Monday, November 21, 2011

Game Listings, GoLibrary and my return


Hey guys!

I havent updated in a while, i really owe some news :). Had a crazy time last week between tournaments, but i made a great new feature on Kaya.gs . I was so psyched that i worked until 7am on friday giving it the finishing touches.

Its not styled so it looks a little messy but you can get a glimpse on how it will look.

All go servers i know of show the on-going/open games in a text-like list. Although its obviously practical (and Kaya.gs supports it, you can see the "switch view button") we believe something better can be achieved. Hence we have a chart!

Games will be categorized by number of observers and the rating of the strongest player of the match, plus colors to distinguish different types of games (Replays, Sandboxes, Matches, etc), You can click on the dot and get a dialog with some information to watch the game, or start it if its an open game. In the future, the very tooltip or popup will show a preview of the game, so you know if you want to look at it before joining.

Otherwise i dont have much more to show for Kaya.gs in the past week for myself: i've been working on the problem solving software. Its looking better and better. I am currently making it possible to create tests by hand: the idea behind tests is to check how much you know of a given subject, making it better to test for fuseki/joseki knowledge. Here at BIBA (Blackie's Baduk Academy) we have to study a whole fuseki each day, and i think they are missing tests on it.

With this feature they will probably create a daily test, which means we will get some nice non-tsumego problems soon. Then we will add Cho Chikuns Tsumego library, and make a widget to put on Kaya.gs :). We really want to show the power of internalizing software outside the server, and that is our goal by making a first GoLibrary version right now.


However, part of me suffers for this delays. Had i stay in Argentina in October, we would have a playable server already. After so many events i attended i could get into the rythm of working, but because i have opposite times to Argentina, polly and I agreed on working things that dont require collaboration: GoLibrary, some GoSpeed(the board) details, and things here and there.

What we are missing specifically to get the first server version is score-agreement. Its kind of done but has to be polished and tested.

After that, we have to stylize some remaining parts of the server and we can launch, which we expect to happen before new year.

4 comments:

  1. A chart may be a better representation than an ordinary list.
    But it may be even more important that users will have the ability to rate things likes games or cool problems from Chos tsumegos library.
    A chart that is based on strength and observers may be good for now but it uses rather static criterias.
    A chart could also show me games which are liked(button?) by many other players ( e.g. friends or players of equal strength ). Of course, it has to be possible to like or rate something. ;)
    But on the other hand i am not sure, if all people want to rate everything...

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  2. Well eventually ill surely add some other criteria, btu right now there isn't any other as relevant. Maybe amount of fake-money bet on the game could be one. Karma of the players and such is quite irrelevant to why someone ones to look at a game. And likes usually come after watching the game, so its already a later stage status of it.

    But i understand ur point. We'll see :)

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  3. What about considering the history of the two players? If they play a lot, and they are pretty evenly matched in terms of games won vs each other (at correct handicap maybe?), and/or their games tend to be close, I would think it would be probable that their game is going to be interesting to watch. I also think that this type of information would be very interesting in developing the community, since lots of fans and followers seem to spring up around continuing rivalries, or players who play a large amount of games (Twoeye, Zchen, and Koram from KGS spring immediately to mind). Even though these players may not be as highly ranked as others may be, they produce interesting games, and also allow for the community to develop around them.

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  4. Eventually we will support some bond of fan-ship, so number of fans is also a way to sort games.

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