Season 79 - Season change news

(08:00 20-02-2021)
Sunday 21st February is the start of season 79 and here is our traditional news message to go with the season change. Rather then sharing news about changes in the software, we want to update you on the status of the development team.

Some of you might remember that many years ago (2013 to 2017) the development stopped and nothing resulted from the many suggestions by the Maxithlon community, even known issues were not fixed. At that point the end of the game was near. The simple reason was that there was no programmer available to get things moving.

Early in 2017 some people set up a new team around a new programmer: Apolo. Since Easter 2017 many long-time requested new enhancements were implemented that most people now take for granted:

·        Relays in the championships
·        Multi-event athletes
·        Youth squad increased from 5 to 18 athletes
·        Youth competition
·        Ability to influence youth athlete pulls
·        Corrections in the fans for master athletes
·        Unread indicator on federations
·        Changes to income from the national league
·        Many small changes
·        Various bug fixes

After these few years it was time to recharge the batteries, evaluate our way of working and decide how we can better serve the game without losing sight of the fact that all members of the development team are helping the game as a hobby (read: have fun doing it). During the past season we took the time to discuss how we want to move forwards.

As said above, until now only Apolo was working on the source code of the game and Ned was maintaining the technical side. Claire_Grube and Guyvandamme were analyzing features and issues without access to the programming. We are pleased to announce that recently various technological changes were made (For the nerds amongst us: first migrations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and to Github from our "old" SVN repository). This will allow inviting multiple developers to look and work on the source code of the game.

As part of this evaluation of our team it was decided to welcome Foxelav as a new member. He and Claire_Grube will become programmers. This will give the team more capacity to develop new features and to investigate and fix issues. Of course they will need time to become familiar with the tools and code before they can be productive.

At the same time the team is updating the backlog of requests and suggestions done by the users, the staff and the development team. At the start of our development team in 2017 we had put together a list of 70 ideas, some very small, others very big. Since then we added new items ongoing and while we completed many features from the original list, the backlog has grown to over 100 ideas. We are now making a shortlist of these requests.

All the above means that, during the past season there was little or no time to develop new features, which might come as good news for some ;-) We ask all of you to give us the time to do the planned work, so all of us (including the members of the development team) can enjoy the game and have fun in our hobby.

We are working on some interesting features. Stay tuned.

Thank you!

The development team,

Ned, Apolo, Claire_Grube, Gynnad, Jorginho, Foxelav & Guyvandamme