For developers: Easy ways to render nice stone graphics

[cloudbrows]

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

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.

[cloudbrows]

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.

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.

[cloudbrows]

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.

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?

[jeromie]

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!