting for a solution.

What is NewGANS?

NewGANS is a really remarkable facepack created by Zealand and a few others over on FM Base. You can find a link to it here.

Basically, NewGANS replaces the ugly looking computer generated pictures for newly created Football Manager players with computer generated simulated pictures of actual people. None of the photos are of actual people, of course — but I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference.

I find this tool indispensible in long-term saves. It’s particularly important if you want newly generated players to seem like real players. Otherwise, it’s easy to tell which players are fictional, since they look different than the rest.

The problem, however, is that the Linux installer for NewGANS simply doesn’t work. Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t work in the latest version of Ubuntu.

Workaround

The workaround? Run it in Windows through a VM.

That’s probably not the answer you were looking for — but it works. In fact, it works really well.

Allow me to explain why.

The truth is that this facepack doesn’t really create anything special. It’s a collection of random faces arranged by face type, hair type, and region of origin.

The views that come with the facepack are designed to export this information directly from Football Manager. After you run a search for only newly generated players, the NewGANS view shows information about the face type, hair type, region of origin, and the player ID for each player. The NewGANS Manager application then simply assigns player ID numbers to faces depending on those variables.

As long as the files are the same and your NewGANS picture directory is the same across both computers, you can use the program to create and XML file on one computer and simply send it to the other.

That’s basically what we’re doing here. To bypass a nonfunctional Linux install tool, we’re simply running the Windows equivalent on a virtual machine that happens to be located on our Linux machine. There’s no need to actually have Football Manager installed; as long as we send the RTF file we generate in Football Manager from one computer to the next, we can generate the XML we need easily and just send it back to ourselves.

Implications

This does have a few big implications, of course.

Basically, if you have a little bit of knowhow, you can use this method to play with NewGANS faces on the Steam Deck.

Unlike FM Touch, you can now play with a fully functional version of the complete PC game on the go, complete with all of your favorite add-ons. You could even export your save from your desktop to a Steam Deck and play it while on vacation with your family — or while in boring work meetings, or while in church, or wherever you need it.