Hey all,

Some of you may remember the “BiggerGolem” Chrome extension I published about 7 years ago, which added some improvements to the LittleGolem UI (most notably, it added more piece sets to Shogi back when there was only a single one, and it added a toolbar badge that alerted you how many games you had on turn). Well, that extension had slowly stopped working over the years as the site changed.

A few days ago, a user (Mathijs Claassen) went to the trouble of updating the extension to work with both the newer Chrome extension APIs as well as the new site layout. This inspired be to revive the extension, and I also added a major new feature: additional Chess piece sets and a resizable board (since the blurry 32-pixel pieces look TINY on modern screens). It looks something like this now:

Now that it's working again, I'm happy to add more requested features, or accept pull requests :)

The Chrome Web Store link to install it on your own Chrome is: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bigger-golem/camnfciehjhogdibimnoghlbedligapl

The GitHub link to contribute is: https://github.com/apetresc/BiggerGolem

Enjoy, everyone!

Good news – BiggerGolem is now available for Firefox! :) It's been approved in the Mozilla Add-on Gallery, so you can grab it at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bigger-golem

It works exactly the same way as the Chrome version (in fact, the code is completely identical). The only real difference is that in Chrome, you can access the options page for the extension just by right-clicking on the button in the toolbar, while on Firefox you have to go to about:addons in the browser bar and configure it from there.

Enjoy!

I'm glad to see this return! I'll have a pull request in later tonight for a couple of quick fixes.

For Reversi players - Trevor Cook's improvements to Reversi have been deployed to both Chrome and Firefox! Check your BiggerGolem options page to set a new piece set and resize the board to whatever size you like!

Thanks Trevor! :)

For Hex players - David J Bush pointed me to a bug in LG itself, that the “Go-style” hex board design is unusable, since none of the intersections are properly linked, so you can't make a move.

Version 2.3.0 of BiggerGolem fixes this bug in LG, you can now use that Hex board design if you like. 2.3.0 has been pushed to both Firefox and Chrome, and your browser should update to it automatically. Enjoy! :)

Another major new release - two major new features in 2.4.0:

• Major performance improvements in rendering Chess/Shogi boards. The “flashing” on slower hardware should be much less noticeable.

• Contributed by our very own klaashaas ★ - head-to-head statistics for every player on the site. Whenever you visit someone's profile or game list, you'll see something like this:

  

  Clicking into any game will highlight and color-code your matches against them so you can quickly click into them.

Enjoy :)

Cool! Thanks!

???

Great enhancement!

I had to uninstall previous version to get the update.

Could you please add the rating of your opponent in its list of games and on the first lines use the same colour code (blue for win and red for loss)?

Carroll: Just to make sure I understand the request, do you mean add their rating *at the time each game was played*, as a column in the game list? Or just their current rating at the top?

If you mean the former, that's probably impossible to do with a browser extension without seriously pissing Richard off - it would require an HTTP request for every game on the list :) If the latter, then yes, that should be doable, but I'm not sure I see the benefit - their rating was visible on the page immediately before this one.

BiggerGolem 4.6.0 has just been released, with two major new features:

• The “Analyze” button for Shogi games now generates XBoard-compatible PNG files, instead of the weird LG-only .txt files that were there before, which no application in existence could parse. Now you can load and analyze your shogi games offline the same way you already can with Go/Chess. Like this, for example:

  

  At the moment, there is no config option for this setting, it is just enabled by default. This is because I can't imagine that anybody was relying on the old files LG was generating. If someone actually wants those back, I will add the config option to disable this.

• BiggerGolem now has a Greasemonkey Userscript version, that will work in almost any browser (instead of just Chrome/Firefox like the extension does). Most features will work identically to the extension version, except for the icon badge showing how many games are on your turn (because Userscripts cannot do this). You can get the Userscript fromGreasyfork. This is a new release and I've only tested it on a handful of browsers myself, so please let me know if you run into any issues :)

I've just released version 2.8.0, which fixes the SGF downloads for Hex games (the current LG implementation appears to be broken, for example, swapping black and white's moves). The one generated by Bigger Golem can be loaded directly into HexGui for analysis.

The one trick was the swap move, which HexGui does not actually implement correctly. I worked around this by just manually doing the swap and replacing it with White's first move (and a comment explaining that a swap occurred). Not ideal, but at least no real information is lost.

The update should already be live in the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-on Gallery, and Greasemonkey :)

PS: I just realized I'd forgotten to mention 2.7.0 in this thread - the major feature there was the addition of Hidetchi's western-style piece set for Shogi, which used to be on LG through the “Design Scheme” button which was inexplicably removed from Shogi a few years ago.

Statistics don't work for me anymore. It just shows an empty statistics field. I use firefox browser with the biggergolem extension. Is it just me?

No mungo, it's the same for me. I just downloaded this extension for the first time and it's showing a blank rectangle with a heading for statistics.

For me too. Looks like that website layout has been slightly change recently and now, Biggergolem can't find the results anymore.

Shouldn't be too difficult to fix.

I have sent a message to apetresc, the developer of BiggerGolem, who seems to be active here. So, I am hoping he will fix it.

Sorry for the late reply, all! I just noticed mungo's message (I'm on vacation these last few days).

Indeed, I can reproduce the problem - I will fix it this week! Thanks for alerting me to it :)

Good news - the bug has been fixed (it was indeed introduced by a minor layout change). I've released version 2.8.2 to both Firefox and Chrome stores (though it might take a few days to appear on Chrome, it appears Google has introduced a manual review process since the last time I published a new version)

Works fine again, in Firefox. Thanks Adrian!