General forum: Major update at Vying Games

15 replies. Last post: 2008-07-18
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Major update at Vying Games 2008-07-14 Eric Idema Hi, all, if you don't know, I run Vying Games, a site that's kind of similar to Little Golem. I know a number of LG players have also tried Vying Games in the past, so hopefully it's not inappropriate to post this announcement here. I just released a major update to Vying Games. To quote my blog post announcing the release here are a few of the new features: * Group Chat * Search (archives, forums, blog, users, wiki, everything) * Tourneys (mucho updates, including trophy case on your profile) * Forums (preview posts) * Wiki (help contribute to Vying games, most of the pages are open to editing by anyone) * Ratings (recalculated, new weights: tourneys worth more, bots worth less) * Unrated Games (withdraw, kick, join, find a bot, public chat) * Variations (see A Whole New Kalah) * Profiles (new look, tables, trophy case, change password, email address for resetting password, membership, vacation days) * Notations (see the new checkers notation on the board and in review) * Undo by request (for those pesky misclicks that get past move confirmation) At present you can play Amazons, American Checkers, Ataxx, Breakthrough, Cephalopod, Connect6, Dots and Boxes, Footsteps, Kalah, Keryo-Pente, Nine Men's Morris, Othello, Oware, Pah-Tum, Pente, Phutball, and Three Musketeers. I'd be very grateful for any feedback (advice, suggestions, bug reports, complaints... whatever). Oh, yeah, here's a link: http://vying.org Thanks! 2008-07-14 Ed Collins Eric - Any chance at all Havannah will eventually make the games list? 2008-07-15 Eric Idema Yes, and fairly soon. Havannah is pretty much done. The UI is functional, but not particularly pretty. I'd guess it'll be released as soon as 2 weeks from now. There are a few other games that are near completion as well: Lines of Action, Y, Hex, Hexxagon, and Yinsh. My goal is to release a new game every 2 weeks or so for the next several months. I'm just not sure exactly what order I'll release them in. It'll probably depend on my comfort level with the code. : )) 2008-07-15 z Sounds great! I really admire your productivity, Eric! 2008-07-15 Eric Idema Thanks, z! : )) 2008-07-16 alain Just logged on and it looks really nice, great graphics. However, after much clicking around I'm now getting frustrated. I can't see how to search for available games. There are a number of similar features that I'd expect to be easy to find but cannot. Any quick pointers? 2008-07-16 Eric Idema Okay, if you know what game you want to play, the easiest thing is to go to the about page, where there's a list of top players, recently completed games, and available tables, tourneys, etc. For example, Phutball's about page. There's a link to "games" in the footer of every page. Also, from the group chat page you can click on "Tables" to see a list of available tables by game. Or, click on someone's username and look for tables (or send them a private invite). I really appreciate you taking the time to comment. The site's navigation changed a lot in this release, and I think you've really highlighted a weak spot! 2008-07-16 Adam Dzedzej When I create a table, can I play against a bot? If yes, how? Another thing might not be present everywhere. When I play footsteps against a bot and I don't change my bet, then It bets 1 for me even though before it displays eg. 7. I think it might be a browser issue (I use Opera), but I don't know. Nice graphics, but some work to have it intuitive. Regards, Adam 2008-07-16 Eric Idema Hi, Adam. When you're on the about page for a game, there's a link at the top to play against a bot. It's labeled, for example, "Play Phutball". That's another link that doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. I should change the text to read "play the bots" or something similar. I also plan on better integrating the bots with tables / invites, which might help. The bidding problem you experienced was a bug. It was introduced with the update, and I fixed it earlier today. I apologize. : (( The feedback I've gotten so far is that the existing players love (most of) the changes and new features. But they already know their way around, whereas I'm consistently hearing from new players that it's confusing trying to figure out how to do things, how the site works, or even what features are available. I think after I've tracked down all the bugs, I'll have to make navigation (especially for new players) my number one priority. 2008-07-17 Carroll Nice site and graphics Eric! I like the way Capellabot plays symmetry in Dots&Boxes, is it a bug though that it would not take entire quad but only half as in http://vying.org/game/121861/45 ? Would you consider adding Spangles from David Smith, a very simple game with just Black and White triangles where first one to make a big triangle composed of 4 small ones wins if the 3 corners are his colour? (http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/List.php?Spangles) It is a very fast game and I hope well suited for face-to-face and robot play. I will maybe write a robot this summer for it, would C be a good language if you want eventually to include it? Then could you give me some advices on data structures and interfaces for easier integration? 2008-07-17 Eric Idema Thanks, Carroll! CapellaBot needs some work w.r.t Dots and Boxes. I programmed it before I properly understood strategy for dots, so it's very naive and often makes mistakes like that. AI development has mostly been on hold while I work on the server in general, so I have a long list of improvements I want to make to the bots. : )) Thanks for the link to Spangles! I'd not heard of it... it looks very interesting. The orientation of the triangles is fixed based on where they're placed right? And, you have to place a triangle next to a neighbor? Is there a limit to the board size? Or, is it "infinite" like in a game played with tiles? If the playing area is constrained I could implement it quite quickly. Otherwise it'd take some effort, but I plan on making games with "infinite" playing surfaces eventually, and a game as simple as this would make a nice candidate. I'm going to be working on a nice clean interface for bots to connect to the server. Right now, you could do what Phil did with RoRoRo, which is get Firebug, and watch the json that's exchanged with the server during play. It's a little more complicated that a bot interface would need to be, though. If you're just interested in a quick way to write your own Spangles program, you could have a look at the code for some of the other games I've done. The code is a mixture of Ruby and C. The code for the games is available on github. There's only a command line UI though (for now). The readme is a *little* out of date, but generally accurate. Here's an example of a game: Tic Tac Toe's source code. Let me know if you have any questions! 2008-07-17 Eric Idema Wow, hard to find info about Spangles on the web. To sort of answer my own questions, the BoardGameGeek article for Spangles says it's played with 25 tiles of each color. I think it'd be best to treat this as a tile game with an "infinite" board than to try to shoehorn it into my normal board game code. This actually makes it much more interesting to me, from a programming perspective. I'll probably try programming it sometime this summer. : )) When I was looking for info on Spangles, I found this wikipedia page about Andantino, another David Smith game with similar mechanics. The wikipedia article states that Andantino has a very strong first player advantage. Has the same been found to be true of Spangles? 2008-07-18 ypercube Spangles is played on infinite board size, like Trax. 2008-07-18 Carroll Oh thanks for these informations Eric! I was busy trying to make vying work on my laptop and got into a few issues, I will message you on this, it seems so easy to use your framework and ruby that it is very tempting, even if my final goal is to have an app running on the phones where I think I will not get ruby... Yes original game was sold with 50 tiles but internet games can be played with a lot more tiles (I saw a problem when you get passed Z coordinate on gamertz...). And I agree infinite board makes it more interesting to play and to program (will your framework handle coordinate renormalization when it becomes negative?). For the rules you were right, I think you have found them on http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/spangles.html... Another one should be added, like Trax if you get simultaneous win condition then it is a win for the player issuing this move (two interlocked triangles). Your question about advantage for White is my main interest in programming it, there are very long chains of forced moves but I could not find a real advantage for White. Please feel free to challenge me and play with the GUI on gamertz.net if you want to have a better taste, just register and put our nicks on : http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/Challenge.php?Spangles or send a mail to pbmserv@gamerz.net with subject Spangles challenge Eric carroll 2008-07-18 Eric Idema Hey Carroll, Yeah, I doubt Ruby is available on phones (although I've never looked into it). I've been told Vying Games works on the iPhone, but I have no idea about other phones. So a web interface may or may not serve your purposes. Okay, infinite board size with no tile limit, that'll make it more interesting. : )) Thanks for mentioning the possibility of simultaneous wins and how it's handled, that's critical to implementing the rules correctly. With respect to coordinates, I haven't done much with tile games yet. I'm planning on putting the first tile at (0,0). I'd not planned on avoiding negative coordinates. It'd be nice to avoid them so chess notation can be used for the coordinates, but I'd like very much to avoid shifting all the tiles around. I worry that shifting would throw off conversation, for example, if early in the game we talk about a questionable move at a3, only to have that tile shift to c3 later in the game. I was thinking about displaying moves as "3s2e" for "3 tiles to the south and one 2 tiles to the east of the center". Though I'm not sold on that as the best solution.

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