A busy week

Momentum is with iGP Manager going in to 2019, and the pace has really picked up this week. There was the announcement of AOR’s Official iGP Manager league (more on that below), two app updates in as many weeks, work on a host of exciting projects behind the scenes and an internal restructuring of iGP Games all going on simultaneously.

Apex Online Racing comes to iGP Manager

Apex Online Racing (AOR), regarded as a pinnacle of racing esports and forerunner to F1 Esports, is now opening a new iGP Manager league. It will be the first official iGP Manager league of its type, with live broadcasts and race coverage to be provided on both AOR and iGP Manager YouTube channels.

The league is free to join, although this may change for future seasons should prizes become available to competitors. It’s something that will develop based on the level of interest, so if this is the kind of thing you want to be a part of, make sure you register your interest over at the AOR forums now, for your chance to enter.

Upcoming updates

In the short-term we are focusing our energies on User Experience improvements, which covers everything from improving the interfaces to performance and bug-fixing. In the mid-term, we are wrapping up some exciting projects such as developing new tracks and updates to the layout of existing ones. We had hoped to get these into the game much sooner, but due to many projects taking a higher priority over the preceding months, we now expect the first updated tracks to arrive by the end of the year.

We will be moving the entire weather service to a new provider by the end of the year as well, since the old provider is closing down their service. We are also closely monitoring discussions about weather (how the track gets wet, dries and how these changes impact strategy) on the forum and will make further updates to this in November.

I have also been considering changing the tyres in iGP Manager so that we go with Soft, Medium and Hard only, and scale the temperature / wear to each track, much as F1 plans to do next year. This way, we could make it so that there are 3 viable tyre compounds for every track, and they would be different compounds on each track, spicing up the strategy across the season. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

New Instagram

We’ve also launched a brand new iGP Manager Instagram page. If you open the Invest dialog in-game you can earn $1m for your team by following us via the button there. If you already follow us, then just click the button and you’ll also get the reward.

The butterfly effect

This is a term I’ve become all too familiar with the implications of in my time working on iGP Manager. Essentially, it means small things can have big impacts once their consequences are felt across many other things. On Friday, many of you will have noticed a mini-meltdown as several managers were incorrectly removed from leagues for inactivity.

One piece of code was put in to circulation that instead of checking if a condition was explicitly true (or == true) was checking to see if a value was not false (programmers among you will know what I mean). This one seemingly tiny distinction caused a ripple effect across iGP Manager. The main effect was that dates for activity and forum posts etc. were logged with day zero of month zero in year zero. Moments later, managers were detected as last active some 2018 years ago and removed from their leagues.

We responded immediately by putting the system into maintenance mode and taking around 3 hours to recover everyone to their leagues, returning their car designs and points totals to normal. The cause of the situation was addressed in that time as well, so it won’t happen again. I’m happy to report that the initial issue and all reported incidents related to it are now fully resolved.

Not only that, but digging around in the related code we found some good performance optimisations that were included with the subsequent repairs. They should make everything run better going forward.