NCAA NEXT 24 - RELEASE

 

A Modern Remaster of NCAA Football 2006 for PCSX2 & AetherSX2

The NCAA NEXT 24 Mod is a fully integrated modification of NCAA Football 06 for the 2023 season with a ton of new features to the original game and previous modification releases. This package is a combination of our team's texture package of over 15,000 new graphics textures and modifications to the entire game's core engine, database structure, and strings to enhance gameplay, dynasty mode, visual quality, and much, much more!

Features include:

• Over 15,000 Textures Replaced at 4K Res+
• Modern Rosters
• Player Editor Enabled in all modes
• Modern College Football Alignment/League Structure & Scheduling, including 12-Game Scheduling System and Notre Dame's rotation and rivalries
• College Football Playoff Built-In
• Conference Championships and Divisionless Conferences
• Updated Bowl Names/Sites
• New FBS Teams (Charlotte, Coastal, Liberty, Old Dominion, South Alabama, UTSA)
• New Stadiums for various teams
• Modern Playbooks including real Coaches and Coaching Strategies 
• Realistic Transfer Portal Recruiting and Waived Transfer Wait Period
• De-Interlacing Built-In to improve visual quality
• Uniform Expansion - Up to 20 uniform kits per team, including unique gear/accessories!
• New Modern Gear and Accessories
• ALL Modern NCAA Rules as of 2023
• Accelerated Play Clock Option
• Current Starting Year
• In-Game Text Updates
• Allows Duplicate Jersey Numbers and #0 
• Enhanced Recruiting, including NIL Pitches, Improved In-Season Recruiting, Off-Season Recruiting improvements, etc.
• Improved Recruiting and Walk-On Player Generation Databases
• Improved Pro Draft Declaration requirements
• International Recruits
• Unlocked Pride Sticker Counter for all teams
• Team Prestige, Academic, and Rankings all updated
• BCS Ranking Algorithm Fixes for Additional Teams
• Updated Player Number Generation Choices to match NCAA Rules, including "0" jersey numbers
• Added CPU Coach Stat Tracking
• CPU Coach Firing/Retiring, and Auto-Hire for CPU teams
• Outdoor Stadiums for teams that used to play in domes
• Updated OOC Rivalries Scheduling + New In-Game Rivalries Added
• Updated Recruit Ratings, 3D Model Body Shapes & Realistic Accessory Choices
• Add an additional 4th Impact Player with user-selectable Captain/Impact Players in Off-Season
• Removed Stadium Cannon Celebrations
• Added Oregon Duck Mascot
• Unlocked hidden teams and allow mascot teams to play human teams
• Modern Database of 8192 First and 8192 Last names for recruits
• Upgraded Music Soundtrack (16 original + 16 new tracks)
• Re-wrote entire magazine headline and captions database (3500+ lines)
• New player-to-coach dialogs including NFL, NIL, Transfer Portal and more
• Sponsorship text updates
• Uniform Numbers and Decals Fixes
• Updated Heisman Candidates

Download it now!

What's New?

After 12 weeks of open-beta testing, we are super excited to release NCAA NEXT 24! This modern remaster of NCAA Football 06 brings in tons of new features, more 4K+ graphics, and stabilizes the mod much more than our previous releases.

Dynasty Changes

Our NEXT 23 mod brought College Football Playoff and other new features to the game, and we wanted to make the next version even better. NEXT 24 now has divisionless conferences, 2023 League Realignment which includes the updated Big XII and new FBS teams like Sam Houston State and Jacksonville State in the C-USA. We also updated the league scheduling system to include these new realignments and to also give Notre Dame a pseudo-realistic ACC conference tie-in schedule rotation.

Along the same topic, we also added a lot more rivalries and rivalry names. We even updated the rivalry records to reflect up-to-date wins and losses of all the in-game rivalries.

All Players now show their "pride sticker" counters, whether their team use helmet stickers or not. This is a great new feature to see how well players are performing throughout the year, and its fun to just collect more stickers for your favorite players.

We also did a lot of minor tweaks, like keeping academic prestige constant, changing the start year to 2023, added 2023 rosters, a lot of UI tweaks, and updated magazine style.

12-Game Scheduling

As you know, the original game was developed in 2005. Back then 12 games were not allowed unless you were Hawaii or played Hawaii. Even then, it was very rare to have them. Soon after, the league changed the rules to allow it. We did sneak in a 12-game partial system in one of the later releases of V13, but it only scheduled 12-games for 90% of the teams. Now, ALL teams will now have 12-game scheduling. This was fixed by using more FCS schools in the scheduling system, and allowing it all to work. We also removed all pre-determined* OOC games from the built-in scheduler to enable a more dynamic system of scheduling!

Transfer Portal

TRANSFER PORTAL IS REALLY HERE. Last season's mod had expanded transfers, but they were all pre-generated and did not allow users a lot of choice. This year, we took the real-world portal and brings it to your fingertips. Yes!! 

Players will now choose to enter the transfer portal at the end of each season if they feel like they can start on a team elsewhere. Users will still have the the ability to recruit them back, or recruit other transfers from other schools, alongside the best recruits from high school and the JUCO ranks.

This new transfer portal works just as you would recruit previously, but now you have 35 scholarships to give out instead of 25.

Coaching CPU Hiring and Firing

This is a new feature we've added and have been beta testing for a year now. This allows users to fire CPU coaches to their liking. We created coaching status based on the dynasty performance of each CPU coach to help guide your decision making. If you fire a coach, the game will automatically hire a new coach from the talent pool in the database for that team! The fired coach will then enter that hidden free agency pool of coaches.

Recruiting Upgrades

Lots of updates all-around. We have a more varied and diverse recruiting database now, which includes walk-ons. There are now international transfers, and realistic skin distributions, gears are full utilized, and there's more varied archetypes of different positions. We also fattened up defensive lineman so they are sized like modern day players. We also increased the speed of tight ends, and we've done a lot of work to randomize recruits to make the game play much more dynamic.

Game Play Updates

If we move to game play, we modernized all the NCAA rule changes like a running clock, and threw in accelerated play clock so users can play full 15 minute quarters in much quicker time than ever. We also added the ability to have a 4th impact player, and we allow users to select their Captains (which become offensive and defensive impact players) in the off-season. These are all new features that bring more depth and challenge to the game.

But our most exciting new gameplay update is the inclusion and collaboration with Playbook Gamer. We have totally re-written all the playbooks with new play schemes, and incorporated all of Playbook Gamer's new offensive and defensive plays into the game. Now teams and their associated coaches have realistic offenses and tendencies based on modern play schemes.

Uniform Expansion

This project started about a year ago. We figured out the how and why and what, but we never finished it because we kept learning more and more. The concept started because we had all these great ideas for uniforms and the game only had a small amount of uniform slots available. Worse yet, we could not customize easily the gears for each team.

So we asked ourselves -- Why not blow up the game and make EVERYTHING customizable? Why limit ourselves to 4 uniforms per team? Let's do more!

Every team will have up to 20 uniform slots. TWENTY x 203 teams = 4060 uniforms.

And within each UNIFORM, we can have custom everything (except gloves). Everything means custom:

Jersey, Pants, Helmet, Chinstrap, Facemask, Face Protector, Pride Sticker, Jersey Numbers, Helmet Numbers, FOUR shoes, socks, FOUR elbows, long sleeves, and SEVEN wrist features -- that's 32 possible textures PER uniform.

Let's do that math again. 4060 uniforms x 32 textures = 129,920 custom unique textures!

  

This is a big project. It's huge. We probably won't even get a fraction of it done by the next major release. Heck, we may only have 2 or 3 teams done. We may need help from the community. It's crazy and wild, but that's what we do here.

With the NEXT 24 mod release, we have a lot of teams done now. Not all of 20 sets, but they have at least home/away with custom gears. We will continue to add more and will release updates on a bi-weekly or monthly schedule as we collect more graphics.

Full Field Experience

Earlier this year, @zonepull5 discovered the overlay texture graphics could be resized, modified, and used to create FULL field updates! @OKST56 then built a very nice template around this mod, and the rest of the community improved upon it and this was one of the most awesome things I've seen in this community yet. The ⁠Field Texture Template PSD thread exploded with so much amazing user content and it still continues to put out new mods. It's been a joy to see!

The team kept looking at those great fields and wondered how the heck can we make this part of our NEXT Mod permanently. The downside of the Community Mod was that it used an overlay texture that is used on most all stadiums in the game. It's not unique. We did some digging and found that there are about 12 or 13 of these overlay textures in a file called FLDDATA.DAT in the game files. We even found out which overlays were used in which stadium per the STAD table in LEAGUE.DAT.

But that didn't get us to our desired end game -- a unique full field texture for every stadium. One that could be as colorful as a real-life one, and not a generic design -- something like what you see in the community mod.

We did some testing, and discovered a very practical way to do this. Each team has their own Midfield logo that is on every stadium. Sooooooo how about we repurpose this midfield logo for the entire field? Now, you may be thinking -- wait -- the midfield is only at... well midfield. And yes, you're definitely right.

We took an overlay graphic, the same texture used in the community mod, and replaced it with the midfield logo and made sure it was resized to fit the entire length and width of the stadium field area!

And then we "unique-ified" the overlay to create hundreds of them to put into every stadium so that every team (FBS and FCS) and every bowl game and every neutral field has their own unique field. How do we do this with the same exact graphic?

@JDHalfrack created a very unique tool that uniquely unique-ifies textures so that they become unique. This is done by modifying a single byte or a couple bytes in the file that is unnoticeable to the human eye, but forces the emulator to think its a new texture and spits out a new hash file for it! This is how we created the uniform expansion, unique stadiums, and tons of other texture mods in this game that would not have been easily done before!

Ok - back to the fields. Now we got a couple hundred overlays. The next thing we had to do was inject them back into the same FLDDATA.DAT file. This file not only stores the overlays, but also the midfields, and other field logos and the stuff you see on the sidelines. 

At this point, we had to see if the previous template worked still. And unfortunately due to the texture centering around the midfield logo, we did have to create and master a new template. This was some great collaboration work between @JD637, @tfergii88 and @SNOHBAWL to create an amazing template that you can see some of the results in the ⁠ncaa-previews now! They spend hours and hours creating editable logos, pinpointing field line locations based on NCAA rules, and end zone overlays, and all sorts of stuff that even the most nitpicky person couldnt argue with! 😄

And so we now have all the tools and created full-fields textures, uniquely, for each stadium, and without having to manually move around fields. It'll all be part of the mod, without user intervention needed.

Player Editor

We also unlocked full Player Editing in both the roster menu and the dynasty menu! Now you can edit almost everything about your players within the game! The only thing that is not editable at the moment is the "class" of your players in dynasty mode. You can edit this in the normal roster menu, just not in a dynasty.

More... much more. There's more features that we've added, and we can go on and on about all of the stuff we added, but it's best for you to experience the NEXT mod yourself. Happy gaming!

Download it now!