BGBlitz 2.7.3 is online

[FrankBerger]

Hi

BGBlitz 2.7.0 is available: A pretty long time since the last release. There have been a lot of things that were more difficult than expected, things that were promising but didn't help and so on.
And although there are not all things included that I wanted to implement in this release, the list of changes is the longest of all releases so far. Small stuff, larger stuff and nice things.

The list of improvements is too long, even for this posting, therefore I omit the minor ones.

• the checker movement looks more smoothly now
• support for the new Look and Feel "Nimbus" on Windows and Linux
• two new themes, "1001Tawlas" by elSpaan "Feltastic" by Sam Rich
• The dice rolls are animated
• visual feedback for used dice (not available for all themes)
• the doubling dialog shows an image of the current cube value
• small screen sizes are handled better better, especially on Linux and netbooks
• When you use manual dice, you can now enter the dice with the keyboard
• there is a shortcut for doubling (^d)
• the font size is adjustable in case your visual ability is reduced
• the status bar shows the EPC (equivalent pip count) instead of the Thorpe Count
• if you want to train calculating pips, there is a new toolbar button, that can be used to switch on/off the display of the pip count and shows the value of the pip count in the tooltip
• in the best moves dialog you can select to shown up to 50 moves and this dialog and the evaluation dialog always shows cubeful equities
• in the edit position dialogs you can also enter the combined position/matchID
   and the XGID. Further you can copy and paste either the combined position/matchID
   and the XGID or drag and drop those
   IDs on the board to get an evaluation (if no game is running). In all exports
   (ASCII, HTML) the XGID is given too.
• the only small thing in the AI that has been changed in this version is a
   better cube liveness heuristic in end game situations
• for casual players the level of game play for lower strength settings was
   reduced and made sure they can't accidentally use a higher search depth.
   Would be great if I have some guinea pigs to check whether those settings are
   o.k. for beginners.
• do you know the feeling: "Why I get always the worst roll?" There is a new
   dialog box, that shows you how good each roll of dice would have been. You  
   find it here: "Game/Distribution of rolls"
• you can now install BGBlitz on an USB-stick (Just copy it on the stick and add
   a folder ".bgblitz" in the bgblitz directory
• there is a new command line interface. It allows evaluation of positions and
   might be extended in the future if you have some ideas how to use it. You can
   use the programming language Groovy to write your programs.  
• Support for Snake is included (a Backgammon variation with a different
   starting position)
• you can read/import/convert "sgf"-files
• a Czech translation
• I invested a *lot* of work to make BGBlitz faster. Tuning with modern Java
   implementations and the newest CPUs with Turboboost is a nightmare because it
   is very hard to measure what is an improvement and what is noise. Nevertheless
   I succeeded making BGBlitz faster.
   The improvement depends heavily on the operating system (32 or 64-Bit), the
   Java-version and your CPU. The speedup is between 15% to 70% (64-Bit, Core i7
   or Atom). This new stuff does some things that might not work on all computers,
   and even crash BGBlitz in rare cases therefore you could disable this speedup
   with "Setup/Miscellaneous Setting/No Unsecure Speedup".
   If problems occur, please drop me an email. If the new code is disabled,
   BGBlitz runs rock-solid as usual, only a little bit slower.
• some improvements for the network play, so it works better with multi homed
   computers and routers
• Close to 50 further improvements and fixes....      

I hope you enjoy the new version. I always glad getting some feedback. If you
find some errors or quirks please drop me an email.

regards
Frank

[socksey]

This is a program to play backgammon with within the program and not live playing, am I correct?

socksey



The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. - Thomas Jefferson

[FrankBerger]

Yes and no. You can play over the network, but you must know your opponent (=IP-adress). It's usefull in a company LAN.

Only the mobile version has a fibs client.

ciao
Frank

[socksey]

What I was really wondering is if the help feature can be used in live play to cheat with?!   
I would hate to see anything like that happening.  It would be equivalent to playing the bots all the time.   

socksey



I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. - Thomas Jefferson

[spielberg]

It is specifically coded (this is for BGBlitz2Go, the mobile phone version) not to allow analysis during a match.

The 2.7.0 Frank's just released is a stand alone analyzer, which will only run on a PC or Mac, and as he said won't connect to FIBS.


BGBlitz 2.7.0 is state of the art. Its analysis is far better than Snowie's , which is not even worth the US $10 a certain used car salesman charges for a stolen version; and also much stronger than GnuBg's which, though free, is a real chore to use.

[dorbel]

BGBlitz 2.7.0 is state of the art. Its analysis is far better than Snowie's , which is not even worth the US $10 a certain used car salesman charges for a stolen version; and also much stronger than GnuBg's which, though free, is a real chore to use.

Do you have any evidence for that? I mean it may be true that Frank's excellent program is better than Snowie, it may not, but far better? I have used Snowie for about ten years. It has its faults, but it's analysis is generally reliable and I like the interface. I also own BgBlitz and Gnu, but I still rely on Snowie to run my initial analysis.

[ah_clem]

Yes and no. You can play over the network, but you must know your opponent (=IP-adress). It's usefull in a company LAN.

Only the mobile version has a fibs client.

That's too bad since that's probably the feature I'd be most interested in.

I'm really very happy with gnubg.  However, I've yet to find a FIBS client that I really like.  I'm using JavaFibs right now, and it works OK, but there are some annoyances and some improvements that could be made, but nobody's supporting it so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to get better.

Occasionally one can get the 3DFibs guy's attention for feature requests, but he's not exactly responsive (I know, it's freeware, so this isn't a complaint, just an observation)

Add the Fibs client and I might be interested...

A client that is in active maintenance would be nice.

[FrankBerger]

That's too bad since that's probably the feature I'd be most interested in.

Well I guess that it is too much work to come up with something better than JavaFibs. And BGBlitz has some holes to plug that seems more urgent to me (and I do all this in spare time). Sorry bout that.

but nobody's supporting it so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to get better.

There were a couple of people who wanted to improve JavaFibs (including me, although for time reasons I would have made smaller stuff like better Mac integration and artworks) but one of the persons wanted to discuss  about licenses issues so long that the other three finally was lost their motivation.

[dorbel]

I think you will find that inim has done some work on javafibs in the last year. Do you have the latest version?

[spielberg]

This thread has, as usual, wandered but I'll add to dorb's immediate prior comment. Inim had done lots and lots of work updating JavaFibs and others, Frank among them, were also improving the code. Unfortunately Cthulu, JavaFibs' original programmer, eventually refused to place the program in the public domain and hence we are unlikely to ever see another update.

[stog]

from frank

Hi all

I just uploaded BGBlitz 2.7.2 and BGblitz2go 2.3.0.  


BGBlitz 2.7.2 is a bug fix release. Several errors are fixed:

- when TachiAI III was used, the level of play was always Expert, independent of the selected playing strength. What a pain for casual players this must have been. Sorry!
- under heavy load the wrong dice could be displayed. Fortunately this was rare.
- a memory leak was plugged
- some erroneous Tutor hints were removed
- a deadlock could happen pressing ^G if ^F was already pressed

and some small improvements:
- at the first roll, one dice is shown on the left and one on the right side of the board
- BGBmips support for 3, 6 and 12 CPUs
- improved visibility of numbers on white checkers
- better detection of usable screen area on Linux
- drag & drop support for position database files


For Windows users: please uninstall the old version before updating BGBlitz.

Many thanks to Achim Hoff, Alain Redlinger, Dahn Tamir, David Ayton,  Dennis Wolfe, John Wiltshire,
Kenneth Loafman, Luc Pauws, Maurice Kemman, Michael Schade, Philip Cherrington, Philip Thomas,
Thomas Hipschman, Rick Matthes, Tom McShane and to all of the people who have provided error reports,
making suggestions or helping in any other way to improve BGBlitz.

If you want to have access to early and beta versions of BGBlitz, just drop me an email. You have earlier access and can influence the further development.

I strongly recommend updating.

BGBlitz2go 2.3.0 provides following improvements:
- added support for the Jacoby rule
- much better drawing performance, especially visible on Blackberrys
- To improve the usability for devices with a full keyboard, all functions reachable through numerical keys are now
 reachable through alpha keys too. "e" is for evaluation, "b" for best moves, "p" for pipcount, "w" shows the history of winning
 probabilities and finally "r" shows the next three dice rolls      
- detect changes in the screen dimension and reinitializes accordingly. Useful for phones with automatic
 landscape/horizon change
- the splash-screen can be closed with any key
- fixed: in 2-player mode with touch screens White had to point to the opposing point
- fixed: the Nackgammon setting was ignored during a match
- fixed: with a rotated board the checkers were painted as eggs
- fixed: Samsung Omnia 2 could not register
- fixed: winning props didn't show after the last game in a match</LI>

ciao
Frank

[stog]

from frank

Hi all (German text appended / Deutsche Übersetzung im Anschluss),

I just uploaded BGBlitz 2.7.3  

A critical error slipped through 2.7.2. If the tutor was disabled, BGBlitz did freeze. Sorry!
If you always have the tutor turned on, you can skip this update, otherwise you'll need it.

You find the new version at: http://www.bgblitz.com/download.html

The update is free.

To update just install the free version (Windows: please uninstall the old version first) from my website,
there is no special update version. The license should survive the update. If not, just drag&drop your license
file on the board of BGBlitz. If you've lost your license somehow, send me an email.

ciao
Frank



Hallo zusammen!

Ich habe gerade BGBlitz 2.7.3 veröffentlicht.

Ein kritischer Fehler ist in 2.7.2 durchgeschlüpft. Wenn der Tutor ausgeschaltet war, fror BGBlitz ein.
Tut mir leid!
Wenn Ihr den Tutor sowieso eingeschaltet habt, kann man den Update auslassen, ansonsten ist er notwendig.

Ihr findet die neue Version hier: http://www.bgblitz.com/download_de.html

Der Update ist umsonst.

Um upzudaten bitte die freie Version installieren (Windows: erst die alte Version deinstallieren), es gibt keine
spezielle Update-Version. Die Lizenz sollte den Update überleben. Falls nicht einfach Eure Lizenzdatei mit
Drag&Drop auf das Spielbrett ziehen. Falls Ihr die Lizenzdatei nicht mehr habt, reicht ein kurzes Mail an mich.


ciao
Frank