Kevin sent me a message about a bug he had discovered in the game while playing a two player game with a friend. Investigating the game I discovered the bug. But not just this bug he discovered, but a whole bunch of bugs. A colony of bugs, perhaps? So this release fixes all these and should result in the actual backgammon rules being followed when bearing off in games. Following the rules. Now that's a good idea!
Avid Backgammon player Ashley Dean has applied his graphical skills to produce a better looking scalable board image more suited to high resolution displays. Work has also begun on an "autoroll" feature and multiple device support for a single account, so keep an eye out for those to appear very soon. Some games from the past that had crashed the AI server have also been continued, so if you had some "stuck" one player games in your game history, the CPU should finally have made its move! A small bug was also fixed where after a player won a two player game on time, the Elo score was incorrectly reported (but correct on the server).
This release makes sure the board is always presented to you in the same way, with your home board at the bottom, bearing off to the right. The top scores now features you profile photo and flag. And a bug was fixed that could break your profile photos, stall your games with the CPU, and break your move history on old games! A good one to squash!
This release greatly improves the transfer of historical moves for games. Prior releases would pass the entire games history from the server to the client for every single move! This doesn't scale well and is not great on mobiles and the bandwidth challenged. The new release only transmits the minimal set of move data between server and client as needed.
The great domain rename is complete! Lots of bugs have been fixed aswell!
The UI interface to the in-game move database is now functional and so we are releasing it for testing. Amazing new feature includes:
We discovered a bug during this work that means you may find some of your old historical games in the database contain incorrect or impossible moves! These bugs have all been fixed now and the games are recorded as correctly as they play.
The game now sports a game timer and a new popup to allow players to negotiate the parameters for their game. Awesome new features include:
After much hard work on both the server and the client we have successfuly bolted the GNU Backgammon AI onto the game. The game state and board position are sent to a server running GNU Backgammon. Then the position is evaluated and the results of the evaluation and the top rated moves are sent back to the game web server where they are used to update the game state and be returned to the client. At this stage only a single-ply evaluation is done to limit load on the server. Eventually we would like to see the AI parameters be customisable by the player.