Hi, everyone.
It's been quite a while since I've discussed what we've been working on, and I thought this would be a good time to jump in. I won't try to answer all of your questions with this one post, and I suspect you'll have some questions that I won't be able to answer at all, but I'll be on the forum for a couple of hours tonight and will do my best to answer as many questions as I can.
I've done a couple of chats since the Simnasium/DM deal took place last August, but I thought I'd do this as a forum thread this time so there'd be a permanent record for others who didn't participate in those chats and who don't happen to be here tonight.
Last August, I said that my goal was to get the 9b patch finished by the end of September, before we got buried by our busy season, which extends from early October to early April. Obviously, that didn't happen.
As I've said before, among the many reasons I thought the Simnasium/DM combination would be a win-win was the opportunity to hand off a lot of my management and administrative duties so I could focus a very high percentage of my time on product-related work.
The good news is that 95% of that transition is complete and I've been able to focus almost entirely on technical work for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it took a lot more time to make that happen than I anticipated six months ago.
And you know what? I should have seen it coming and set my own expectations, and those of the DMB customers I was chatting with, at a more reasonable level.
Although each individual handoff went about as well as one could expect, the number of handoffs was large enough to chew up a lot of the time that I was planning to spend on the 9b patch and other improvements to the game. This should have been obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn't. I guess I'd been running the company for so long -- more than 19 years -- that I forgot how many things had to get done for everything to work.
As a result, we didn't get the 9b patch finished before the 2006 Season Disk took over as priority number one. As soon as the season disk was released, we got to work on two projects, the 9b patch and the 2007 Projection Disk.
I'm happy to report that the 2007 Projection Disk is almost done and will begin shipping on schedule next week. And I'm also happy to report that we're getting much closer to releasing the 9b patch.
I know that you expected the 9b patch to be done by now. So did I. But last month we chose to increase the scope of the 9b project in three ways. First, we decided to do some work on the computer manager that had been previously been scheduled for version 10. Second, we discovered a couple of compatibility issues with the new Microsoft Vista operating system that we wanted to address in the 9b patch if at all possible. (Luke is making good progress on that front.)
Finally, Jack Wood has added a large amount of new text to the play-by-play library. His work was going to be one of the main features of version 10, but we decided to include everything he's done to date in the 9b patch instead. This is a major enhancement -- a 40-50% increase in the size of an already very large library -- that we will make available to version 9 owners at no charge.
Our near-term goals are very simple. Between now and the end of April, we want to get the 2007 Projection Disk out on time, get the 9b patch into field test, release the April update to the Projection Disk, and make the 9b patch available to all version 9 customers as soon as the field test has confirmed that it's ready.
We know there are other things you're interested in hearing about, but I'm going to stop at that for now. We need to deliver these things before we can move on the rest of our agenda, so that's our focus.
Before ending this initial post and waiting for your questions, I'd like to address one issue that has been raised by the Diamond Mind community over the past several months. The folks who run Simnasium have been accused of focusing all of their energy into the Total Baseball online game and ignoring the DMB product line.
As one of the people who is directly involved in these projects, I must disagree. Since early October, virtually all of my time has been spent on things that directly benefit the DMB community -- the 2006 Season Disk, the 2007 Projection Disk, and the bug fixes and enhancements that make up the 9b patch. We haven't done a very good job of communicating those facts in recent months, but that's the truth.
As I said, I'll be on the forum for a while to answer as many of your questions as I can, so fire away.
It's been quite a while since I've discussed what we've been working on, and I thought this would be a good time to jump in. I won't try to answer all of your questions with this one post, and I suspect you'll have some questions that I won't be able to answer at all, but I'll be on the forum for a couple of hours tonight and will do my best to answer as many questions as I can.
I've done a couple of chats since the Simnasium/DM deal took place last August, but I thought I'd do this as a forum thread this time so there'd be a permanent record for others who didn't participate in those chats and who don't happen to be here tonight.
Last August, I said that my goal was to get the 9b patch finished by the end of September, before we got buried by our busy season, which extends from early October to early April. Obviously, that didn't happen.
As I've said before, among the many reasons I thought the Simnasium/DM combination would be a win-win was the opportunity to hand off a lot of my management and administrative duties so I could focus a very high percentage of my time on product-related work.
The good news is that 95% of that transition is complete and I've been able to focus almost entirely on technical work for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, it took a lot more time to make that happen than I anticipated six months ago.
And you know what? I should have seen it coming and set my own expectations, and those of the DMB customers I was chatting with, at a more reasonable level.
Although each individual handoff went about as well as one could expect, the number of handoffs was large enough to chew up a lot of the time that I was planning to spend on the 9b patch and other improvements to the game. This should have been obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn't. I guess I'd been running the company for so long -- more than 19 years -- that I forgot how many things had to get done for everything to work.
As a result, we didn't get the 9b patch finished before the 2006 Season Disk took over as priority number one. As soon as the season disk was released, we got to work on two projects, the 9b patch and the 2007 Projection Disk.
I'm happy to report that the 2007 Projection Disk is almost done and will begin shipping on schedule next week. And I'm also happy to report that we're getting much closer to releasing the 9b patch.
I know that you expected the 9b patch to be done by now. So did I. But last month we chose to increase the scope of the 9b project in three ways. First, we decided to do some work on the computer manager that had been previously been scheduled for version 10. Second, we discovered a couple of compatibility issues with the new Microsoft Vista operating system that we wanted to address in the 9b patch if at all possible. (Luke is making good progress on that front.)
Finally, Jack Wood has added a large amount of new text to the play-by-play library. His work was going to be one of the main features of version 10, but we decided to include everything he's done to date in the 9b patch instead. This is a major enhancement -- a 40-50% increase in the size of an already very large library -- that we will make available to version 9 owners at no charge.
Our near-term goals are very simple. Between now and the end of April, we want to get the 2007 Projection Disk out on time, get the 9b patch into field test, release the April update to the Projection Disk, and make the 9b patch available to all version 9 customers as soon as the field test has confirmed that it's ready.
We know there are other things you're interested in hearing about, but I'm going to stop at that for now. We need to deliver these things before we can move on the rest of our agenda, so that's our focus.
Before ending this initial post and waiting for your questions, I'd like to address one issue that has been raised by the Diamond Mind community over the past several months. The folks who run Simnasium have been accused of focusing all of their energy into the Total Baseball online game and ignoring the DMB product line.
As one of the people who is directly involved in these projects, I must disagree. Since early October, virtually all of my time has been spent on things that directly benefit the DMB community -- the 2006 Season Disk, the 2007 Projection Disk, and the bug fixes and enhancements that make up the 9b patch. We haven't done a very good job of communicating those facts in recent months, but that's the truth.
As I said, I'll be on the forum for a while to answer as many of your questions as I can, so fire away.

