Sunday, February 26, 2012

Collaborator Wanted on a side project.

Hey guys. Before getting right downt o business, id like to mention how AWESOME were the broadcasts by the Quebec Go Club on showing live streaming of the games on Kaya.

Guests were invited and it was extremely drawing and fun. It truly felt like the stepping stone, the basis, to create truly great video shows on streaming. Live commentary of Congress games on video, interviews with players, sky is the limit!

Things brings us to a project by a Kaya collaborator, Jonas "JJ" and his RGF specification.

Rgf is a spec to relate an audio/video file to an sgf file. As the video progresses, the stones placed in a board in the video are palced in a board. which means you can pause and interact with the board, and then resume the video. That could mean you put comments on it or you ask questions.

I have to say that jj's work here is amazing. He is not a professional programmer and he tackled a difficult problem like a pro. There functional version and we are looking to make a nice demo of it.
We want someone to assist JJ, to utilize the tool and help him make it better with suggestions and aids. Using things is the best way to test them. And also to work on translating a GoCommentary video to RGF.
The only skill requirements is not being afraid of looking at RAW SGF. The work is almost the same as moving a video to a SGF in any editor.

Assisting in this can get you access to Kaya.gs with a free Collaborator account. If you have any questinos send an email to gabriel.benmergui@kaya.gs or if you are in the server, just pm me.

Regards, Gabriel.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Kaya.gs is advancing steadily

Its been 13 days since my last post. 13 days. How did i let that happen?? i thought i posted last week :).

I have to recuperate 2 weeks of mayhem into these blogposts. We have been veery busy with non-technical aspects of Kayam thinking on what can we achieve from a technical standpoint, and how long it will take us.

We have now a feature list we are going to work on for the next 30 weeks at least.

So what is new in the past 2 weeks?

Private messaging is now complete for 0.10, and once a major test is confirm, i have a BIG event to announce. One event that will make Kaya.gs the FIRST server to do it. It will be an awesome demonstration of accomplishing that which we promised.

Also, we are now storing all games, which means users can see past games and load them up on an Offline Version of Gospeed for analysis and review. This is thought to become an API for people to develop independent statistics, compilations and so on.

We also got a new meijin, which a specific Kanji character and a Moon on the board of Fame.

Things are on schedule and working smoothly. I hope lots of new people visit us once we make an official announcement and hopefully we can finish the already filled Game of the century

Saturday, February 11, 2012

0.8 Byo-yomi, escaper clock and the road ahead

Been a while since the last post! Had an exhausting week.

Release went normal, yesterday and only a few tweaks were needed to make sure its stable. It was a pretty shady release but most of its issues are fixed by now.

We have included byo-yomi but the most difficult thing we did this week was the escaper clock. Now when a user is disconnected from a game, a visible 5 minute clock is shown as the marker for forfeit.

It was pretty trivial until we found out that the regular clock for the escaper was still running. So we have to adjust it by how much the user was disconnected and that was quite the pandora's box.

Its still not perfect but its pretty close to being so, and we are going to polish it for 0.9. We have decided to focus on on the core features of game play a lot more for the next few releases, which means time systems, maybe chinese ruleset, voiced clocks, better variation sharing and experience, etc. Most of that work is front end, so if i get time to spare during the next releases i will focus more on OpenKaya's Tournament system, for which i have a great appreciation for.

Also, Kaya BlackOps Labs is working on a secret project. Might become a world domination feature , and we plan to show it at the end of february.

Stay in tune!

Sunday, February 5, 2012

0.7's Gospeed & OpenKaya(again)

0.7 is out! hours before i did a birthday party at my mom's place.

0.7 was a huge release for us, and it came with 2 major features. The first feature is that now all games played are saved and stored. You can access them through user profiles with a single click, and we have the basis, the core, to make an API for them.

After proving its stability, and being happy with it, we will publish an API to be able to do analytics, reporting, and just toying around. Because lots of games are lots of information, and im sure the community will have ideas on what to do with it.


But even mroe important than that, we released an html sgf viewer. Gospeed is the name of the smart-board Kaya uses, done 100% by dp. We put it in a client, and now you can see not only past Kaya games, but any game out there in the web.
This is available to everyone. You dont need an account, so you can visit here and load a game up!. Also when you load a game, we give you a shortened url so you can share the loaded game with someon else. Like this one http://url.kaya.gs/w6r61c .

We have a some way yet for it to become more featured than eidogo and a lot more to be similar to a regular sgf editor. Right now, its best use is to view games, the comments and to share them easily.
Check it out!

0.8 is a big ? for us. We haven't decided what to work on but its likely we will work on time related features. There is a lot of work to do there and its pretty finite, we know that if we do it now, we wont have to think about it again.

I must congratulate Verse for doing so much work with time systems on OpenKaya, he implemented Byo-yomi, canadian, and even Hourglass! We are only short of Bronstein, but i could not dare ask him any more :).

Again, OpenKaya is surprising me and because over 4 people are working on it right now, i decided to make a public tracker on it : https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/470995# . This system is famous among developers and truly easy to use and understand. As i make sure no two people work on the same thing at the same time, this will also allow collaborators to know the overall picture, and those that would like to collaborate, see what are the recognized tasks so far.

I have updated the documentation with a Credits section and for 0.8 all collaborators will have their Fire Kanji associated with their accounts. Nice work guys!

Because most of the time work left is on the front end and heavy weight on pato's side, this week i might turn some attention to OpenKaya myself, specially tournament organizing. We have an engine right now, and we have to turn it into a usable webpage.

We have a long and very exciting road ahead of us. Ganbatte!

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

OpenKaya & vital addition to my kitchen arsenal.

I've been very happily surprised the past week on the number of people that want to collaborate with code.

There have been already 4 sizeable collaborator contributions, and 3 other developers offered helping hands.

This is my first time as a source controller of this nature. My job with OpenKaya is making sure everyone that wants to contribute, finds a place to do so and doesnt get any obstacles -technical or otherwise- so he can solve problems.

The past week specially there were great advances regarding the tournament system and there is another nice project that has moved a lot faster than it thought. Both are killer features and its not out of the question to integrate them into kaya by the end of february.


Kudos to the first sprouts of the community! People that aid with code will get a special marker (The Kanji for Fire) in their accounts. Potentailly their works could get also some coverage so people could easily provide them with karma. Collaborators of this sort deserve recognition too!


Changing the note of the post, my father gave me a special present for my birthday: an espresso machine. Now i can consume large quantity of delicious coffee for the nights ahead of us!. Lets work for 0.7 to be a great release!