Different hardware also means different software versions. These started to be a pain in the “back” for developers, with 30% using Android 1.6, 30% using 2.1 and 20% version 2.2, we had to optimise our apps for each android version. Thus requiring us to create 3 version of the app or exclude the low end devices.

This year, most Android users have updated to Android 2.1 or 2.2. But Android’s fragmentation has become more apparent to the open public. Since it isn’t software, it has to be, forcefully, the hardware.

There are several processors around, but above all, different graphic cards: Adreno, Nvidia and Mali 400P.

While Mali 400P (only featured in Samsung Galaxy S 2, yet) only allows processing of standard compression of textures, Nvidia and Adreno support their own proprietary compression of textures. This means that only Nvidia users will play some games and only Adreno will play certain games. And Mali 400P won’t have any of them.

Though we expect Nvidia-exclusive games to be re-adapted for the main public -as well as Adreno’s-, we’ll have to wait for it and have faith in the developers. Developers who, by the way, have been paid extra money for using the proprietary compression of textures.

Certainly, I believed Android hardware fragmentation to be an avantage, since it allowed me to choose my setup. Currently, it’s a pain in my eye.

However, for those who are interested in avoiding proprietary compression, you can buy a Samsung Galaxy S 2 and use software decompression through “Chainfire’s 3D” or wait for some hacker to adapt these textures to the standards. You’ll require a rooted phone and a bit of patience. I can tell you I’m successfully playing some “proprietary-compression-textured” games in my SGS2, but some just won’t load.

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Inbetween you’ll find a huge amount of users who, just like me, try to modify the system to suit their needs. As a sample we could talk about Compiz, a basic user won’t go any further from the “none-basic-extra” menu while a computer-guru may actually modify the code of the program or write code directly embedded into the compiz-manager. The intermediate user will try to use the compiz-manager without writing code… with success rate varying from one attempt to the next one until it’s satisfactory – a couple of hours later. If we keep on with the go-equivalents, these users would represent single-digit kyu players facing tsumegos of increasing level of difficulty.

During the last month, I’ve realised there are some thing that just didn’t fit my needs. Openoffice is way worse than Microsoft Office, the same happens with Gimp and Photoshop and some other applications. In the end, windows had to be virtualized inside ubuntu so that I could get some stuff done.

This week, I received a new monitor. Trying to get two monitors working at the same time was a mess. Options:
-Twinview: cloning output, only available in nvidia, shows the same image on both monitors… with different resolutions. Useless
-Xinerama: extends the desktop to both monitors… Weird and useless with different resolutions.
-One monitor, one workspace: requires a new Xserver to be launched at the same time and would be troublesome, since I only have one keyboard and mouse.

Meanwhile, I decided to install Windows on a partition. Though I had already fiddled with grub in order to create a Ubuntu+Windows dual boot, I wasn’t aware of the terrible world of shadows I was about to enter… Ubuntu developers had “upgraded” grub to grub2. Oh my god!!!! If microsoft updating Windows Xp to Vista was bad, updating Grub to Grub2 was even worse. It makes everything much more complicated and hardly impossible to deal with if you don’t know how to write code and, moreover, understand it. A 4 pages long thread in a forum with computer gurus couldn’t solve it either. Is this tsumego solvable??

Hours went by, so many I can’t count them with my fingers and toes, trying to make Grub2 work with Windows 7 modification of Master Boot Record, till Proximo came into my mind saying:  ”I use Windows just because everything works right from the beginning”. I resign, you win.

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So, going back to the purpose of this post, it seems like Frank has decided to release Moyo Go Studio for free, once again. You can download this powerful tool from his site though it would be better to have other download sources, since the server is somewhat busy right now and speeds aren’t that high. The whole program itself weights about 300 MB and it includes an initial database of 57086 professional games but other downloads are available summing up hundreds of thousands of new games from amateur games extracted from KGS, CyberKiwon, IGS, NNGS and Tygem.

The more the download percentage increases, the more I wonder about the real purpose behind releasing Moyo Go Studio for free. Did Frank actually have a selling spree back in 2007? Releasing this software for free would certainly allow him to get into the news, which would make MGS more popular. However, a current  free release of a program may not be the best way to fulfil his hopes, since it would be a whole lot more difficult to erase the free version of MGS from the net than it was last time.

In the end, Frank may just be tired of selling his product and just wishes everyone could use his program.

Related posts:

1. Moyo Go Studio for free
2. Goodbye Moyo Go Studio, Good Luck Frank!

Unless you’ve been living in another world, you’ll already have noticed the users migration from Godiscussions to Lifein19x19 with both administrators agreement. So the original GD discussion moved on to the new forum. By the way, I just happened to register in Lifein19x19 with the same nick: Alejo. The structure of the forum is very similar and the registration process is totally painless and just takes a minute.

On the Computer Go section, we can see this software announced:

From the video above, the result looks quite promising. Stone detection is very good and the program detects in-game board rotations. Though the video is quite limited and we can’t see all its features, adding a territory counter, while not very difficult, would be quite useful. On the other hand, the developer still hasn’t decided whether to release it freely or not, so we’ll have to wait for the final decision.

While writing the previous lines I’ve started wondering about possible software combinations for these tool. How would this affect the Go software market if this application was embedded in SmartGo or Moyo Go Studio?

Related posts:

1. Embedded SGF viewers

What is Flattr all about? You’d better watch this video.

Unfortunately, it’s still a closed beta, so you’ll have to apply for an invitation and it’ll be granted when the your time has arrived. It’s been a few weeks since I signed up, but I’ve heard they’ve sending lots of invitations lately, so it may not take that long for you.

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Smartgo has already announced a version for the Ipad, available in the appstore for $19.99. According to Anders’ blog: “the two apps are still pretty close, but over time I expect them to diverge:

• The screen size of the iPad allows whole new features that will either be missing or limited on the iPhone.
• Even for shared functions, the UI will over time change away from the iPhone version and become optimized for the iPad.
• The extra power will allow more game records. Initially, SmartGo Kifu includes 20,000 pro games, but I hope to increase that significantly as soon as I know how the iPad performs.”

Unfortunately, having a different version for the iPad means that iPhone users will have to pay an extra license if they want to enjoy this version of Smartgo in their new tablet.
This is one screenshot from the emulator screenshots, where we can already see there are a few new options available:

As for server clients, Yetle at godiscussions.com has already taken a picture of the KGS client working through VNC in his iPad. William M. Shubert (KGS’ developer) has already stated that there will be a special edition available for Android tablets, avoiding to specify if there’s going to be an iPad version for this server. If we take into account the lack of a KGS client for iPhone, we can already assume iPad users won’t have a specific version on a short term.

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D3Publisher released a collection of games called “The table game”, as the first volume of the Simple 2000 series. This volume includes 11 games electable from the menu below these lines:

Vertically, from left to right: shogi, go, Othello (aka reversi), gomoku, mahjong, unknown flower-cards game, unknown flower-cards game 2, something similar to bridge, sevens (aka Fan Tan), memory and solitaire – Klondike style. Once you enter the Go section you’re prompted with the next screen where you can choose the board size, handicap, time settings, and a few other fields which I still haven’t managed to decipher. As fas I have explored, I still couldn’t find an online mode or a 2 player mode… but this may require further investigation.

If there is anyone able to read Japanese, please let me know the meaning of the options, specially the ones below, since I suspect they are quite relevant.

When it comes to the AI strenght, I can’t really rate it better than a 10k, I think it falls somewhere between 10k and 15k, but, obvious as it may seem this bot is very  bot-ish: Some important moves which a human would never allow you to do are ignored by this bot, thus losing entire groups or losing the chance to kill groups. Sincerely, the artificial intelligence of this bot is way below what we are used to on computers: Mogobot and Gnugo are much stronger. The life and death status of the groups are very hard to establish for this bot, so he usually tries to survive till you place the final killing stone, waiting for you to make a nonsense move.  On the picture below, you’ll see there are two white groups which weren’t given up till I had placed the final killing stone; in fact, white still tried to make the left group live… which only ended up in giving me some extra points. The bot isn’t actually reading the sequence where it dies. On the other hand, the life and death status of groups in the scoring phase has always been perfect.

The musical section, while being too short, is just adequate and calm enough to allow you to focus on the game while creating some sort of oriental atmosphere. The Wii controller must be held horizontally, placing the stones with button 2 and pressing A for the pause menu. By the way, the first option of the “pause” menu is to “pass”, the second one is “undo last move”, the third is “resign” and the last one is to resume the game. Guess I saved you a bunch of minutes with this.

As for the other games, I can’t really tell you its strength or options, since I lack enough knowledge of them to be trustworthy. I’ve only played a game of shogi against the AI and he defeated me so badly I had to play a few Go games more… guess I’ll have to know more shogi other than just the rules.

Update: this game is available through Amazon.co.jp and through other media, please don’t ask me how to download it, try google.

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Though I lack certainty, it seems like the reviewer of the game didn’t knew how to play Go before, since he doesn’t mention something which would be relevant for usual go players: AI strength, rankings and such. When it comes to the game, on-line play is enabled and graphics are quite nice. From my point of view, it may be worth checking the game screen shots as they may look familiar for Second life users: each people has its own avatar, the view can be modified…

Since the original site is copyrighted, I can paste the full content, but the just first sentence of the review makes it worth it to open the link. For further “information”, I’d recommend checking Microsoft’s description on the project: It only takes minutes to learn, but it takes a lifetime to master. (WTF?)

Thanks to uglyboxer from Godiscussions.

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During these months, Peter -the developer- has been improving qgo2, adding new features and enabling servers. Unfortunately, there seems to be some code issues when it comes to the Qt suite and support isn’t as responsive as expected. Taking into account the amount of free time invested into this project and the results, the developer has finally decided to give up the project.

For further information, I’d recommend checking the qgo-announce2 archives, help about the new Qt 4.6 version and the management of list sorts will be welcomed.

Related posts:

1. qgo2: Multiserver client in pre-beta phase

Here you have a sample of what it looks like

Related posts:

1. Go in Google Wave
2. Google Chrome and KGS

Google wave is the new social network released by (guess who?) Google. It’s still quite premature and there are very few invitations sent, so the amount of users of this network is very limited.

Google wave has a big potential for many purposes, but we are here to talk about go.

In this picture you’ll see it is actually possible to load an SGF viewer. Only viewer, there is no way you can actually play with it. But it’s the first solution for Go players in Wave…

Updated: LOL, I managed to get a board working, it’s now playable. It’s playable but has a couple of bugs, which I don’t know how to solve…

Right now, I created a public wave with the result and instructions on how to create it: LINK

Related posts:

1. Beta Go gadget for google wave
2. Google Chrome and KGS

General interface:

The general interface is very clean. There are a few icons on the left, which will intuitively guide you to your desired path. You can either play online, create or review sgf files, play against gnu go and configure a few options of the program. Since it’s a pre-beta version, the amount of variables which can be modified through the main menu still is somewhat short, but we expect it to grow within the next versions.

In-Game and Graphics

Here you have an image of how the board looks like. As you can see, it resembles the plain 2D version of panda-glgo, which is due to the fact that panda-glgo was actually developed from the first qgo… Well, the stone slate-and-shell graphics and the board are ok, the icons are small compared to other programs, but big enough to not having to worry about it. The upper space could be used to place some of the lateral icons and thus make them bigger

Go Servers:

Here it comes, the big feature of this program: it is able to connect to IGS, WING, LGS, CyberOro, eWeiQi, Tygem and Tom servers. Currently IGS games can be played without any trouble or, at least, I did. Since IGS is among the most used servers, its developer is focusing on improving the IGS experience and thus leaving the other servers as only “watchable”. I happened to succesfully watch a few games in Tygem and CyberOro.

Conclusion

QGo2 seems to be a very good tool for people who like moving from one server to another looking for new challenges. It is definitelly going to be an important tool for Unix users, since we don’t have many tools so powerful.

Last news: The developer of the program has allowed me to resend you information about compiling and executing the program. If you want to test it, contact me at alejostenuki AT gmail DOT com and I’ll send you the instructions.

Related posts:

1. qgo2 project abandoned
2. Beta Go gadget for google wave

A few months ago, David Fotland released the 12th edition of “Many Faces of Go”. Following the patterns of its predecesors, MFoG most important changes remain within its engine.

According to its author, MFoG is supposed to be 5 stones stronger than the 11th version and, in year 2008, he proved to be the best engine by winning the Go tournament in the 13th Computer Olympiad (see Game results). Currently it’s supposed to implement some Monte Carlo analysis over the traditional knowledge, so as to make it much more powerful.

If you visit its homepage, you’ll see this list of the major new features of this version:

Related posts:

1. Many Faces of Go – review

I’ve just been playing with the new 1.02 version of Universal 3D Chess and having fun with a couple of new features. Acutally, they might not be the most useful features in the net, but the video export may be welcomed for viewing games when the platform doesn’t allow SGF files (i.e. some portable devices).

Massive rendering allows you to activate at once lots and lots of games on your screen. The first attempt I did, loading 100 games at once was quite funny, but then I overclocked the graphic card just to find out that 420 games loaded at the same time is too much for my computer. Anyway, here you have the picture of the 420 games:

And, on the next video you can watch a sample made with the new “video export” feature.

The video above has a 720×480 resolution with 25 images per second and lasts for 45 seconds. The total file size compressed with Xvid with 80% rate is 5,41 MB.

Here are the specifications of my laptop, so that you get an idea of how this might look like on yours:
-Dual Core T9100 (2,5Ghz, 6Mb Cache L2).
-4 Gigs DDR2.
-Nvidia 8600GT overclocked to 8700GT.
Obviously, the graphics card is the slowest part of the whole, but it still gives good results when it comes to Go graphics

Indeed, any Quad Core with a couple of 9800 GTX working on SLI may easily reach the 500 games with a decent frame-per-second average. I’ll be waiting for your images.

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A couple of days ago I received the new version of U3DC. According to the developer (and I agree on most of them), these are the improvements:

- Add a title bar to the main 3D view with short cut to functions (Next/Prev games, Full screen, Edit game info …)
- New file format decoding, now able to load image in jpg, png, tga,gif, tiff, bmp, pict, psd, ps …
- Drag feature to move the menu with your mouse if the screen is notbig enought
- Interface is more easy to use and more reactive
- New dialog box when quitting the program
- New game list style
- Borders between games
- Add board tag
- Game informations editing tool
- Conversion of an image to a game (GO) works not so badly now (but still experimental)
- Bug corrections in SGF file format

What stroke me the most when I first opened the version is the feeling of the whole application itself. It actually looks like a finished project, where the first version had some bugs to be fixed, now they are mostly solved. The navigation bar, though not necessary, looks quite cool and might be useful when working with massive amounts of games. The user interface and style have been improved a lot and it gives the sensation of a much nicer application (while the essence is exactly the same).

Here you have a screenshots of how it looks like (keep in mind that I’ve loaded a quite heavy image so that you get the final real quality):

Another feature which has been improved a lot is the “image to sgf” tool. Now it can actually convert an image to a sgf file so that you can play with it in U3DC. The only requisites are related to the amount and contrast of the colours you should use.

As you can see on the left, white and black stones must have plain colours while the board should remain in painful contrast with the other colours. Darker colours such as brown and red, will lead the program to convert it into black stones, thus giving a wrong result.

The result of the conversion of this image can be seen here:

I think further development in this line would be great, following the path left by Image2Sgf, so that it could automatically load the image from a camera into this wonderful 3D board.

By the way… have you ever wondered how to picture your girlfriend in a go board??? Playing with the some of the pictures of your collection is just… hilarious…

Related posts:

1. Universal 3D Chess Testing
2. Universal 3D Chess Review