The First Few Waypoints

You may have heard the Yogi Berra quote, “you’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” Product roadmaps are like that. If you only think about what’s in the next release, pretty soon you’re on a narrow, two-lane highway to the middle of nowhere. So one of the things we are keeping in mind is our ultimate goal – any game, anywhere. With that final destination over the horizon, metaphorically speaking, it’s also good to have some shorter-term results in mind. For those of you in on this early stage of the adventure, we want you to know where we’re headed, too.

The main thing with a beta test is, of course, to find and fix bugs. We put Hoot out when we did because we’ve reached a point where those of us in the company simply don’t have varied enough habits and setups on our system to capture all the possibilities that even our first set of features may invoke. We also realize that for some of you, these first features aren’t enough to make Hoot work for you. Rather than try your patience, it’s just simpler to tell you what we do now and what we’ll do shortly.

You can think of Hoot as having two main feature categories right now; performance enhancements and client platform. Performance enhancements are a broad category, but they consist of routines in the hardware that let certain games run better, or tweaks that improved how things work across the network. Client platform is self-explanatory. The first version of Hoot was for Windows clients and targeted for OpenGL games. In the future we’ll add specific enhancements for DirectX games. Most of those games should work now, however, so the first big feature enhancement will be support for additional client platforms, Mac and Linux in particular. From there, we’ll start to do some performance tuning, and then support some cell phone and handheld clients. Those small screens should be interesting. J

The final point in this post I want to make is about frequency. Some of the features will take some time to implement. However, we get reports on bugs and various other issues more frequently, and do our best to solve them quickly. We’re not going to hold back those fixes for some big feature that’s weeks or months away. So expect to see smaller releases more frequently.

The exact order of support, other than the Mac and Linux clients, isn’t set in stone yet, so let us know what you want first. As Yogi Berra also said, “when you see a fork in the road, take it.”