Cinderblock Go Server

[zpmorgan]

Thanks for testing those browsers. It's surprising that it worked at all in IE9 though.

Does anything seem broken? I don't see why else it should be; I'm relying on canvas methods & jquery for most of the DOM interaction.

[gnome]

Dear zpmorgan,

Does this news mean that Basilisk is down for good? To be replaced by Cinderblock in the future?

I had just discovered Basilisk and began a couple of games on there so it's slightly sad. I really hope The Cinderblock Project turns out ok so that me and everyone else can play cylindrical Go again.

Best of luck in your endeavors,
the Gnome.

It's probably down for good. Sorry to interrupt your games. With its level of interest, it really wasn't worth maintaining though.

Cinderblock is (slightly) based on Basilisk; it works in real-time and I just added a sandbox mode: http://cinderblock.zpmorgan.com/new_game/

Thanks, Cinderblock looks really nice. Playing go variants in real time really does sound great. Sandbox mode is something i missed with basilisk.

Less popular variations probably still need to be played as (partly) turn-based because of the lack of willing players.

I really hope this project takes off nicely. It looks really sexy. I would probably shiver with anticipation were I the shivering type.

EDIT: One thing that makes toroidal and cylindrical games more easily followable is a "zoom out" feature, for example with the mousewheel, which makes some board intersections appear in more than one location. I don't know whether implementing something like that would be nontrivial or not though. Sorry, I know you are not taking feature requests. Just something to think about.

[Phelan]

I've been using the WASD keys to see the board connections. Seems to work so far.

[zpmorgan]

I really hope this project takes off nicely. It looks really sexy. I would probably shiver with anticipation were I the shivering type.

EDIT: One thing that makes toroidal and cylindrical games more easily followable is a "zoom out" feature, for example with the mousewheel, which makes some board intersections appear in more than one location. I don't know whether implementing something like that would be nontrivial or not though. Sorry, I know you are not taking feature requests. Just something to think about.

I'm seriously honored by that.

Zooming out wouldn't be that hard; it's already drawing a canvas on another canvas a few times. However, I think I take issue with the premise. I don't think that stones being in several places at once could help to understand the situation or the topology.

At the moment, I quite like how dimensional wrapping is handled. Have you tried dragging the board with the right mouse button?

[gnome]

Zooming out wouldn't be that hard; it's already drawing a canvas on another canvas a few times. However, I think I take issue with the premise. I don't think that stones being in several places at once could help to understand the situation or the topology.

At the moment, I quite like how dimensional wrapping is handled. Have you tried dragging the board with the right mouse button?

Yeah, the dragging works great. It's what made me think of using the mouse wheel to zoom. Mouse wheel might not be the best option though, since when someone unfamiliar with the interface accidentally zooms out with the mouse wheel, [s]he might get slightly confused. Which is why perhaps it might be better if there were buttons for 1x, (1,5x, (golden ratio)x ?) and 2x zoom.

Zooming is not necessary, but when I tried out the toroidal boards in the sandbox (my first time using toroidal boards), I found myself dragging the board around a lot before making a move to get a general picture of the board. I'm not acquainted with toroidal go, but it seems to me that keeping track of the global situation is very important and to do so you have to drag the board around a lot. Especially so with smaller boards.

This dragging is a bit tiresome and since it takes a bit of time, your turns take longer. This probably does not matter with a turn-based server, but since Cinderblock is real-time, it might be worth taking note of.

EDIT: Then again, I've no idea how helpful zooming would actually be, it was just something I thought of while playing that *might* be helpful.

EDIT2: And perhaps you don't even need to do much dragging if you have played a lot of toroidal go and you can picture the board well enough.

EDIT3: So never mind this post. Probably.