Thanks, everyone, for all the interest and continuing positivity.
@<most of you>: I promise there will be options to tweak the appearance of the board and stones and whatever you like. Don't expect that, soon, however. If I've put up a screenshot of it, that probably means I've called it “good enough” for now and moved on to other things – otherwise, I risk building an enormously aesthetic chocolate tea-pot and that's not useful to anyone. Visuals are terribly dangerous – it is too easy to get caught up, tweaking and polishing them and they can easily consume infinite time.
@ez4u: Yes, you understand the feature correctly and, yes, I am still in two minds about the stronger-player-is-the-away-team idea. It does seem a bit confusing. It was an extension of an idea that I implemented in the game-list view because, when testing, I found it much easier to find intriguing games by sorting the game-list by “stronger” or “weaker” instead of “white” or “black”. It's all of two lines to change it so it might not survive too many more revisions. In the end, it works out that white is nearly always 'away', in practice.
@ez4u: The order of the list of users in a channel (either a game or room) is currently arbitrary but will certainly be sortable at some point.
@ez4u: Lastly, if the number of overtime periods or stones is greater than 30 (two rows of three groups of five; five more than the most common Canadian overtime setting), the dots will simply be hidden and only the numeric counter will be displayed to avoid a very large and unwieldy hoard of the little critters.
Today, I 'rooted' my Android phone, unlocked the bootloader and installed CyanogenMod in a desperate, ultimately successful attempt to make it useful again – instead of a device for showing Sony-branded update notifications for apps I will never use and have never used (can't disable them either), promotions for other Sony products, stores, premium media and wot-not. Turns out hacking phones is also liable to consume infinite time but now I can see my email notifications without having to dispatch a billion junk ones, first. Also: I defeated the evil empire's evil plan. Progress!
This is looking great! From the video it looks like it is planned to have automatch functionality, though from the original post it sounds like that isn't implemented yet. Will it be difficult to implement? Automatch is one of my favorite KGS features.
Monadology wrote:This is looking great! From the video it looks like it is planned to have automatch functionality, though from the original post it sounds like that isn't implemented yet. Will it be difficult to implement? Automatch is one of my favorite KGS features.
Automatch actually looks like one of the easiest features to implement and is also one of my favourite KGS features.
Earlier this afternoon, with my development environment still open and my code yet uncommitted, I connected to the live KGS server with one of my own ranked accounts and played the first games ever to be played via KGS Leben.
@EdLee: Those kudos belong to my wife. I just implemented a whole bunch and asked her which variation on the theme struck the best balance between helpful and jarring. (She's a bit annoyed with me because I haven't set up a test environment for her to play with the client, yet.)
Personally, I found them to be a little too subtle at first but after I stopped trying to critique them and let them do their job, I found that they really do draw the eye to the stone as it is played, even without sounds.
Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2016 9:42 am
by EdLee
Charlie wrote:Personally, I found them to be a little too subtle at first but...
Hi Charlie,
You could try to increase the diameter of the marker slightly, say, to, slightly larger than (half of the stone's diameter).
Ja. Expect an announcement before the end of this month. I am hoping to have the code-base in a semi-stable state by then and to have set up project-management related stuff like roadmaps and issue trackers and readmes. Also, the automatch feature I mentioned in my last post will be ready for use so there will actually be a point to using the client.
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2016 4:26 am
by EdLee
Charlie wrote:Also, the automatch feature I mentioned in my last post will be ready for use so there will actually be a point to using the client.
Hi Charlie,
I never use automatch ( on KGS or IGS ), so even if this feature is completely missing, just the better-looking stones and board alone (v. CGoban's set) are enough for me. Oh, and no more Java nightmare; big plus.
But the most important thing is there's a future to this browser based, non-Java client.
The good news is this: although I don't feel that the code is operationally stable at the moment, I am fairly happy that it is structurally stable enough for me to announce that the source code is up on GitHub and you're welcome to poke about inside it. Clone it. Build it. Serve it. Run it. See the project README for the very simple two-step build procedure and some information on how to serve the artefacts that get produced.
https://github.com/stephenmartindale/kgs-leben
The bad news is that I hardly achieved anything, this month. I reworked the style sheets and ensured that the auto-match features are now exposed through the U.I. so that no console hackery is required to use them but that's about it. I didn't even test all that much and, honestly, I don't know if half the stuff that I think is working really is, today. It was a busy month for me and programming had to take a back seat. I hope to have more time to work on KGS Leben in July and should have even more in August.
I am also embarking on a two week holiday, commencing on Saturday evening. I will try to keep abreast of PMs for the next two days before I depart. (When I get back, I will probably set up a SlackChat channel and log-in when I'm at my desk, working on the project, ready to help anyone who wants to collaborate. I thought about using a room on KGS for this but, honestly, SlackChat is much more featured.)
Nevertheless, I cannot wait to hear that someone has had a crack at building and running my work. I cannot wait to answer your questions and use them to make the project more friendly to people other than myself. Go forth and rip it apart.
Eagle-eyed GitHub users might have spotted the project on GitHub and noticed occasional commits in the last few months. Noddy badges all round, I say.
Copying and pasting this from my response on Reddit in case anyone else is wondering.
I had set this up a few days ago, it runs pretty well and I like it. However there are a few problems that makes me not want to use it. When you close a game, it defaults back to some other room where the game did not originate, forcing you to click on the room you were in before. Sorting is completely messed up at this point, I assume it just hasn't been added yet. Finding a game by rank is annoying. The time systems are not denoted, I had forgotten about systems like 10min/24 stones and was wondering what those circles had meant until I realized. Otherwise I find the interface great.
If anything sounds harsh it isn't. Both you and the creator of GoUniverse have made great progress in a short time.
What is the longer term plan for users to use the client without having to build stuff? Does it require wms to bless it and run something on the gokgs server? Or for a 3rd party to be running the json convert server thingy?
yoyoma wrote:What is the longer term plan for users to use the client without having to build stuff? Does it require wms to bless it and run something on the gokgs server? Or for a 3rd party to be running the json convert server thingy?
There are 2 services that need to be running for this to work, the API server which runs on one type of service and the web service hosting the pages. It could be hosted on the KGS server if wms wanted, but the people who write the HTML client would either need to package it up in a browser extension or host the site themselves on another server.
