The Daily Hilario: Getting started with FM 2017

Let me regale you with a few frustrations that I've already had with FM 2017.  This is on a mid-2016 MacBook Pro, with oodles of RAM and plenty of power to do just about anything beyond intense 3D gaming.

1.  The fans, the fans, the fans are on fire.  And I don't mean the people.

Just running the game and getting to the loading screen makes the laptop sound like it's about to take off.  There's literally nothing happening, the game is simply running and the cooling fans are going berserk.

I loaded 9 nations, all playable, all available players with the game giving me a 4-star rating (out of 5) for how smoothly it will all run.  I might need some ear protection in the long run, and I don't even play with the 3D match engine because that's laughably bad as always.

2.  External monitor support is an absolute joke.

Now I realize there's some extra "difficulties" here between the MBP display, which is Retina, and the external Dell monitor, which, while great, isn't.  But surely, an application in 2017 would be able to start and adjust properly on the fly without crashing and without becoming unusable and having to be ended via Force Quit.  A brief peruse of the SI forums makes it clear that I'm hardly the only person experiencing external monitor issues.

The workaround, if this is happening to you as well, is to start the game with the following launch options in Steam: -small_screen -windowed

This will force the game to always start in windowed mode at the smallest resolution.  You can then adjust, stretch, make full screen/etc from here.  If you have Retina enabled, it will even bump itself up to that 2x resolution on the MBP display, which is nice (though you have to have really good eyesight).

3.  Graphics packs, skins, etc are still a p.i.t.a. to add

'Tis the nature of the licensing, I get it.  Still a frustrating process every time.  I've got DF11 faces, TCM logos, and the always nice and clean Vitrex skin running.  Still need new kits as I only have last year's EVO set.

In any case, after all that fiddling, I've hardly had time to get going.  We're still on just Day 1, which is always the busiest day.  Gotta set up training, scouting, roles, etc, etc, etc.

FOOTBALL (All times BST):
16.00: Confederations Cup: Germany vs. Cameroon
16.00: Confederations Cup: Chile vs. Australia
03.00 (next day): MLS, 4th(W) vs. 8th(W): Portland Timbers vs. Seattle Sounders