State of the Game needed

Just so you know, we are collecting and compiling a list of all known bugs in the viewer and simulator from you. Our new simulator developer will be looking into these over the weeks ahead and trying to resolve as many as he can. Awareness of the details here was lost in the turnaround of staff and budget problems we had over the last two years.

Luke said you don't know what you are getting in your subscription, but in terms of features and pricing, iGP is ahead of other online grand prix manager games. It's good to know that you're getting the most feature-rich grand prix manager game available, before even factoring in updates. Breaking down the price at £2.50 a month (29.99 / 12), other grand prix games charge more per month for less and are updated rarely, if at all. That we can't produce or provide as much support as EA Games and their titles is less a concerning comparison, because I've come to terms with that (not for lack of trying).

Comparisons aside, your happiness is what really counts, and that's something we've always taken note of and responded to. The only times we've struggled have been when we've not had the resources or manpower to respond, without exception. That is something we are doing our best to turn around too, bringing in new staff and looking to rebuild.

While we may not have been blogging week in week out, we have always been transparent about updates in a sense. We changed our entire strategy openly a couple of times, taking the flack that came with it. But it was necessary, so that we were able to deliver and be consistent on things, because we had trouble doing that in the past when we lost key people and our budget.

There are two updates coming in the next two months, and I concede we should be blogging about that. But the last two years have really been overwhelmingly spent holding things together so that you have a game to play. There is no chance of the company going under now, its survival was ensured several months ago. Since then, it has been about getting things back on track. Once you get out of "survival" mode, you can start to think about what will be in the blog again, and what nice features you're going to add this month. We've got a few tyre updates in the works, some stability updates, and then we plan to move on to finishing the long overdue 'version 2' update.

I hope I have been clear that we are focused on making the best game we can. But we have only recently regained our capability to actually do something about it. Much of the work our new simulator developer has been doing hasn't produced an instant string of updates to the live site, that will come further down the line, but I'll elaborate to make sure things are crystal clear.

When I said we lost key people, I don't mean jobs we could pass on to the next guy that rolled in, we lost the people who built the race engine and viewer of iGP, who were irreplaceable. This meant our hands were tied for far too long in terms of development. There was a very limited scope to what we could actually do. I wrote a bit about it when the situation was ongoing, usually in response to threads like this one. Furthermore, there was actually a limitation in the software we were left with (of which lag and crashes were a symptom), that meant we couldn't grow the business, which meant we couldn't get enough money together to hire new developers. It was a catch-22 situation for some time.

There are major updates which have been completely finished on the web side of the game for best part of two years now. It has been a waiting game, finding and training up people capable of developing the simulator and viewers, to finish those updates and make them compatible. Very recently we've been able to get these major updates working in a testing environment, allowing us to start pursuing them again. When I say all of this in such a simplistic way, you might have a timeline of weeks in your minds eye, but I'm talking the best part of 12 months involved in this process alone, of finding and training replacements and getting things moving again.

Once those updates are complete, everything will get a lot easier, because we've essentially been on two parallel development paths for a while. There is a heavily developed and revised game that has been sitting unfinished on our beta servers for a long time, and then there's the public game which we've been maintaining in the interim. That's not stuff that is coming this week or next month, but it is finally moving again.

In the meantime, we will be investigating everything you guys are reporting, such as long-standing bugs. New tyre compounds will be released very soon. There is more going on than you had realised, and we'll definitely be publishing more from now on. We've got plenty to talk about now, and it's the kind of stuff that's worth publishing.

Minutes from internal meetings go back years showing we have wanted to change from Java to another platform. :D Along the way we looked in to Unity and HTML5, even investigating the possibility of a very basic 3D engine in Unity. We almost hired a guy for the job at one point, but he would have had to take a revenue cut. Once he saw the kind of revenue we were talking about, he was gone. :P In the end it was more realistic to stick with Java, for now.

In terms of redevelopment, it has been more important that we redevelop aspects of the simulator than the viewer. I mentioned there are limitations within the system that need addressing. That's really our biggest project and has been for some time. It will unleash us from this catch-22 situation because we can finally start scaling up the operation in a way that we can't right now. If it goes to plan it will simultaneously be the most boring update (from your perspective) and the most exciting (from ours). It should render lag and crashes virtually non-existent (bar network / provider issues), reducing their side-effects to an inconvenience. It's after that update that we're going to start releasing features in a big way, and refocusing our energy on all of the front-end stuff. Again this is all in a timeline of months, not weeks, but we know we are making real progress.