[Jim Gindin]

Given recent discussion, I thought it was time to post a few of my thoughts regarding the direction of Front Office Football Nine, as well as our progress.

First and foremost, we want a finished game that's playable. Sounds easy, right? However, games get larger and more complex every year and the days when a solo developer could perform every task seem to have ended.

As I wrote more than ten years ago, with software, the jump from one coder to two is larger and more complex (those words again) than going from two to ten.

OOTP brings exactly what the Front Office franchise needs. Similar experiences and goals, but also familiarity with those growing pains. When I first talked about this project with Markus and Andreas last year, all of us shared enthusiasm for the potential of what we could do. It's now a matter of executing that vision.

We're doing well. We're still perfecting the art of fitting our development cycle in with the different projects OOTP has under its wing. We're making good progress.

That said, I can tell you where we are now. The Front Office Football internals are converted to a form that works for a multi-platform environment and for anticipated future structural changes. The GUI framework is taking shape and we're ready for the potent magic of graphic design.

I'll go into a little detail about one of those structural changes, because it illustrates exactly the kinds of long-term goals we have for this project. One complaint about FOF is that it is limited to the current 32-team, eight division pro football structure. Yet some customers want to play with different league formats.

The original plan was to convert Front Office Football function as is, then move to more flexible league formats for future versions. But because we've had extra development time in recent months, we'll be able to fully support a few league formats (meaning scheduling, playoff structure, AI) right out of the gate. With the potential of adding more before the release and eventually (this part I can't promise in FOF9 because I've only done a little bit of work on it) the ability to add your own custom league structures and schedules (which means those of you who love spreadsheets and embrace adventure will gladly share them with the rest of the community).

I've also been able to add some more features that I've wanted to do for some time, but never quite found room in the schedule. Another example (and I won't share them all, because not everything is tested and sometimes you add something and it just doesn't feel right) is implementing the OOTP calendar structure. You'll play FOF9 day-by-day rather than the stage-oriented approach of FOF8.

As Markus wrote recently, we're months away from being able to show off this work. There is no release date scheduled, nor do we have anything settled right now. It's done when it's ready. Our merger makes sense only if we have something you'll enjoy year after year. This means it has to be up to our standards. No more, no less, no quick fixes.

Andreas posted that we couldn't guarantee multi-player function for the release. That's true. We can't guarantee anything that isn't currently working, and out of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code in FOF8, multi-player function is the piece that translates least efficiently to FOF9. The FOF8 multi-player code is Windows-specific and the snippets of multi-player instruction are all in pieces that react to GUI interaction.

It will be among the last pieces I work on. Since multi-player mirrors single-player, it's by design a good candidate for a feature implemented later in the development cycle when everything's more settled. It's also one of the true hybrid pieces of the new game, in that I have code that defines the scope and execution of multi-player commands, but it will end up working in a way that's familiar for those who play multi-player OOTP. So it's not a simple add. It requires a lot of coordination.

I know you want concrete answers, and we don't have them. It would be a poor business decision to hold up a finished product to add a new function. However, it would also be a poor business decision to completely abandon something that we know has brought people enjoyment for a long time. We're thinking about how best to serve everyone's desires.

The only correct answer is to say it's something we would like to provide, but it's not something we can work on at this stage of development and it's not guaranteed to be in the inital release. It's also correct to say that we recognize that for many people, it's a feature that they won't do without. We want customers, so we're certainly not crossing it off any list.

We have also discussed how best to serve existing FOF8 customers. The plan, if we provide multi-player function for FOF9, is to write an internal tool to convert existing multi-player leagues. Commissioners will upload their game files and we'll convert them and provide a detailed explanation of how we're handling the extensive internal structural changes from FOF8. Front Office Football commissioners are familiar with this routine.

Moving forward, OOTP games have automatic conversion routines built in. So we've added the basic support for this when we go from FOF9 to FOF10. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Finally, while I'd like to provide frequent updates on progress, I'm also aware of the dangers of talking too much about something that isn't yet completed. I'm never going to tell you this is the "best" anything or promise that something will be in the game that we haven't yet programmed. I'm not going to be posting much while we're busy with development. Once we are closer to our goals, those around here who are more experienced with the product release process will start doing their thing and I assume I'll be here to answer questions and explain more about the product.