JTwixt - Make this main variation problem

Hi,

I am using JTwixt. I feel it very useful but I have got an issue with the "make this main variation" which I am not able to make working. It always consider the last peg as being the main variation.

It is a pity because it forces me to replay manually some big parts of the games before coming up to the current peg.

Any ideas / comments ?

Thanks a lot in advance !

Thierry

Could you please provide more details. Give us a sequence of actions which we can replicate, and tell us what happens on your machine.

Hi David !

Ok. Here it is :

- I load a ongoing game

- I go to the end and try 2 paths (first path A and secondly path B)

- My opponent takes path A

- The game still goes. To simplify let's assume that there is no other branch.

- When I load it again in JTwixt and click "-> Branch", then it goes to next possible branch (path A or B)

- When I click another time on "-> Branch", then it takes path B (always the last path I have created

- I go back to the branch A/B and click on the first path A peg

- I select "Make this main variation" option (trying to make the real game path to be the default one)

- If I go back to the start and click on "-> Branch" two times again, it still goes to path A

Btw, I'm using JTwixt V0.7a

Is that clear ?

Maybe I have not understood correctly something...

Thanks a lot for your help...

Thierry

Have you tried "Main to end" and "Main next" in the "Move" menu?

Thanks for the advice. Tried it. It doesn't work :-(

Possibly the Jtwixt documentation is unclear. Here's how it's supposed to work:

- At each node of the game tree, one move can optionally be labeled the "main" one. "Main" is perhaps misleading here. "Actual game" might be better than "main".

- The menu command "main to root" labels all move leading up to the current position as "main".

- The menu command "main next" moves to the child node labeled main, if there is one.

- The menu command "main to end" is equivalent to doing "main next" until you reach a node which does not have a "main" child.

- But there is a design flaw in Jtwixt and Jhex: The plain "forward" command ignores the "main" designations, and instead (1) makes the best move (in the sense that "vertical wins" is better than "vertical advantage" is better than unlabeled), and (2) if there's a tie for best move, it makes the move most recently added to the tree. If Jtwixt is modified in the near future (possible, but not certain), then this will likely be changed so that the "main" variation takes precedence over all others for the "forward" command (and similarly for "-> branch" and "-> end").

Hi Rottcodd,

Thank you very much for these explanations which make it much clearer.

I hadn't understood the best move precedence on the plain commands.

What was unclear either is that "main variation to root" is labelling moves. I

would have expected "make this main variation to root". The same for "(make this) main variation to branch".

At least now I can go directly to the actual game last move using "main variation to root" and then "main to end".

Would be fine if the plain commands would use a "main > wins > advantage" precedence.

Also, would be fine if shortkeys could be assigned another way (because numpad is not easily accessible from whithin a notebook computer...)

Btw, are you the author or JTwixt ?

Yes, I am the author of jtwixt and jhex. I stopped playing these games online about 10 years ago, and consequently also stopped developing jtwixt. But recently I've started playing again (only hex at present, but perhaps twixt in the future), so it's likely I will start revising jtwixt/jhex again. (The two applications share most of their code.) The biggest obstacle was converting the source code from the old, defunct developer environment to a modern developer environment like eclipse. Happily, I managed to do that this morning.

I agree with your proposed changes to the menu wording. In my defense, the documentation at http://canyon23.net/jgame/twixt_doc.html was clear on this point.

I also agree that the "main > wins > advantage" precedence would be better for the plain commands.

I forgot to respond to your comment about keyboard shortcuts.

I think Mac OS X overrides the assignments I attempt to make. For example, "Save" should be cmd-S, not cmd-F4. I'll see if there is a way around this.

(Can anyone on a non-Mac platform confirm that the shortcut key for "Save" is control-S?)

Typically on Windows Save can be invoked via Alt-F S to open the File menu, then select the Save command, or via Ctrl-S.

Thanks, but what I meant to ask was "Can anyone on a non-Mac platform confirm that the shortcut key in jtwixt or jhex for "Save" is control-S?". Sorry that wasn't clear.

In any case, I have the problem sorted out now.

Well. All these are good news. This is fine!

First of all, thanks a lot for this nice piece of software. I'm using it a lot and I like it very much.

I'll continue my comments on the new thread you've created.

...and you are welcome playing back to Twixt !!! ;-)