Life In 19x19

In another thread, anoek posted some lovely stone renderings:

anoek wrote:This might be a different kind of simple than what you're aiming for, but since you mentioned coding stones in javascript I thought I'd mention that generating stones procedurally using a simple phong reflection model worked out pretty well for us at OGS:

Are those the stones that other people see on ogs? What I see is this:



I've complained about how the stones look in nova's forum, because I found the diagonal shading visually displeasing and distracting when looking at a full board, but maybe I was complaining about something others are not experiencing. Here is how a full board looks to me:



Is this how it looks to you, or are others using the pretty stones from the top images, and if so, how are they selected?

Yeah, I see the stones as anoek posted them.

It looks like the rendering algorithm is broken for you (the OGS board is an HTML5 canvas). What browser are you using?

I am using Firefox. Because you asked, I tried going to the site with Chrome, and there the stones were as Anoek posted them. Firefox renders the stones wrong? That's weird.

I guess I can use Chrome as a dedicated OGS client

daal wrote: Firefox renders the stones wrong? That's weird.

daal, could you let anoek know about this ? Perhaps post your screenshots to his other link, so he can perhaps fix this bug ?

I use firefox and it looks fine.

Same bug here. Windows 8. Firefox 29.0.

I believe so. Try this link. http://online-go.com/game/533578

daal wrote:I am using Firefox. Because you asked, I tried going to the site with Chrome, and there the stones were as Anoek posted them. Firefox renders the stones wrong? That's weird.

I guess I can use Chrome as a dedicated OGS client

I use Firefox too, and they look fine here, so I guess the problem is somewhere else. Could be in the OS, in your graphics hardware or drivers, or perhaps some plugin or add-on to Firefox that is interfering with the rendering in an unexpected way.

IE shows the correct rendering, but somehow everything looks blurry: the stones and the lines:

One thing to try is to disable Firefox' hardware acceleration: under Preferences -> Advanced -> General uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available". If that fixes it, it is a graphics hardware/driver issue.

I'm pretty sure the problem occurs if you use the browser zoom. If you have a high resolution screen and zoom to read the itty bitty text in chat panes then the stone and board rendering screws up.

I re-checked the thread I started on the Nova forum last November, and there was a reply last month that the problem occurs on displays with higher PPI density, and there was also a link to another thread there describing the problem in a bit more detail and offering an unfortunately unsatisfactory workaround. Using Chrome works for me.

Edit: I just tried Herman's suggestion of disabling Firefox's hardware acceleration, and it helps on 9x9 boards, but not on 19x19.

Yeah.. I'd hoped that problem would fix itself within a couple browser versions, that does not seem to be the case. After this next patch I'll revisit the stone rendering and make sure that problem goes away.