It is time for our “annual” off-site planning meeting.

Generally, a business does not have resolutions; however, it does (or should, at least) have goals and a plan. It is essential, in my opinion, that the direction of a company be revisited on a regular basis, from the top down. Rather than always trying to simply run in a straight line, making quick decisions to adjust course based on immediate obstacles and rewards, one needs to occasionally check the compass. This is, of course, much easier to do for a small business like ours than for a large corporation. Still, it is the failure to reassess that can lead to billion dollar software companies forgetting the basics of development, or huge information companies experimenting with doing “evil”.

Because we are still small enough to fit all of our corporate decision-makers into the same room, I can schedule an off-site planning meeting in order to reaffirm the fundamental goals of the business. We can then make course corrections as necessary and decide on specific goals, or milestones, for the short and medium terms. As long as we do this frequently enough, none of our turns should be too dramatic and we should always be moving in roughly the desired direction.

The timing of this meeting is intended to work in conjunction with our end/beginning of year break, when we return revitalized and ready to get things done. Instead of a manic, unfocused burst of energy, this overall look at our goals helps focus the effort in the correct direction. The decision to have the meeting away from the daily distractions of an office is important, especially since we work from home offices, where there is twice as much to interrupt us. For several hours, as long as it takes, we just disappear from here. Of course, we do choose a venue that allows for frequent relaxation, too; this is not your standard business meeting.

This particular meeting had to be postponed for a week because during the previously scheduled time, I had to be at a funeral, and that was not conducive to a positive outcome. Now, though, I am really looking forward to this, especially since it feels like the intervening week has been spent just meandering, and it is high time to put that all behind us.

Until this off-site meeting is concluded, we will not have an official set of goals for 2007 (and beyond) and the specific plans to reach them, and once that happens, most of the details will not be published anyway. However, there are a few general items that one can expect. We will certainly have many new game releases this year, including several to provide better Windows Vista support prior to its general release. I will be spending time as a Director of the Association of Shareware Professionals and working to build the ASP Indie Games SIG. There will also be something of a surprise. Shhh….

One tangible goal for early 2007 will be a brand new development system. I have a huge sentimental attachment to my current PC system, since it still has the soul of my original Pentium system purchased in 1995 (albeit with every single component upgraded at least twice). Its spirit is twelve years old, which is at least 96 in computer years, so it deserves to retire now and live the quiet life.

Quad-Core, here we come.

It is good riddance to 2006, as far as I am concerned.

Looking back, business was good in 2006, with several product releases, especially with Goodsol Development. Personally, my immediate family did quite well, all things considered. However, the extended family situation was in some turmoil in the wake of the death of my father-in-law and the serious illness and hospitalizations of my mother-in-law. This made it harder to enjoy our successes.

Our company takes a break for the last two weeks of each year, encompassing New Year’s Day. This break is designed to allow for us to relax, celebrate, and return to work refreshed, and it usually works. This year, though, I spent much of the first week of the break driving back and forth between home and hospital dealing with an emergency surgery, a minor recovery and then serious downturn.

On New Year’s Eve, my mother-in-law ended 2006 for us by dying in the hospital. Thus, the second week of our break was spent making arrangements, grieving and mourning, attending a visitation and then the funeral, and beginning to handle the estate. Today is the first day that I have had in almost two weeks during which I could just relax.

At this point, I can think of nothing more refreshing than getting back to normal and returning to work at SophSoft, Incorporated and programming for Digital Gamecraft.

Merry Christmas!

That is all.

Today the run of this local play comes to an end.

The stage production of Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story produced by Sunsets with Shakespeare, a community theatre group in the Lansing area, has its eighth and final performance (not counting a dress rehearsal with a paid audience) this afternoon. The play is staged in a barn theatre at the Woldumar Nature Center, which is a fairly intimate venue.

As mentioned previously, my younger son, William, who recently turned 14, stars as Ralphie Parker, who is determined to get a “legendary Red Ryder 200-shot carbine-action range model air rifle, with a compass and this thing that tells time built right into the stock” for Christmas. Alas, he is thwarted at every turn with “You’ll shoot your eye out!“

This part has been a big deal around here. William had to rehearse almost every night for a month, and since he is on stage for every scene, he had to be there all of the time. He was on the cover of Noise, an area newspaper, reenacting the scene in which Flick gets his tongue stuck to the cold metal flagpole (though the image is not online). He was interviewed for, and quoted prominently in, an article in the Lansing State Journal (which gets no link because of their delusion that people will pay to read an article from 10 days ago). He and Flick also did a video introduction for Entertainment Express, a local television program that covers the arts.

Not everything went smoothly, though. William got his hand stepped on during one of the scene changes in the dark, and during his two-day break between the first and second week shows, he came down with strep throat. Also, the one area media outlet that actually has a decent web site gave the play a bad review (so no link). The review was rather dubious, however. It gave a great mention to a local media personality for his performance as Santa Claus; the only problem was that this person was not in the play at all. Besides, how much credibility can one give a review that, in a full page writeup, does not even once mention the actor who plays the main character?

Still, A Christmas Story was selected as one (#3) of five “best bets in entertainment” in a newspaper article from yesterday. (Look fast, before they want to charge you to do so.)

After this production closes this afternoon (and following the cast party, of course), William will already be learning his lines for his next role: He will be playing the (major) part of the King in Shahrazad, though this one will be with his school drama club.

His mother and I are very proud parents.

I will again be joining the ASP Board of Directors.

Last week, members of the Association of Shareware Professionals voted to bring me back as one of six Directors. I last served on the Board in 2004, and I made the decision then not to run for election at the end of my (second) term. Having served that year as Chairman of the Board, I needed to take a break from volunteer service for a while to concentrate on business. After a couple of years, though, I was asked (and nominated) to run again. I accepted and stood (not ran) for election.

Three of the six Director terms expire each year, and (obviously) the terms are each two years. This time, there were 5 candidates, and the membership seems to have wanted experience. I (a former CoB) received the most votes, followed closely by Mitchell Vincent of K Software (current CoB) and Sam Bellotto Jr. of Crossdown (sitting Director). Sam is another game developer/publisher, and I know that Mitchell is a closet game developer (and successful business software publisher). There will not be much turnover on the ASP BoD this year, but I know my election (replacing an absentee Director) will be a net positive in terms of participation.

So, on January 1, 2007, I will again be a Director of the Association of Shareware Professionals, with all the limited prestige and complete lack of remuneration that entails. One nice thing, though, is that I have personally met all of the other 2007 Directors, as well as the current Officers and Executive Director; this is not always the case for an international organization. I think that we have a good team for moving the ASP forward.

My first public act as Director-elect is to now ask anybody reading this who is not already a member to please consider joining the ASP. When I first joined (last century), it was the best $100 that we had ever spent on our business. The annual cost has not risen, and the value of the marketing and business information has not decreased, so the investment is better than ever. If you already are an ASP member, please volunteer.

Thank you for your support.

Visual Studio 2005 is still a hot topic.

For whatever reason, one of my blog postings from a year ago, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, has recently received two more comments (not counting the typo) supporting my general position that Visual Studio / Visual C++ 6.0 is still a better development environment under Windows. My feelings have not softened since then, except that using XCode 2.4 under OS X really does make one appreciate some of the features present in MSVC.

Today, I had to do some support for a project that was originally built (by a major company) under MSVC++ 6.0, and which I had upgraded to add new features. Most significantly, I added language support for Spanish, Japanese, German, French, and Italian, in addition to the original English. The new programmer has been tasked, apparently, with rebuilding the project under VC++ 2005 Express as his first experience with the product, and it is a chore. Having described certain steps under the former environment, and then having to “translate” the procedures for the newer compiler showed me, again, the unnecessary complexity of the interface. On the [not] other hand, though, this complexity is much slower as well.

Within the last couple of months, I also read an article at Dr. Dobb’s entitled, Microsoft Cautions Developers About Visual Studio/Vista Conflicts. The gist of the article is in the first paragraph, “that Visual Studio 2005 won’t be fully compatible with Vista and that older versions of Visual Studio won’t be supported at all on Vista.” Brilliant. Of course, I have not been able to get Vista to install on a test system yet, so perhaps it makes no real difference.

Despite a few shining counterexamples, most of Microsoft seems to have lost focus on the reasons that Windows is the most prominent operating system: developers and users. Between the bloat and churn, there is also an arrogance, as though Microsoft no longer needs to even pretend that they are trying to do anything other than take our money. They still control the platform that provides most of my income, but things do change.

Once upon a time there was an invincible industry giant called IBM…

We wish for everybody to have a great Thanksgiving and/or Thursday.

Today is the most travelled holiday in the United States, traditionally for family gatherings. This year, we have opted to stay home with immediate family and a friend or two for Turkey Day, serving a large, and fairly common, meal of turkey and stuffing, ham, potatoes and gravy, green beans, and of course, cranberry sauce, with a raspberry pie for dessert. (In truth, baking that last item from frozen will be all I am allowed to do.)

Our tradition is for each person to briefly talk about what has made us thankful over the previous year, so here goes:

On the business end of things, I am thankful that our company is successful, with several projects in development, and especially thankful for these major game releases:

• Pretty Good MahJongg 2.3 – released November 20, 2006
• Pretty Good Solitaire 11.0 – released September 5, 2006
• Most Popular Solitaire 1.1 – released August 10, 2006
• MVP Backgammon Pro 2.0 – released July 26, 2006

For the personal side, I am thankful that, despite a death and another serious illness in our extended family, my wife and children are all healthy and thriving, and very thankful that our family is strong and close in this last year together before our older son departs for college.

Now, we get to enjoy some good food (and listen to Alice’s Restaurant) at the start of the holiday season, before we wrap up our 2006 development and head into our end of year break.

Interesting tidbit: I am a direct descendant of William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, who arrived on the Mayflower and is credited with being responsible for the first Thanksgiving years ago. According to Wikipedia, I share that lineage with Hugh Hefner (as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of other Americans, I suspect).

The latest update for this excellent game is now available.

On Monday, Goodsol Development released version 2.3 of Pretty Good MahJongg, a unique solitaire game based on traditional Chinese MahJongg tiles. Of course, it includes tile matching layouts, as one would expect, but it also contains 55 other games. Many of these games are Solitaire variants played with tiles instead of playing cards, and all of these games were invented specifically for our title. There are also different types of puzzle games to play.

One can get more information from the web site, www.goodmj.com, or better yet, directly download the evaluation version.

Pretty Good MahJongg was programmed entirely by us, SophSoft, Incorporated, for Goodsol Development. More specifically, I am the only person who has written code for this game, with the obvious exception of libraries used. However, the primary library utilized is a private framework known internally as the Goodlib library, which we also wrote. This library is used in all of our work for Goodsol and it contains common code for handling tasks such as memory management, interface control, and image manipulation.

As I have written previously, Pretty Good MahJongg is the game of ours that I most enjoy playing for fun (as opposed to testing). Often when one finishes developing a game, there is an element of burn out, and the game is put aside for a while, if not forever. In the case of PGMJ, though, I never felt the desire to take a break from the game, and I still play it regularly for relaxation. The only other game on my quick launch menu is Most Popular Solitaire, in which I am simply playing, and winning, all of the FreeCell games in order. (As I write this, I am currently on game #3205.)

In my opinion, the sleeper category of PGMJ is the ‘Wall’ games group, which includes the flagship game, Great Wall, where one removes colored tiles by clicking on a group of two or more of the same color, as well as related games such as Cumberland, using the same gameplay mechanic but applying it in a deeper way. My personal favorite from this category is Wall Pairs, where one removes pairs of adjacent tiles of the same color. Because the player gets to select the two tiles, rather than just removing an entire group, this provides more opportunity for strategy. Almost every game of Wall Pairs can be won, and I have personally been able to beat the first 500 games (so far).

The other two games on my ‘Favorites’ list are Free Klondike and Short Spider. Free Klondike is a variant of MahJongg Klondike, which in turn is a tile version of the traditional (playing card) Solitaire game Klondike. In this variant, the player only gets one pass through the stock, but any tile can be played in an empty pile. Most games are winnable, and I have only found one game (#48) in the first 546 (and counting) that I could not win. Short Spider is a variant of MahJongg Spider which only uses 108 tiles, making it easy and relaxing. I have won all of the first 126 games of this variant (and the first 245 games of the standard 132 tile version).

Oh yeah… For those who just want a nice tile matching game with a good interface and plenty of features to make gameplay enjoyable, we have added many more layouts, including 10 that I created myself, to bring the total up to 280. Should this not be enough, the full version includes a layout editor that makes it very simple to create custom layouts as desired.

This is just one of several projects on which we have been working recently, so expect more announcements of releases, including some from the past, after the imminent (US) holiday and throughout the next few months.

Things change fast around here.

After 11 years of adult leadership in (first) Cub Scouts and (later) Boy Scouts, my wife and business partner, Sherry, has decided to reduce her active role. She decided that it was time to resign from her position as Scoutmaster for Boy Scout Troop 2, and also to transition from her role as Charter Organization Representative for Cub Scout Pack 224/Marble Elementary School. She will remain an adult leader, working with Venture Crew 22, which involves boys and girls ages 14 through 21 but requires a smaller time commitment. This allows her to spend more time just with our family.

As it turns out, this change comes just in time. Tomorrow, James has another taping of QuizBusters, where East Lansing meets Eaton Rapids in the first round of the tournament. (East Lansing was in the last qualifying match and then ended up in the first tournament game.) At almost the same time, William has his first read-through for his role as Ralphie in a stage production of A Christmas Story. (Unfortunately, the script has not yet arrived, so a viewing of the movie will have to suffice for familiarization until tomorrow.) Thankfully, we both have the time to get them where they need to be, though we can each only watch one event.

This reminds me of an amusing idea told me by a parent who experienced the shock of going directly from one child to four by virtue of triplets. He said that parenting was like playing defense: with one or two, you can play man-to-man, but once you have three or more, you need to switch to zone.

A game product is resuscitated.

Back on April 16, I wrote a memorial to MVP Backgammon Professional on the fifth anniversary of the final beta build of the game. At that time, the project was presumed dead. The publisher, MVP Software, had not released a product nor significantly updated its web page in about four years.

Lo and Behold! In late July, MVP Software finally released MVP Backgammon Professional, much to my surprise and delight. Of course, I found out about the release by accidentally, first by coincidentally seeing its listing on a download site, followed a week or two later by an email from a fan of the game. Thankfully, they made up for that oversight by providing me (upon my request) with a copy of the full game, and I have finally been able to take a few minutes to tell everybody about it.

This is not a normal game review, because I am in no way unbiased. We, SophSoft, wrote the bulk of the game, meaning every last bit of it through the aforementioned beta release, and did most of the artwork for the game as well. One could certainly assume that I would be inclined to praise our portion and may be disposed to criticize the rest, so read this commentary with that in mind.

First of all, let us start with some of The Good. Most of the primary functionality is unchanged from the beta version of five years ago, yet it still holds up well. The program plays a strong game of Backgammon, especially the Copernicus personality (an expert neural network). We had suggested a windowed mode in addition to full screen (and wrote the code to easily support it), and they apparently decided that this was a good idea and added it. Some of the dialog boxes were changed from our last version, and for the most part, the changes were beneficial. Best of all, for us, is that MVP showed real class and left all of the original credits intact, merely adding more of their own.

Now, here is a little bit of The Bad, with regard to the program itself. The pubeval personality, which was a very simple (classic) neural network evaluator, was removed, leaving a large strength gap among evaluators; Gerry Tesauro, who wrote the original pubeval, is still thanked in the credits, though. In five years, we probably could have improved Copernicus, but I suspect that its strength is now somewhat less than GNU Backgammon, which has continued to be improved in the interim. Had I been given a chance, I would have added antialiasing to make the checkers look better on the board (given the faster machines of today), and I would have altered the right mouse button interface. Also, the grafting of the ‘5’ (over a ‘1’) to update the splash screen copyright date looks poor. Why was it not 2006, anyway?

The biggest disappointment with program operation, for me, was that MVP removed all of the direct peer-to-peer networking and replaced it with their Classic Entertainment Online service. The beta version allowed users to connect via Internet, LAN, modem, or serial cable, as well as via the (unfinished) CEO. In the release version, only the latter option is available, albeit complete now. My opinion has not changed in the half year since the previous post that MVP Backgammon Pro should have been released five years ago without CEO, and then an update could be released later (with sales in the meantime). This argument is bolstered by the fact that I have checked CEO many times over the last couple of months and there has never been another backgammon player online (and that is the only game currently supported).

That last part was, of course, a marketing problem rather than any issue with the game itself. Marketing is not a science, so I may be wrong, but I feel that there are several errors in this area, specifically with the limitations of the trial version. The trial omits the Copernicus evaluator, which is the strongest one available, so there is no way to know how strong the program really is without buying it. Actually, it not clear during the trial period that this is the case, so many (if not most) players will probably assume that the AI is weak, because they can only see the deliberately crippled evaluator. Likewise, there are three different board sets, plus three checker sets, with only one each available in the trial, but this is not obvious either.

Ironically, I did not see any way to print an order form from within the program, though that was ostensibly the reason for us parting ways. MVP Software did not like our cost estimate for adding the ability to print an order form (instead of just opening a form in NotePad and letting the user print from there). They demanded that we add the feature for free, claiming that they had three “experts” who said that it would take them no more than 15 minutes to add printing capability. I responded: “In that case, why are you still talking to me?” (Clearly, there was some deeper problem there, but we never found out what it was.)

The bottom line is that MVP Backgammon Professional is a good backgammon program that is fun to play. Even though there was nowhere near five years worth of improvement since we last worked on the game, it still stands up today and is better than most backgammon software on the market. The drawbacks are not severe, and perhaps will give MVP Software something to improve in the future.