Livery editor & Auto-kick

We're as eager to release the new livery editor as everyone is to have it, although personal circumstances ended up overlapping a lot in recent weeks. I was moving country and then moving house again while two of the other developers had short summer vacations with family. Now the whole team has re-assembled and we're really getting down to work and making great progress. There will be several announcements in this blog.

Livery editor update

The first and most important announcement is that the livery editor update has been in testing for a short time and we are now adding finishing touches, so it should be released very soon (roughly a week from now). It's the biggest new feature we've added to the apps so far, and one everyone is excited for. It will also mark the final stage of converting the web version to WebGL (no more plugins required!). The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed improvements to the management interfaces this week in preparation for the update.

Auto-kick starting later today

Later today I will also be rolling out the auto-kick feature. It will start by removing everyone from leagues who hasn't logged in for 28 days. This will act as a big clean-up operation to boost activity throughout iGP Manager. With hundreds of thousands of players now, it's inevitable that thousands of inactive accounts appear, including league hosts, and this will quickly clean up such leagues and increase activity throughout iGP Manager.

The auto-kick period will not be editable. After much debate on the topic we decided this was the best approach, as the last thing we want is for people to be confused about when they might be removed from a league for inactivity and make an incorrect guess. Making it universal ensures that everybody will know how often they need to login to stay in a league. I am considering reducing the auto-kick period to 14 days in October and including the option to tell the game that you are on holiday. I'd be interested to hear your opinions on this in the comments.

Re-focusing on stability

After the release of the update our focus is going to shift to the stability of the platform again for a short time. We are always striving to iron out bugs and improve stability, but it will be heavily in focus for the next few weeks. There are a lot of things we have observed and feedback we've received that has made it clear how we can further improve stability and support across devices. So we'll be devoting time to that to improve the experience for everyone.

We also have more exciting content and visual updates in the pipeline which we will talk about when the time comes. But for now, the all important livery editor update and stability improvements will be our sole focus. As a very small team, we have to prioritise tasks in a very single-focused manner to avoid becoming over-stretched. But it has its benefits, as we get to be really thorough with everything.