This hand-drawn stuff reminds me of a pet-peeve about generated boards and stones: why are the stones always placed in such a perfect geometric grid? I dream of a renderer that has an elegant, subtle jostling of stones, where they're budged a bit left/right/up/down and have some of the slight visual disorganization of a real board.

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

I added a minor displacement off-axis in the neat image generator. Of course, real, physical displacement is too complex for the amount of time I'd like to give it.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Currently the best-looking gobans/stones I've seen are:
Panda Tetsuki and Goban by Sen.te

Goban by Sen.te has random wabi-sabi offsets for the stones and I think it looks nice.
I think that it gives the game a human touch, and in my opinion Go is always more enjoyable with the human touch.

What would really be cool is if someone made stone placement animations in a goban application, either with hands placing the stones or with the stones kind of coming down on the board in a fade-in/zoom-out fashion.

I'm going to post a few board textures I made, here soon. Cool discussions going on here.

That is actually totally awesome.

This!
I’d really love to have that on Go servers.

Greetz, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I don't know why there aren't animations, either. I had animations on my in-progress Go app that I was working on last summer, and I thought they looked pretty nice despite being very simple.

http://gokibitz.com/demos/2014-05-02/
http://gokibitz.com/demos/2014-05-02/simple.html (paper theme)

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

Just great... I wonder what we can do if we can put all our individual effort together... maybe just nothing as it's really not that easy to coordonate things...
but may be something hudge...
a great site to teach go !

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Converting the book Shape UP! by Charles Matthews/Seong-June Kim
to the gobook format. last updated april 2015 - Index of shapes, p.211 / 216

Collaborations can be great, but what I'm focused on more now is trying to make smaller, reusable components. For instance, there's no reason that developers need to keep reinventing a parser for SGF files, which is why I made one available on NPM: https://www.npmjs.org/package/smartgame. Hopefully it's documented well enough that the next person to happen on it will find it usable, rather than making their own, anyway, like... well, like I did. (There's already a parser here. https://www.npmjs.org/package/sgf To be fair, it's almost totally undocumented.)

I want to work on making other components easy for others to use that are a little more complicated.

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

Raise your hands if you have created a SGF parser or pseudoparser

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Cloudbrows, this is a nice mindset, it is true that a lot of developers may be reinventing the wheel. I think what may be necessary is a well-known Go developers' forum where it's easy to see other developers' work and the resources available online.

I really wish that an improved, responsive, and feature-rich goban applet was developed soon. WGo and GoKibitz both look nice so far. WGo needs a few more features to be on par with Eidogo (such as tsumego mode), and I don't know how far Gokibitz has come along.

Also here's a high-quality seamless goban texture, in subtly varying colors, I made for anyone to use:
Hayang's Kaya Goban Texture (MediaFire)

I experimented a lot with the hue and saturation and have created a few varieties that I think look good in their own way. I think the first texture has the best color so I am applying it to my experiments.

Hah - yeah, maybe it's a bad example. I guess SGF parsers are so trivial, most developers would rather right their own? For me, it required a fair amount of mental effort and time, since I'd never really parsed anything programatically before. I would've appreciated something in JavaScript that I could drop into place.

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

GoKibitz has been essentially inactive for about 3/4s of a year. I think the rendering is pretty nice, but there are still lots of features that need to be built out. To be honest, the project got a little too complex for me. I'm a front-end developer by trade, and I'm less experienced building feature-rich applications (even small ones) than I am building webpages. I've been trying, lately, to refocus on making the components much more self-contained so that it's easier to work on.

But that said, I only recently discovered WGo, and the API as described on the webpage looks fantastic. On the surface, it looks so good that I should probably not go to all the work of duplicating that effort with GoKibitz. Like you, I want to work on the design aspects of it, and I haven't looked at what's involved in messing with the canvas renderer... I'm hoping it wouldn't be too hard to add animations. In the best possible case, the developer abstracted the renderer really well from everything else, in which case I could make an entirely new one if I want.

We'll see--to be honest, just talking to you and some of the other devs on this thread has made me more excited about working on go stuff than I've been in months.

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

This is great! Have you thought about putting it up on Github or something like that so it'd be easier for others to see and use?

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Nate Eagle

"You see, this is why go is so difficult. But also why go is so interesting." --Yuan Zhou

As someone who is thinking about building Go related software, I just wanted to chime in and say this thread is awesome. It's great to see people contributing whatever skills they have towards improving the tools we have available!