It looks like Sebastian is planning on posting regular development updates over at OOTP. So I'll quote them in here for all to see:
Week #1
Sebastian Palkowski wrote:Ok, with the open beta release yesterday and a looooong night for me I did not code much today (just had to come down a bit). We still go through all the initial feedback, log it into our Project Tool and start to prioritize it.
The first update will be about fixing the most glaring bugs (and no, I will not fix the infamous Toronto "bug" ) to make the game more stable. To give you an idea about the progress we make I will use threads like this every week to give you updates directly from the OOTP Dev HQ.
Today we concentrated on the In-Game area, fixing the OT bug when a goal is scored and I look for the problem when games never end. Additionally I added PbP text for Shutouts.
Another thing we did today was tweaking the contract extensions so teams have money for the FA phase and we fixed some db related stuff (e.g. an English league declared as Junior League).
We prepared the editor for our researchers so they can continue to work on the database. Normally we do this on Mondays but yesterday we had other things to do. We plan to release Database Updates every Wednesday, starting next week.
JeffR wrote:I thought I'd do another one of these, just to let people know where we stand a few days post-release.
The launch itself, delays aside, went reasonably well. I'm only aware of one person who's still having installation problems (but if anyone else is and hasn't spoken up yet, please let me know.) We're pretty pleased with the number of preorders. Not "time to go Ferrari-shopping" pleased; more on the level of "I can buy brand-name macaroni and cheese this week" pleased, but still a long way from disappointed. It's a good foundation to build on and a positive sign for the game's long-term viability...
...which won't matter much if we don't start getting the problems fixed. Sebastian and Malte have been making nice progress there now that things have quieted down after the launch. At a glance, it looks like about a quarter of the bugs that were added to the tracker since Sunday have received fixes already, with particular attention to the crashes/game-freezers. We're in the process of testing those fixes now, and we're aiming to have the first update ready next Monday, barring anything unexpected.
That update won't include fixes to database errors; the first database update will include those and come on Wednesday (the researchers' deadline for updates is Sunday night, and we need a couple of days to test and fix any problems after that.)
With everything going on and a late start, I've fallen a little behind on my historical database work, but the next update will, at a minimum, add players debuting in 1980-81. I won't have a good idea about how other league databases have progressed this week until Sunday, but hopefully we'll have one or more getting close to the point where we can make them playable. We've also added a few new researchers to cover some of the gaps in our research team.
Issues relating to player valuation (trade AI, scouting, drafting, star ratings, etc.) won't get much in the way of fixes this week; we're going to start with some bottom-up changes to the way player ability is assessed, and then see what ripple effects those have through the rest of the game before dealing with specific things like bad trades or star ratings that don't seem right. It'll likely be at least another week before that process starts.
It doesn't look like we'll be able to get the new random names working just yet (you may have noticed that every new player is getting an English name at the moment.) In addition to the adjustments required to get the state/province-based naming system working, Sebastian has made some changes to the way the game handles name data, which should result in some performance improvements. It's just going to take a little while to tie it all together, and there were higher coding priorities this week.
I'm very happy to see that my efforts to make the game's "really, really beta" status clear to prospective purchasers seem to have gotten the message across. People have been quite understanding about the bugs they've been running into and the tone of the criticism has been very constructive. We don't plan on taking that for granted; the show of confidence we've gotten this week deserves a proper response, and, starting with next week's updates, we'll begin to deliver that.
JeffR wrote:Time for another update; a longer one this time since it's been a couple of weeks since the last one.
It's a little chaotic right now with the OOTP and iOOTP releases imminent; losing portions of the website and some other servers for a few days last weekend threw things off even more. However, things should improve soon: if everything goes smoothly with iOOTP on Sunday and Monday, Sebastian should be back on FHM full-time on Tuesday. The Mac version will be one of, if not the, first things he works on. Once he's had a chance to take a look at that, we should be able to figure out exactly how much time it's going to take and come up with a schedule that gets it out in a reasonable length of time while still allowing us to make progress with other things.
There'll be a data update on Wednesday as usual, but definitely no game update this week, barring the discovery of a really catastrophic problem. We've managed to clear out a lot of game-breaking stuff in the first two new versions, so it's time to start taking a little more time between them and addressing less immediate, but more time-consuming, changes. When we do update again, we'll try to avoid the confusion that occurred this time when people wound up with older versions of the setup file from their browser caches.
We're continuing to make good progress with the database; I'm comfortable with where we are right now and the overall rate of improvement. We actually may run into a situation soon where we have leagues that can be made playable but may have to wait until we can implement league selection during startup, otherwise we'll slow the game down too much with so many leagues running at once. That's fairly high on the priority list. The historical database continues slowly but surely, two new seasons a week seems to be a comfortable pace for me, and I can speed that up if necessary, which will get the database done with plenty of time to spare before release. There are still a lot of rough edges to historical gameplay, but in general it's moving in the right direction.
The in-game view isn't much to look at right now; Sebastian and I have discussed some changes to it that would make it a little more attractive and entertaining. Basically, an EHM-style 2D engine isn't going to be happening anytime in the forseeable future, so it seems a little misleading and frustrating to have the game view centered around that shot display screen that looks like a poor attempt at pseudo-2D. We want to do something that makes better use of the game's art and data to help you get a little more attached to your players and team, rather than having them just be a flag on the ice and lines in the game summary.
Player generation and early-career progress is something I'd like to see refined quite a bit in the coming weeks. It's working (in a crude way) at the moment, but it can be a lot better. That'll have an immediate impact on the playable junior leagues, of course, but it's also important to build up a believable history for the players you draft and sign when you're playing at higher levels.
New player naming still isn't fully implemented yet; I'm hoping we can take a couple of steps in the right direction this week, but it's looking like we may have to wait a while for the planned province/state-based ethnic naming system and temporarily use a nation-based one like OOTP (which, unfortunately, will lead to issues like the Quebec-born player pool having too many non-French names.)
The effects of changes in player valuation aren't quite as dramatic as I'd hoped, but it was still a step in the right direction. The most recent update dealt with the basic building blocks of how individual ratings are relevant to a player's overall value; the next step (and it's a big one) is adjusting how the needs of individual teams change the way they perceive that value.
In less encouraging news, we're starting to run into the exact problem we were hoping to avoid: making little hardcoded fixes to account for oddities and exceptions in the way rules (both on and off ice) work in individual leagues. That's driving us away from the modular approach we wanted to take, where customization is easy because the rules can be swapped in and out for a given league and will behave in a uniform way. And there's a stability cost as well: a lot of the frequent crashing you saw in the first couple of weeks post-release was attributable to quick-and-dirty fixes that accomplished one thing, but led to situations where something else broke in a very bad way.
So, there's going to have to get that situation under control, which, among other things, will mean holding off on implementing more league-specific rules. If a league requires that every team have at least three players in the lineup whose last name starts with M and were born in June, don't expect to see that happening in the game anytime soon.
Finally, as I think I've said before, we don't plan on doing any serious promotion until we're much closer to the September release; word of mouth is still bringing new customers in at a fairly steady pace but we're trying to avoid a situation where we get a flood of new users that don't understand the game is still in beta. That said, an opportunity has presented itself where we might be able to bring in more preorders from people who know it's a work in progress, and I plan on looking into it a little more in the next couple of weeks.
Thanks again to everyone who has preordered; keep the feedback coming. I'm not commenting on it quite as actively as I was a couple of weeks ago, but it's not going unread.
JeffR wrote:Time for an update, it's been a while since I've done one of these.
Everything is on track so far for getting back to the regular Wednesday updates next week. That includes the new selectable league setup. So, instead of having so many playable leagues that it bogs your game down, you'll be able to just the ones you want (with one limitation: the highest-level league in the game and its top farm league - i.e. the NHL and AHL in the default database - will always have to be playable.) If you've played a historical game, you know how much faster a single-league game plays. That'll also eliminate the need for us to hold off on adding playable leagues (I'd been trying to avoid that because the game was too slow already), so we may have some new ones this coming week or next - I won't say which, exactly, as I want to talk to the researchers about it first.
Coming along with that will be a significant upgrade to the way players move around non-playable leagues, so switching a league to that setting won't make it completely static in terms of player movement. That'll let players have realistic career progression and will be the first step to implementing a better player generation model.
And here's where it gets complicated, and where a big part of the recent delays have happened. Now, the easiest way to handle that sort of movement is just to hardcode specific progression from league to league - e.g., every player in the BCHL moves to a US college when he's too old to play junior. But that runs contrary to the moddable approach we want to take with the game - if we start hardcoding that stuff, you can't change it, and that's not how we want to do things: if you want to try editing in every Junior B league in Canada and making them playable, I think you should be able to do that without breaking the game.
So what we've done is made the whole non-playable transaction system work at the team level: every team will individually specify where its players go if they become too good, old, or bad to continue playing there (and there's also a chance of random movement to simulate trades and free agency.) Graduating NCAA players, for example, have several different possible destinations if they're not drafted or signed by a team in a playable league, but those vary significantly depending on their team - someone playing at Harvard is more likely to quit hockey entirely rather than make minimum wage in the low minors, teams in the northeast are a little more likely to have their players wind up in the Federal League, WCHA teams send a few more to the Central League, and so on.
Likewise, teams can restrict which players come to them. Continuing the NCAA example, the Army and Air Force teams will only take American players, and you could have a team like the University of Minnesota limit its recruits to one state or a particular region.
Getting all the data in to make that possible isn't a quick and easy job, though - we're talking about data entry for hundreds of teams in dozens of leagues, not to mention the time it takes to figure out exactly what that data should be. I've spent most of my time for the last couple of weeks on it and I'm just now at the point where it's nearly ready to go. It'll be a welcome relief once it's done, but it'll also make the game much more "alive", so I think it's worth the effort.
In other news, the Mac version is on target as well: Sebastian's expecting to have a testable build next week, so we've added a few new testers today in preparation for having a look at that. Barring any disasters, we'll be ready to go with it on the May 1 target (and since that's a Wednesday, we may be a little slower with the data update that day if there are any issues with getting it ready for purchase.)
As for other concerns: crashes and player valuation/trading remain at the top of the list. Regarding crashes, please continue sending your crash-related savegames in, those are helpful. As for making the AI value its players properly, that isn't going to be something that happens overnight, but we'll continue to make incremental improvements there. I realize that's a particular source of frustration now, but I don't want to lead anyone to think we're going to make a change one week and the AI will suddenly be brilliant. That isn't to say we're anywhere close to what I'd consider acceptable AI roster handling in a release version, just a warning that it'll get better in stages that may not be really obvious from week to week - AI teams will stop trading for three starting goalies or refusing to move a draft pick higher than the fifth round, or bottom-pair defencemen won't ask for $6 million a year and then accept $600,000 after a couple of weeks of free agency.
This is getting a bit long-winded, so I'll cut it off there, although in closing I'll add that plenty of things not mentioned above are also getting addressed in the usual day-to-day bugfixing.
