Somehow I ended up scheduled to appear in two panels in addition to that presentation and the round-table discussion that follows it. Last I checked, that could mean I have the most appearances in the whole agenda; I certainly didn't intend that when I signed up! :) All in all, that, half a dozen other sessions I'm really looking forward to hearing, and a few meetings in between will certainly keep me busy for the week.

And at the same time, I'm wishing I could cancel the whole trip, because of other work challenges.

With now 6 weeks after Shockwave 11's global rollout, most active Habbo users have probably encountered the automatic update mechanism which should look for a new version every 30 days. Unfortunately, Shockwave 11 has not been a great experience for us. Three distinct classes of problems are known to us:

1. The installer/auto-updater seems to function incorrectly in some operating system and browser combinations. In particular, errors have been seen on Windows Vista as well as Japanese language Windows, but issues have been reported also by Windows XP users in other countries. Adobe says it's due to third party Xtras, not because of Shockwave itself, but that's all the same to us because we can't control what Xtras might be on the users computer due to other games requiring them (Habbo doesn't require any).

2. Shockwave 11 changed some core functionalities in a backwards incompatible fashion in order to correct several long-standing bugs which most developers have years ago started considering as platform features. Eg, text handling details cause rendering mishaps with old content.

3. In order to provide compatibility with content authored for SW 10 or earlier, the player builds in a Shockwave 10 compatibility component stack due to large-scale developer demand (us included). However, this stack was put in at a late stage in the development cycle, and turns out has its own installation-related problems. In short, many new installations or upgrades to Shockwave 11 fail to execute content compatible with older versions on the first attempt, because downloading the compatibility components fails.

Each of these three groups contains multiple smaller issues, meaning it's been very difficult to identify clear root causes. At this point in time, perhaps the only highlight of the release is native support for Intel Macs, thus removing the requirement to use Rosetta mode for accessing Habbo on a Mac.

We have been in constant communication with Adobe to resolve these issues, but little concrete, measurable progress has been made. Instead, all through April and the beginning of May we've seen increasing reports of access problems and shorter sessions in the game, which we take to mean active users are growing tired of Shockwave problems. This is of course a reason for alarm.

To avoid the access issues caused by problem 3, we're now looking to switch to native Shockwave 11 mode, but in a way which does not force an immediate update for users still happy with their SW 10 installation, since Shockwave 11 will be less common than 10 for some time to come. Having to maintain compatibility for both versions 10 and 11 will likely cause some user-visible bugs, eg graphics glitches of the kind we would typically want to avoid. However, currently it looks like it's going to be an overall better experience to introduce a few glitches like that to everyone than to have a significant and growing segment of our most loyal userbase unable to access Habbo.

Of course the team can deliver on this kind of changes on their own, and even with a few other colleagues traveling next week as well, I know I'm not really going to be needed there to find a solution for this issue. Still, it's never fun to leave the action behind on a critical moment like this looks to be.