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KGS Wishlist
Keywords: Clubs & Places, Software
The following are features and requests KGS users hope can one day be implemented in the server or client software.
In 2003, wms has more constraints on his time and is less able to extend KGS[81], but nonetheless, we may dream.
To see exactly what wms is working on right now, you can look at the KGS Status page. For more long term plans of wms, see KGS Plans. If I like an idea enough to decide that I will definitely implement it eventually (or if it is implemented already!), I will erase the entry here and add an entry to the status or plans page. So if I delete your entry, don't be mad! Just check those pages, it probably means that I really liked your idea. I will never remove an idea here because I do not like it.
If you just used KGS for the first time this page may be quite confusing to you. Your experience, however, is very valuable and you can help improve KGS by adding it to KGS First Time User Experience.
If you are an experienced user, please enter your comments at the bottom of the appropriate section. Don't worry too much about if it's in the right place - if it isn't, someone will move it there.
Voting: If you like an idea, mark it with "[+|YourName]", if you don't with "[-|YourName]". (Attach them to the end of the paragraph you like. If you write them on a new line they can get moved out of context when someone inserts a comment.) (-- Sebastian) (See Discussion
Table of Contents
- [1] Social
- [11] Logging In
- [12] General User Handling
- [13] Chat handling/room use
- [14] Handling Nasties
- [15] Design Discussion: Should Games be arranged by Chat?
- [2] Game Handling
- [21] General Game Stuff
- [22] Editing
- [23] Score Estimator
- [24] Rule Systems/Time systems
- [25] Ratings
- [26] Game Start
- [3] File Handling/Database Use
- [31] User Info
- [32] Game info
- [4] General UI and Design Issues
- [8] Technical/Other/Dunnos
- [81] Development Fundamentals
- [82] Connection and Responsiveness
- [83] Other Technical Issues
- [9] Discussion of this Page
[1] Social
[11] Logging In
[12] General User Handling
- Steve Fawthrop: The ability to store info about a player in a file on disk. A button on the user info would invoke a text file, saved on the hard drive (presumably in the cgoban directory) so that details about a person can be recalled at a later date. This would be very useful because I talk to a lot of people and cannot always remember everything about everyone.
- Gedh: I think this would be a very useful thing to implement, too.
- Tristan: I like it as an idea, but have a reservation: isn't this kind of thing getting perilously close to making a database on people, which I think is prohibited by law in some countries? I suppose it depends on the kind of information which is being stored, but even so it seems a slightly dangerous area to me.
- Gedh: Hmm, my understanding was that the original suggestion above by Steve Fawthrop was for a feature whereby one could store one's own personal notes about individual players, for instant recall at the press of a button. As such, everyone's 'database' would be different. I was supporting the original idea above on that premise. So for example you could have as an entry 'xxxxxxx gave some helpful comments' or 'yyyyyy passed and scored the game and then resigned after I pressed 'done' ' etc etc. Surely there is no law about keeping personal notes (which no one else has access to) about people? +++
- Sebastian: Make this in a standard file format, so that users can add their own comments, e.g. what they want to remember about someone.
- Skelley: Very good idea. A local memo per user.
- Dolgan: Donīt do it in the cgoban directory but in the users home dir, so that every user on a machine can have their own database.
- crux: It would be nice if you could set your rank to e.g. "1D-", which would work just like "-", but give people an indication of your strength.
- -: I donīt think it worth the work. After a few rated games your rank will be obvious. Until then you can use a comment.
- crux: It would be nice if the main chat rooms also added ranks after the player names, just like the in-game chats do. It makes it easier to find someone if your player list is sorted by rank.
- +: Great Idea. Still better, but probably more work: have the Usernames in the Chat pop up a context-menu on right-click.
- dnerra: In User Info and in the privat chat box, have a button "Observe this player's game" in case he is playing.++?+
- mgoetze: Possibility to leave a short status message like in an instant messaging client, e.g. "Be Right Back" or "Out for lunch". +?+
- Gedh: A facility to scroll down the right hand players list, whilst keeping the buddy-list area locked at the top? Or for those with enormous buddy lists, a scroll bar in each, with adjustable divider?
- ChipUni: I log in both via the web page (at work) and at a downloaded client (at home). My list of censored people doesn't seem to be remembered when I log in via the web page.
- wms: Yup. Some preference info is saved on server, some is saved to disk. Things like buddies & censors are saved to disk, so when you switch computers, they are lost. Maybe would be a good idea to eventually move all prefence data to the server...for most people there isn't all that much so it wouldn't overfill the server. I may add this to the KGS Plans page.
- Bisqwit: If you do, leave the font size setting as local. I use cgoban on various different resolution screens. Probably many other settings also deserve to stay local...
[13] Chat handling/room use
- Hu: Sort rooms by current members.
- Hu: Semi-public rooms that anyone can join, but the room owner can exclude people individually.
- crux: (Much) bigger history buffer for the chat windows.
- Jochie: Or just make it configurable so people can pick what they like?
- joshual000: Ability to open private chat in a separate window (cumbersome to tab).
- wms: Originally, KGS used to have separate windows for different chats and/or rooms. It was awful. Windows everywhere, constantly getting lost so you couldn't find the convo you were in. I took it away, people complained, I tried a bunch of things, the current tab system with the "stack" option seems to be good for most people. Having an option of chats in a separate window is complex enough that I'm not interested in it.
- Notochord: This is actually microscopic, but for those of us who don't have sound, or who tend to have it off, it would be nice if opened chat windows could be given some kind of timestamp upon their creation so that one could know how long a message has been hanging and act accordingly. +
- dnerra: Additionally, it would be nice if the "chat bell" would make a less annoying sound, so that it becomes a little more attractive to leave sound on.+: It almost made me get a heart attack!
- wms: IANAFA (I Am Not A Foley Artist). Give me the .wav or .mp3 file, and I will replace the phone ringing. :-)
- mdh? How about giving us the ability to change the WAV/MP3 sounds in our client. You could place the fields in the client's prefences page. That way we can set our own sounds for chat windows or stone placement. The default would be the current sounds there now (for the web client)
- Gedh: A tab next to room tabs at the top in the main window, for each game being played or observed. This would make it a little easier to get the game back up following a change of focus to one of the rooms.
- Gedh: Set room focus at log-on to be the same as the room which had the focus at log-off. At the moment, focus seems to shift to the right-most room tab at log-on.
- mgoetze: Ditto when closing a private message.
- Gedh: A “leave message” button when looking at an off-line players info. Also maybe a “leave message” button in a players private chat box who you have been chatting to but they have disconnected.
- Gedh: I wonder if there is any way to see, say, the last 10-20 comments made in a room when joining it? As someone else has mentioned, time-stamps for comments would be nice, too.
- Gedh: A check box in your personal preference to block private chat when you’re playing a game. The prospective chatterer would then get a message like ‘?????? is playing in a game and has disabled private chat’. Actually, getting chat during play doesn’t bother me, but I think it might be a feature which some would like. +
- TJ: As a total aside from anything topical: What's with the unicode/ascii/whatever stuff, anyways, Gedh? Just looks odd in diff and edit mode. Hu: Tristan introduced the unicode characters, not Gedh, TJ.
- Gedh: yes, everything seemed ok with my original submission (see page version 209). Tristan seemed to change all my apostrophes with his edit at page version 221. Not sure how or why that happened.
- Gedh: When leaving a message for someone, a confirmation box saying something like ‘message to ?????? successfully sent’ would be helpful. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I wonder if my message went out ok. At present, a confirmation message is given when saving a game to disk, but not when sending a message. Also, an ability to view messages sent by oneself in the last 28 days (say), for those of us who sometimes send messages and then forget what they’ve said, and to whom! Writing the message down manually is a way around this, but it’s not ideal.
- Gedh: The dreaded scrolling chat box issue (I can’t believe it isn’t in here already). This arises when one is trying to catch up with what’s been said in the window, and has scrolled up in order to do so. As new lines are added to the chat, one seems to be drawn into a battle of will with the chat box window constantly trying to drag the focus back down to the bottom. Anyway, I’m sure everyone is familiar with this one! +
- mgoetze: This was on this page for a long time and
removed by wms himself... guess it somehow got lost from the KGS Plans / KGS Status pages (since AFAIK he would like to fix it)...
- mgoetze: Make the chat interface more like IRC... specifically, I'd like to see "chanops" for rooms with the ability to kick and/or ban people from that room, set the topic, etc., and also channel modes such as +m (moderated) - which could also be useful for lecture games, etc.
- jraitsev: it would be really nice to be able to have the chat sub-window optional, so that one may choose not to have it at all, so that he or she may concentrate more on the board itself. When two people are playing and are not talking, all the space dedicated to the chat portion of the client becomes a waste. It does not seem wise to dedicate 1/8 (at least) of the screen space to "hello", "hi". Everyone else, what do you think?
- Sebastian: I wouldn't vote for an option that generally hides it. The openness of chat is one of the main perks of KGS and its community, and I would hate it if I said something to you and you wouldn't see it just because you disabled it. This would be like speaking against a wall. But it may make sense to hide the pane after a while if there is no new message. Or to gray out old messages (like a person that has been inactive for a while). I often look at the pane just to check if there was a new message, which is really distracting. (Default time for graying out should be initially 4* the time per move and after 5 messages change to 2* the average time per message, or something along these lines.)
- SolidPlay?: Perhaps an ability to size the chat window to one's likings would be better. Some people like to chat, some people don't, but ultimately alsmost everyone has unique preferences to the size of the window. Personally i like to discuss game as i play it, however this does not mean that i like having 1/8 (or so) of the screen dedicated to it. My feeling is that most people would agree with this.
- wms: The chat pane in the game window will not take space that would be used otherwise. A board is required; some control buttons are required. The chat pane will always fit itself so that the board size is constrained by the buttons, not by the chatter. So the only reason to make it an option is for people who are really annoying by seeing others talk; I know these people exist, but there aren't enough of them to warrant adding the complexity of adding this as an option.
- Nico: have people's nicknames emphasized (boldface ?) in chat rooms. And why not a nickname autocompletion (on the tab key) as in popular IRC client?
- Jochie: Being able to right-click on a person's chat and get the usual pull-down menu. Easier than scrolling down a few hundred names to find the individual if you want to censor them or just look at their info. +
- mgoetze: Automatic optimization of tab order so as to have as few rows of tabs as possible. Or at least let me reorder them manually. ;)
[14] Handling Nasties
- Fhayashi: tag next to name for guests, people who have a lot of unfinished games. some sort of sandbagger detection system to detect people who play to lose in ranked games, and have perfect free game records.
- Dolgan: Or show an rank derived from free games if they donīt play enough rated games, and the free games rating would be without a ?
- phenomene: I really do not like this suggestion. People who play mostly free games for fun do not want to see them rated, even in an secondary system.
- Neil: Add a "game censor" flag that hides all game offeres by the person and auto-rejects the person on my offers, but lets me see the things the person says.
- crux: Unlikely to happen, but guests shouldn't be able to talk. There's too much abuse.
- mgoetze: This seems to extreme, but perhaps a "Censor All Guests" option might be viable.
- wms: Newbies are often guests, and often say things like "How do I watch a game here." I'm not going to censor guests, for newbies to be told after their first attempt at contact "sorry buddy you can't talk here" would be too unfriendly for words. I also don't plan on an option for hiding chat from guests. From my experience guests contribute only a very small amount of idle or offensive chatter, and I'm not going to add the complexity of such an option just so that some people can see 1% less chatter.
- Neil Allow unfinished free games to be cancelled if someone leaves.
- Neil: Escapers don't have to finish their rated games when they get caught back online and the victim hits resume. (Fixing this goes hand in hand with the ability to cancel free games).
- TJ: What if they aren't escapers? Forcing someone to resume a game when they don't want to is a bit fascist. For instance, I have one unfinished game with someone I consider an abusive player. After cursing at me, they left the game. I'd not want to be forced to resume it. Yes, it was policed fine, we just don't talk to each other, and there hasn't been a problem with him as far as I know. Would it be nice if an admin could just cancel that game? Sure. Should admins be jumping to do this sort of thing? No. It's such a minor issue, really, and people get all riled up about such things, that it's better to just let people work things out/don't work things out. Someone won't resume a game with you? Play someone else. Maybe they think you cheated/were unfair/were rude. In my case, I know for a fact the other guy thought I cheated, probably still thinks so. I didn't, though, but I'm a big boy, and don't want or need an admin to act as judge, jury, and executioner over a sad misunderstanding. Sorry for going on for so long. I just tire of whining about escapers/cheaters/whatever in KGS chats, and can't fathom why the admins would add this sort of authority, and the duty to listen seriously to all that whining that comes with it, to their plates. If you get escaped on enough that you lose your rank when it isn't your fault, then I could see someone going to an admin for some help. Before that stage, though, people "escaping" (9 times out of 10, suffering a connection problem or something), isn't a very big issue on KGS, or at least hasn't been for me over the rank range of about 27 kyu to 14 kyu over the life of my account. Let's keep our freedom from a KGS police state at least until things demand something better, and I'd hope even then, something like shared abuser lists among consenting faction members would be implemented before admins start having to make judgement calls 50 times a day over this sort of thing.
- Neil: Let admins cancel rated games in obvious escape cases.
- ChipUni: I'm an administrator of another chat zone. In my experience, there is no such thing as an obvious escape case (according to the escaper), and everything is an obvious escape case (according to the one being escaped.) I wouldn't want to subject admins to the strong feelings people will have. Further, as far as I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), if someone leaves too many games unfinished, that account isn't allowed to create new games until more games are finished. To me, that sounds reasonable: it punishes only the escaper. Are we sure that we need other rules?
- dnerra: It seems to me that anything put up in place to regulate escapers could rather make it a bigger issue than it really is. Personally, I have never had a problem with escapers, and whenever I saw someone suspecting his opponent had escaped, it occurred that he had just lost his connection. Maybe it is best to tone down a bit in the discussion (and official regulations might provoke exactly the opposite).
- Cheyenne: Maybe not so much of how to handle nasties (if someone can figure a better spot to shuffle this feel free). Get rid of the ~ tag and replace it with a user rating defined ranking. When a game is finished, allow the players to indicate if the game was helpful to them (put the question right on the same pop up that shows the "game done" and final score). Each player gets to make the selection and it is stored as part of the game record (doesn't have to be included in the sgf file). There would be two flags (one for each player.) Then when processing one's rank, use the flag to determine how many games one has that the opponent marked as helpful. If a certain precentage of games are marked as helpful then give that person a "gold star" next to their name.
- Cheyenne: To maybe help flag escapers, keep track of the number of times that a game has been tried to be resumed and declined. When a high percentage of games have been refused, flag the declining user with some mark or report the percentage in the user info.
- TJ: Note my argument above, huge long rant on a similar vein: I've one game with an abusive player I wouldn't want to be forced to resume.
- Cheyenne: I understand. The way that my proposal would work would be that not only would you have to refuse to resume that game, but also a number of other games. The idea behind my wishlist item is to flag people who have a large number of unfinished games and also refuse to resume them. So.. the only time someone would be flagged would be when they have a high number of unfinished games and a high number of refusals across all of those unfinished games.
- jraitsev: I absolutely agree!!. KGS should have a system in place that would let players know that a given player (Ex.: one asking for a game) has a history of escaping, rude language, sandbagging etc. These types of stats can be gathered by allowing users to submit their opinion about their opponents after a game with him/her is finished (responce should be optional of course). On another hand good friendly users should also be recognized as such.. I am certain that this measure, if implemented, will help KGS community to grow and keep inconsiderable people out of it. Your thoughts?
- chipuni Assume that A plays B, and that A leaves the game. If B offers to resume the game, and A declines, then the ranking system should reflect these decisions: A should be considered to have (provisionally) lost the game (until it's played out), and B should be considered to have (provisionally) won the game until it's played out. True escapers will properly lose rank as if they've lost the game.
[15] Design Discussion: Should Games be arranged by Chat?
- Gedh: An additional symbol next to a player’s name in the right-hand players list to indicate if they are currently involved in a game or not? (I know this can be done by clicking on the players info, at present). I suppose I’d have to rate this suggestion as ‘very minor’. +
- mgoetze: I think this falls under the "don't encourage people to arrange games by private chat" design philosophy.
- Hu: Have user info show where a player is, for example watching a game, unless it is a private room, and only if the user checkboxes that it is ok to track them.
- crux: Problem is you can't really tell if someone is actually looking at the cgoban window or reading email.
- Obviously, but if a game window is open, that can be noted.
- Server user list. This includes monitoring rooms for members.
- Anon: Perhaps this could be integrated with another idea: some kind of interface to show all users in buddy/censor/whatever_other_status lists. Currently it's easy to mark someone as a buddy, then want to send them a message when offline, and forget the spelling of their account, etc. Or forget which users you have censored, etc.
- Fhayashi: It'd be nice if the username was in italics if they are currently playing a game.
- wms: This feature is missing on purpose. On IGS and NNGS I would sometimes only be interested in watching, so I'd set my status to "X". All the same, I'd constantly get hit with "game?" requests. When I'd say, "look I'm marked as X", I'd always hear back "yeah but you weren't playing so I thought I'd just check to make sure you didn't have X on by accident". Result: I had to either be rude and ignore people or have my game viewing constantly interrupted. On KGS I worked very hard to come up with a game setup system that discourages people from using private chats to look for games. I'm worried that if it were easier to see who on the user list is/is not playing, it would encourage people to send "game?" tells to those who weren't. As it is, you can try to talk to somebody to find out if they are playing, and once in a while I do get "game?" messages on KGS, but still - I don't want that info to be any easier to get.
- Fhayashi: Interesting, but as someone who did not use IGS for any length of time, I would never consider using private chat to ask for a game. In fact, being able to note who is playing would allow me NOT to initiate private chat with someone who is busy playing a game. Is it in KGS's best interest to leave out a potentially useful feature due to defects in the design of other servers? +
- MarcinKaminski: It would be useful to give an option in settings to ban all incoming chats. Often I'm disturbed by people asking me for a game when I'm viewing other games.
- crux: Maybe it would be more useful if it banned all incoming chats by non-buddies?
- (Sebastian:) If A sends chat to B, and B is currently in a (timed and rated) game, then pop up a message for A: "B is currently playing in a (timed and rated) game. Please choose between
- Postpone alert till right after the game is finished (default).
- This is urgent, send right away.
- Send this text as message instead. B will receive the message right after the game is finished.
- Cancel.
[2] Game Handling
[21] General Game Stuff
- crux: It says on KGS Plans that there'll be a way to quickly find the player info in a game. This could be done by having the two players always appear at the top of the observer list. +
- gimpf: When challenging a game offer, put a small chatbox below all the parameters (ruleset, time, handicap, etc.), so that discussion about some parts may be more convenient.
- rubilia: Iīd greatly appreciate this, though probably too much work needed to implement it. It would help not only to negotiate the settings in a more "human-like" communicating way but also just to get in touch with the other person before being involved in a game. To speak about me, after several sort of unsatisfying experiences, I am not that keen on playing anyone anymore. On the other side, I donīt want to stick to my buddies only. So I must check unknown opponentīs info and/or chat to him/her when a game is about to start. Also, most questions about the settings I use to use are asked after the game is already begun. Thereby I get into annoying in-game-discussions regularly. Obviously, people prefer a single click at "accept" (or just "decline") rather than moving to the "rooms" window, looking for the opponentīs nick, clicking at it, opening a chat and eventually asking/negotiating there. - But, perhaps not necessarily an extra startup chatbox is needed. I think it should be comfortable enough to let the nicknameīs pull-down menue offer the same options like it does elsewhere ("chat to", "see info" etc.) rather than to switch colors wich easily could be done by a small "change colors" button between the nicks.:)
- Nacho: When java (or cgoban) decides not to let you play for a while, and you have to reconnect, the game you were playing should appear first thing, so you can rejoin it faster.
- Hu: A checkbox in New Game / Create Game windows that disables / enables Undo's. (suggested by Truc)
- crux: Why? You can always decline them. Disabling them entirely prevents you from correcting obvious misclicks.
- Hu: Of course, but by resolving the issue before the game, it would reduce rancor and ill-will and discussion during the game. It would put the players on notice, and would not require reading a person's user info in detail to get their policy, then chatting them to negotiate it. It would put the negotiation and notification where it belongs, where the rest of the game negotiation occurs.
- Hu: Don't start the clock until the first stone is played. Maybe only start the clock right away for rated games. Sometimes people have delays as the game loads up, or they might have to arrange windows. +++?
- Jochie: Remember what type of game was last offered, just like the time and board-size is remembered? That avoids the situation of setting up a free 19x19, then canceling to change the 'Note' and re-offering, ending up offering a rated game.
- Jochie: Default to 'free' if your remembered board-size is non-19x19, or if you select that in the dialog?
- Hu: Support for team games.
- Fhayashi: Uneven time limits, i.e. 1 hour for black vs. 5 minutes for white. Don't know how you'd have a rated game with such a handicapping system, but would be fun for free games.
- (Sebastian:) Workaround: Give your opponent additional time at the beginning.
- Gedh: When observing a game, make the small horizontal bar which divides the observers list from the chat box adjustable. I.e. ability to reduce chat area and increase visible observers, or vice-versa.
- Araldo: Add an extra column in the list of currently played and offered games, to show the available time and the time system. For example "Japanese Byo yomi, 10:00/0:30(5)", "Absolute 30:00" or "Canadian Byo yomi, 0:00, 10:00/25". Then there is no need to check each game only to find out that it is too fast to play, too slow to watch, etc.
- Cheyenne: I believe that Wms already has this in plan. Look at the Plans waiting for protocol change in KGSPlans.
- LordOfPi: this will lead to a clobbered game list. It will be harder to spot the important details quickly
- Magdirag?: I agree that this will lead to a clobbered game list. It would be nice to have this info in the box you get when you hover the mouse over a game. Currently that box just duplicates the note.
- Iff: I have the suspicion that network latencies are not accounted for properly. Yesterday I lost a game on time even though my clock still showed 20 secs for 2 moves. I found (not only in this game) that fast boyomis are more or less unplayable for me (it's not that that I want to play fast go, but sometime I accept my opponent's settings just to find out in the boyomi-phase that I have a problem with latencies). Some years ago I was playing chess on the internet and I remember that there was a tool around ("timeseal" was the name I think) that allowed for proper handling of network latencies and made fair blitz games with 1 minute each possible. Could we have such a feature?
- Velobici: An indication of the response time that your game opponent is experiencing. Saw a game today (20030911) in which one player claimed to be lagging,typed it in the chat window, yet his move did not appear on the server. Is this possible? When using a TCP based protocol over a single socket such behavior is not possible due to in order transmission and acknowlegement. The player winning by 20+ points lost on time claiming that his clock showed that he still had 18 seconds. Rules? 1:00/1:00/15.
- Hu: The current move is marked as an option. The effect is to write a circle in the SGF file for every move. Make this SGF file marking optional, or not done by default.
- sita: I second this strongly. Many tools have problems with this markup-property on every played point (and they could not be blamed for these problems), including cgoban1(!) and sgf2misc.
- mgoetze: And, while we're on the topic, marking the move automatically in newly-loaded SGF files would be a nice option for the preferences.
- Hu: There is something semi-automatic like this already. Under the Options button, if you select Label, you can choose the Label All Moves option from the popup box.
- mgoetze: I meant as a global default, it gets quite annoying to do it everytime when loading a bunch of new games, also I am never sure whether to leave these marks in the file or not, and I end up getting "Do you want to save messages?" and not knowing whether I've changed anything else.
- Nico: have a slider bar when watching games to navigate more easily between moves.
- Hu: DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graph), perhaps with a flip between DAG mode and tree mode.
- John Aspinall: Could you say more? What happens to lines of play with ko-fights in dag mode? How do the editing commands have to change? (Don't get me wrong - I highly approve of using DAGs; I hate it when some tsume-go discussion casually mentions that "moves 3 and 5 may be interchanged" when the real move-order discussion is more complicated and much more clearly conveyed in a DAG. But (having implemented a DAG-editor as part of an interactive compiler tool) I have first hand experience of my users tying themselves in knots with what I thought was a simple transparent interface.)
- joshual000: In-Game dialogue messages that are not modal (they can be removed from the foreground if the focus returns to the main game window) - annoying to minimize, acknowledge, restore.
- Velobici: Please do NOT make in-game dialog messages modal. Modal dialog boxes prevent the user from doing anything but dealing with the modal dialog box. Forcing the user to perform an action that can be deferred, at the user's discretion, is bad user interface design. Microsoft applications and operating systems are full of this behavior -- a modal dialog asks for data that exists elsewhere. One has to cancel the modal dialog to get the data and then re-enter the modal dialog. Much better to allow the user to get the data and enter it immediately. A modal dialog box could be used to force someone to lose on time by popping up a modal dialog constantly while their clock is running. Proper use of modal dialog boxes (and other elements of user interface design) is describe in
The Human Interface Guidelines
- joshual000: I agree, on further investigation this works quite well as the un-acknowledged undo dialogue is dismissed on the user's 2nd click on the main game window (the 1st click returns focus, the 2nd makes a move) I was unaware of this behavior!
- Anon: An indication to the players at game end if there were any observer comments during the game. Some players like to read the comments, but why bother downloading a fresh copy from the server if there are none?
- wms: Already there. When your game ends, comments from the observers will be dumped to your chat area if there are any.
- Anon: An indication to players/observers what the komi and time settings are for a game (preferably somewhere in the board window). Observers may not know, and players sometimes forget.
- wms: Already there. Look under "rules" in the "options" button/menu.
[22] Editing
- MK: There are times, when players upload files from their home computers to give comments on them on the server (f.e. for teaching purposes). Such games are not recorded in game log of this player, whereas there should be an option to do that.
- wms: There are several reasons that I on purpose do not allow this. One is that it would be troublesome if people uploaded copyrighted SGF files. A bigger problem is, what if somebody goes and uploads some huge SGF file (like Kogo's dictionary) 10 times a day and saves it each time? That could fill up the KGS disk space pretty fast. Finally, it seems to make sense - if you create a game on KGS, it appears in your record and is saved in the archives. If you created it elsewhere and uploaded it from your disk, then it stays on your disk and does not stay on KGS permanently. Keeping this policy makes things much simpler all around. What I would like to do is make it so you can "upload" SGF files from URLs as well as from your disk, and have a way for people to insert URLs to SGF files into their user info or into rooms they own - then you can put together SGF files offline and easily make them available to other KGS users, which is the one really good reason I can see to allow uploaded SGF files to be saved on KGS. In fact, having the URLs in your user info would be better, because it is so hard to give names to games in your game list.
- crux: Only the players can turn a game into a demo, but it would occasionally be helpful to give up ownership of a demo, so that a stronger player can review even if one of the players leaves.
- crux: Separate displays of move numbers: the one currently being played, and the one you're currently looking at. The first one eventually turns into the game result. Currently, if you go through a game after it is finished, the move number isn't displayed anywhere.
- Hitting the forward key after creating variations should follow the main tree, not the new variation.
- Hu: Then how to follow the variation by keys? The Shift-Up/Down keys shifts the track to different variations. Perhaps those keys could shift the track not only at the first move in a branch, but anywhere in a branch.
- Edit window to become a permanent part of the main board window, switching back and forth is cumbersome.
- wms: Depends on your window layout. I do hope to make it "dockable" eventually though, because right, people who make their game window fullscreen have a real hard time with the edit window.
- (Sebastian:) Dockable is good. Maybe a view where the stones are smaller, so it can fit easily beside the goban. Stones could be as narrow as a few pixesl because users don't have to precisely click them, as long as they're in the right variation.
- Vesa: Undo/Delete move(s) in the Demonstration mode (revisited). When replaying a game from a printed diagram or when broadcasting a live game, mistakes happen and working around a misplaced stone looks very ugly during the demonstration and in the saved demonstration games. There are two proven user scenarios:
- Teaching sessions: KGS user "opettaja" is used for Finnish study circle every Saturday and several different players have replayed the game, commenting and answering question. The sgf file is a good document afterwards, except for the confusing game/variation path due to misclicks that cannot be deleted.
- Live broadcasts of amateur tournament games (see for example "SMsarja03" games): KGS is the best place I know to broadcast amateur tournament games. Still, the game recorders tend to make mistakes and if there is no easy and clean cut way to recover,
- the game record is unusable as such and needs to be rewritten with some better adapted sgf editor and
- in the worst case, the game recorder loses the game sequence and stops there. For live broadcasts, simple Delete for misclicks is a very serious usability issue.
- Hu: A clue in the commentaries to distinguish between those made during the game and those made after. Perhaps a dashed line separating before and after commentaries.
- Hu: Have the paired Editing Tools window pop to second from top when a game window is brought to the top. (Have the Editing Tools under the game window unless it is explicitly brought to the top.)
- Anon: Some way of distinguishing, in the comments/chat, what branch the comment/chat appears in. When someone is teaching, and uses one branch and comments at move 10, then making another branch and comments again at move 10 (now the display currently does not print a new "heading"), there should be some mark to distinguish the comments to different moves, even though the move number is the same, the branches are different so the "move" should be considered distinct.
- (Sebastian:) Currently, game review chat is added to the moves that are displayed when user presses return. Any chat is thus split up into disparate pieces. Similarly, oftentimes, A enters a comment, and B replies while A switches the display to another move. This can be mitigated by the following:
- When saving as SGF, add a sequential number for all comments done during editing. (This would also provide the "clue in the commentaries" Hu asked for)
- Display and write into SGF both move and variation that was visible when user started typing to message. This would also make sense during normal play.
- Remillard: I would like to see the full FF[4] capabilities in the editor. I would like to see the area, line, and arrow modes added to the edit window (or the conjoined docked editing box). For an example of what this looks like see
http://jeanfrancois.menon.free.fr/rubygo/screenshots.html and go halfway down the page til you see the screen where these tools are used. Honestly what I'd love is a whiteboard system, but that couldn't be saved with the SGF and might get heavy on the server to distribute the graphics. However the FF[4] are a great compromise. If I'm demonstrating something, I tend to be very visual with it (probably an engineer thing) and rather than say "in the area around N17" just plop down an A and grey out an area around it and say "here". Very direct and visual. As always, just one fellow's opinion...
- mgoetze: Integration with SL :). I'd like some markup (such as [[ and ]]) that would allow me to make something a clickable link to SL, and spare me the trouble of typing
http://senseis.xmp.net/?... all the time.
- Sebastian: The problem I see with this is that it wouldn't work anymore once you save the SGF file and replay it in any other program. So I'd separate this into two requests: (1) clickable links and (2) ease of entry. As to (1), it would be nice to have. As to (2), this would be easy if we had something like autotext - you could just define "
http://senseis.xmp.net/?" yourself. (I assume this must be a request already, but I haven't read the whole list yet.)
[23] Score Estimator
- Nico: Possibility to help the score estimator by manually specifying which stones are dead and which are alive (click to switch their status) where appropriate.
- Niklaus: wms told me (after I submitted a bug report) that he won't make any changes to score est. It was written by someone else and the code is supposedly quite a mess, so he won't touch it. He'd rather remove it altogether, if only it wasn't such a popular feature.
- Hu: Option when reviewing editing SGF files: to have Score Estimate window available and updated on every move. This one I would find very useful, since I am constantly doing the multiple clicks to get through the menu when I am reviewing games. The score estimator has its flaws, but it is very useful to compare relative scores for different positions.
- crux: I guarantee you'll get at least 4 stones stronger once you let go of this misconception.
- Hu: I am aware of the score estimator's limitations, I can see and account for those limitations when I use it, and I do my own counting in games. I am simply using the computer for what it is good for, as a labor saving device to efficiently compare relative scores, especially when reviewing other people's games.
- jraitsev: Being able to use score estimator in Free games (this is implemented in Dashn and i think is very popular)
- TJ: I hope not. I might be tempted to actually use it, and I'd not learn as much in free games. Also, I really wouldn't like to be playing a human plus a machine, even if the machine is usually wrong. If you want to use score estimation to help learn, there's always post-game analysis.
- mgoetze: Disallow score estimator for players in simul games, possibly also make it easier for people to kibitz such that the players can't see it.
- Neil: wms already says he plans to make Simultaneous games Free instead of Teaching. That should fix it.
[24] Rule Systems/Time systems
- dnerra: Fischer Time as an additional option. (Yes I know it's not well-known among go players, but I'd bet a lot that it would become popular quickly.)
- TJ: Heated discussion followed, moved to KGSWishlistFischerDiscussion To summarize, many people expressed interest in seeing this system implemented. Arguments were given for why it was/was not a good system for Go. wms has stated that it will not be implemented anytime soon, and suggests further discussion be moved off the wishlist page, which I did.
- Doug Ridgway: On the time systems topic: Eggtimer (aka hourglass) time. Obscure, yes, but it's quite different from
the other systems and sounds like fun. In particular, you can never lose on time as long as you're moving faster than your opponent...and conversely, you must keep moving faster than your opponent if you want to win on time.
- Fhayashi: Complete Ing rule system. This includes some sort of time purchase scheme, no?
- mdh?: I think wms implied during the Fisher discussion that he has rejected doing Ing Time.
- Fhayashi: Yeah, but there's less of a reason to not do Ing time. And imagine, wms could get some Ing Foundation? development money for having a server that actually allows Ing rules!
- mgoetze: Why?!? I just had a game on KGS with "Japanese" rules. It took a lot of convincing to get my opponent to accept that Bent Four in the corner is dead. I certainly don't want to discuss the Ing ko rules with people during a game!! I don't see that anyone would willingly play the under Ing rules - the only reason I can see that they are ever used is money from the Ing foundation.
- Fhayashi: Uh, dude, I just said that about the money.
- wms: Ing ko rules cannot be implemented by a computer, because they sometimes require knowledge of whether a ko threat will always have an inside answer or not, which is well beyond the ability of today's computers. (You could argue that doing this perfectly is also beyond the ability of humans, but that's beside the point here). So a full ing rules cannot be done. The Ing foundation has shown willingness to switch to a superko system when necessary, but once you get rid of the ko rule Ing is close enough to other rule systems that having it as a separate bullet item seems unnecessary. Ing clocks, where you can buy more time by giving points to your opponent, are optional; not all Ing games are required to use this system. I'm against implementing Ing clocks because they are so very different from existing clocks (way more different than Fischer for example), in that they do more than control time use, they can also change the score of the game! Also, as far as I know, they have never been used outside of Ing tournaments, and lastly of course I think there are already too many time systems on KGS so I'm really reluctant to add another.
- TJ: Real Japanese rules dispute resolution in the scoring phase. Ability for both sides to agree life or death of a group is in dispute, which moves you to a cloned board where you can play for the life or death of the group in dispute before returning to the game board to apply the results. I'd hope applying the results wouldn't even need to be automated, if that was difficult.
- wms: Japanese scoring resolution wouldn't be helpful. I had it on the old cgoban 1. It is incredibly complex - much much too hard to expect anybody other than scoring experts to understand. When people have difficulty scoring, to throw them into a massively complex system to try to "solve" the problem will only make things worse. (Can you imagine two 25k's who just get a bent 4 to be told, "OK now play it out, but the only valid ko threat is a pass, and when you are done playing the board will be returned to its current position, except that the life of these stones in the corner will be determined by whether or not they were captured and not replaced"? Do you really think that they'll be able to figure anything out from such instructions? Much better for them to just ask a handy 1d what to do, and have the 1d say "those stones are dead."). Ing kos are worse; there is no rule for determining whether a threat is a "fighting" or a "disturbing" ko, you need a TD who knows the difference, and computers cannot reliably tell the difference. Thus, Ing ko rule is not possible.
- TJ: Pity. How about not restarting the clock after an undo in the scoring phase to allow for explanation or grabbing a dan player? Granted, I've only had one occasion where this was a problem (someone hitting undo every time I tried to explain dead bent four and restarting my clock), but it seems jarring that someone can dump you back into the game and start your clock again without warning after you both apparently thought the game was already over. I was really looking for some way to avoid this happening, which doesn't always make sense under Japanese rules.
[25] Ratings
- Hu: Weight ratings according to length of game and number of moves. Ratings are being distorted by blitz games (example: two seconds per move). Games won on time, which is common for experienced blitz players with fast internet connections and supple wrists, do not reflect true strength.
- wms: I tried this. I really looked for a weighting based on game time that would improve the rank system accuracy, but all tests I did indicated that putting a low weight on fast games made the rank system less accurate. I like the idea, but I'm not going to make any changes to rank system unless I can find statistical data indicating that it improves things. So many people think rank systems can be done based on what "feels right", which usually makes a really badly broken rating system.
- Scryer: What about separating the data rather than ignoring or integrating the blitz data? That is, give one rating for blitz and another for serious games. I understand some pros are much better at blitz than at the usual times, so there's some reason to believe that people at our level would also have different speed strengths.
- Hu: Change the "9d?" rating that gets awarded players who win a lot of games to something like "9d+".
- Nico: allow assistants/admins to re-score a game upon user request (I've already seen several players abused during the scoring). This is more fair and, as a side effect, ranks will be more accurate.
- mgoetze: Today someone who was cheating in the scoring phase was stripped of their rank and as such the games didn't count for the rating system any more... I think this is a "good enough" solution.
- jraitsev: When KGS decides of whether or not to assign a "~" mark to a particular user, it should look not only at Rated games but also at Free games. I, for example, have a "~" symbol attached to my nick, however saying that i do not play (or refuse to play) weaker players is simply not true. The fact that I TEND not to play Rated game with them, in my opinion, is not grounds for saying that i don't play atainst them at all. It is known that some people on KGS choose not to play "~" by principle. Leaving up to them and wms decide whether their principle is well justified, KGS should be able to accurately assign "~" mark, by looking at all (both Free and Rated 19x19) games. Your thoughts?
- wms: Already works that way. KGS looks at all games - rated, unrated, teaching, 9x9, 19x19, etc., when deciding who gets a "~".
- mgoetze: I think the question mark ratings are way too wacky. It seems if you only play one rated game, win it, and then just wait, there's absolutely no limit to how high you can go. Examples: gooxan, club, hsv. Just look at the rated games they have won/lost and compare with their rating.
I think the algorithm needs to be replaced entirely but until then, I would propose the following: If the player has lost a rated game, cap his/her rating at the (adjusted for handicap) rating of highest-rated player who was lost against, until the question mark is gone.
- mgoetze: Revert [xx?] ratings to [?] if their last rated game is unfinished (examples: BabyApple?, redmage).
- mgoetze: Do not allow absurdly fast games to be rated (5 minutes or less absolute time, or less than 3 minutes of main time and 30 or more stones per minute of overtime).
- dnerra: Why that? 30 stones per minute is still possible, and if both players agree to play it rated, why do you want to forbid them to do that?
- mgoetze: Because the vast majority of such games are played by naive victims of ultrablitz players who use such games to get a rank much higher than they would have otherwise.
- dnerra Isn't that case taken care by Wms' plan to "make it very obvious if a game is very fast"?
[26] Game Start
[3] File Handling/Database Use
[31] User Info
- hugh2: ability to search the user database. Currently you have to know someone's exact username to look up their info. Searching by (partial) real name, email address and even Notes would be useful. It might be nice to add a Location field too.
- Hu: Make names in game records live links so that clicking on one brings up the user info.
- Rich: As with the above suggestion, but in the list of names of players offering games.
- Gedh: Display the number of unfinished games a player has in the last (say) 40 as a number next to their name. This need not be available in the right-hand players list, but should be given when a player opens a game offer up, or matches someones offer.
- ian: make a -p mark to warn that your challenger has no picture
- Fhayashi: Option to turn off user pictures in games? Or is it in there already?
- Hikaru: There was a conversation just today in the English room of KGS about a person's inability to remove their picture once they have uploaded one. They can change the picture by uploading a new one, but there's no way to go back to having no picture, is there?
- Gedh: KGS long service award! For every year an account has existed, one should be given an extra 200 characters on top of the base 1000 characters for player info, up to a maximum of 2000 characters.
- mgoetze: Seconded! No wait, I want even more... make it per month! :)
- fhayashi: On User Information - Game list, color-code the games by win/loss for the user who's list it is. Or better yet, more stats in general. Jubango feature? win/loss percentage by date, opponent, etc.?
- Jochie: Have a list of languages from which you can choose the ones you yourself speak or understand sufficiently; then when you play against someone, review their userdata, or start a private chat, you could be warned (or verify manually) that you have no language in common?
- (Sebastian:) Or just display little symbols (flags?) next to the user name for the languages the user speaks. This would be visible sooner and would have the advantage that someone who speaks several languages can pick the one he likes best rather than having to default to English.
- +
[32] Game Info
- Hu: Option to sort game records according to result. Secondary sorts. Put column headings over the columns and then clicking on those can control the sort, with the previous sort being the secondary sort.
- Gedh: Leave result field blank when displaying demo game info in players game information listing. I find it can be confusing in someones info to see for instance W+R 4 times in a row, only to find that it’s actually two victories and two demos.
- mgoetze: Ability to delete unwanted demo and small-board (smaller than 9x9) games from permanent record. (I like a tidy game list...)
- GoStone: I would like a purely web/http-based way to view current KGS games, without resorting to java. The front page would give a list of current games. Click on a game and you get the current sgf file displayed neatly like on gobase so you can review the moves so far. Click refresh to see new moves. If you could get a small java applet to show new moves automatically, so much the better, but not essential. The same sgf script could also be used to review finished games of course. Perhaps this is also a call to generate an open-source javascript program for displaying and reviewing sgf files. Anyone interested?
- jraitsev: Being able to request a particular progress chart. Lets say for last week, month, year etc.
- jraitsev: Provide statistical information about total wins/losses in Rated games in either one's profile or upon request (such as view user info)
- mdh? On a similar note, how about a counter of how many games I have played? How else am I suppose to track "1000 games to Shodan" or "Lose your first 50/100 games as quickly as possible"? :)
- Doug Ridgway: Seconded. At the moment, I keep track of this manually in my info.
- Rakshasa: You can find this out by going to the archive and list all the games you've played. Just multiply the number of pages minus one with 20 and add the number of games in the last page.
- Joshual000: Unless you've saved a game review, then a game could be counted twice (and filtering the list to rated games only gives you rated games - so you lose any free/teaching games)
- mgoetze: Furthermore, games older than 180 (I think) days are dropped off the list.
- Fhayashi: I think a reasonable way of getting good statistics would be through the website, instead of the client. Have statistics along with the game records on the website.
- TJ: An option to save to server instead of just a dialogue that may or may not pop up depending on who took editing control first. It can be greyed out if the user isn't allowed to save the game to the server so that they'll know they'll lose the game unless they save to disk.
- TJ: An option to save all games played to disk by default.
- TJ: An interface like the server interface to open games offline instead of the current file and folder "who was that game against again?" system.:)
- Icepick: A better way to extract SGF files. There's no easy way for me to download all, or many of my games.
- crux: I'd like to be able to download tarballs of any given player's complete set of games from the website.
- Neil: Seconded. It seems to me it'd be easier for the server to be able to give me lots of sgfs all at once by date rather than having a script pound the web archive.
- Zarlan: Seconded. It would be great to get a set of all games a user (including oneself) has played.
- wms: Me too! The problem is just resources. A player with many games will take a bunch of CPU time and a lot of network bandwidth to put all his games together. I'm worried that if a feature like this is added, there will be people who daily download all the games of a half dozen players just to see what changed, and it'll slow down the server itself. So, usually saying "it might be too popular" isn't a good reason to not do something, but in this case I think it is.
- dnerra: Well, of course there are technical solutions for this. You could integrate it into the client, so that people cannot write bots to do this daily. You could limit the downloads to some number of games per day. If doing it via a website, you could still require login with KGS username and password, and limit the number of downloads.
- Neil: I like the ideas of being limited to downloading your own games and making the archives at fixed intervals. I can't imagine these restrictions would leave any incentive for abuse.
- crux: But you couldn't download the collected games of Solaris this way.
- crux: You could split them up by month. That'll reduce CPU consumption (archival is done once per month) and download bandwidth. It would still be more convenient than downloading them one by one. To further reduce the number of files that need downloading you could have additional archives of every game played before the start of the current year (per player, updated yearly).
- Joshual000: or at least an easier way to download your own games would be sufficient for me. By month or even by year would be better than the game history right click menu option I use right now.
- Christoph Gerlach: Default filename of manually saved games should use the timestamp (yyyymmdd_hhmmss) of the game BEFORE the filename, so it will be possible to save all games to one directory without renaming or losing order.
- Christoph Gerlach: Default filename of a D based on a played game should be the filename of the game with the postfix "_D".
- Nico: have a fourth tab in user infos displaying stats (ie. # of won, lost, rated, free games, ration win/loss, weakest player, stronger player...)
- Nico: have more filtering options in the games record (free games, unfinished, demo, simul, won, lost games)
- Fhayashi: Some sort of lesson archive. A set of special 'users' with lessons (commentated .sgf) in their games list. It would have to be special so that the games do not time out. People could contribute commentated .sgf as lessons, and if they are accepted, they'd get incorportated.
- Nixihou?: It would be nice to have headings in the chatroom window above the game-selection part. Like "Challenger" "Grade" "Opponent" "Grade" "Size" "Result" "Bystander". A few more categories would be helpfull though. e.g. "Time System" "Rule Set" "Game Status". I would like to have the possibility to sort the gamelist by clicking on one category. (windows explorer like)
[4] General UI and Design Issues
- Fhayashi: Display current server time.
- wms: Done. Been done since v1.0. The player's clocks are updated after each move to the server's opinion of time left. The only error is due to netlag; it is not possible to remove that (even if I implemented an NTPD-style protocol in the server and client, it takes several days for NTPD to accurately sync clocks when there is high netlag). Perhaps, though, you mean "display the time of day that it is on the server right now"? (you weren't clear in your question), in which case...well, if you want to know what time it is on the server, just set your clock to UTC, so I doubt that is what you meant.
- Fhayashi: I meant the second. With the current tournament and the international user base of KGS, it's sometimes difficult to coordinate times for tournament games, since we have to figure out what each other's time zone is. It would be a bit simpler if the current UTC time was displayed somewhere. Not all of us are haxxor enough to set our computer's clocks to UTC rather than local time =)
- wms: Oops, sorry, my mistake. Look at the KGS plans though - one plan is to add a tag, probably "<time:utc>yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm</time:utc>", and people can put into room desrciptions and message of the day fields. Then on the client, automatically convert it to local time when you look at it. Having "server time" I don't think is too helpful, it will be wrong for 23/24ths of the world, and what you really want is the time that the text author was referring to, not the server's actual time. So I think letting people enter date info once and then do the time zone calculations in the client would be best.
- Fhayashi: What I want to be able to say is "Let's meet here 04:00 server time for our tournament game." If the time is calculated, that's still not useful. I know what time it is where I'm at, I just think there should be a universal server time with which appointments can be made. It's fine if you know what the differential between GMT and your current time is, but I STILL don't know. I think it's GMT-6 here in Boston, MA, but I'm not sure because of daylight savings.
- joshual000: Ability to size (and retain sizing) of stacked sub-windows.
- Hu: wms is thwarted in the short run by a Java library limitation.
- wms: KGS tries to do this. But java lies sometimes about window sizes, and also if you have a multi-screen setup, java gets really screwed up. Hopefully the java issues will be fixed eventually. The multi-screen there may be a workaround for - haven't had time to look into it.
- ian: In what way does it lie? I know that Toolkit includes the toolbar sizes, but this can be compensated for surely?
- Hu: Skins.
- crux: This could cause problems if you try to tell people where to find a button you want them to press.
- Hu: Yes, excellent point, crux. That is the biggest downside.
- mgoetze: It's awkward enough for people like me who prefer an english-language client but sometimes help out others with a different-language client (such as German). Perhaps a better idea would be to just improve the help files? :)
- Wms: Sorry to be a downer, but my opinion of skins is well expressed by
Jamie Zawinski. Every skinned app I've ever used annoyed the hell out of me, it gaves me a choice of dozens of equally useless designs. "Ooooh! With this one the buttons are just a badly laid out, but now they are blue tinted instead of green tinted!" Dammit, just do a good design and be done with it.
- dnerra: Amen! I think it's part of a bigger problem that typically free software developers don't understand the importance of sane defaults (versus possibility of choice).
- ZeroKun: Tabbed game viewing.
- Jochie: Remember different window sizes for different board sizes as it's almost scary to play 19x19 and then open a 9x9 board with the same window size. Huge! :)
- jraitsev: It would be nice to include a "fixed" option for the "invitation for game" window. For example if one wishes to play ONLY Free games, and does not want to be bothered by people suggesting a Rated, Simul or any other type of game, user should be able to make Game_Type parameter "fixed". The challenger, therefore, will be able to suggest any changes except for the ones that are fixed. The same goes for time and undos. Many times, people put a short description next to their game, something like "do not change time", or no undos. If they make Time_param "fixed", all requests for time change, will automatically be declined and challenger will be made aware that his potential opponent will not play games timed other then originally indicated. Some people may want to filter guests, "~" players and others. If so indicated, all requests that do not match user's wish will automatically be declined or not eligible for changing. What are your thoughts?
- Zarlan: Exelent suggestion! Though filtering '~'-players should be done so that they are only filtered away if they want to play as black.
- wms: Sorry, but the killer here is that the game setup dialog is too complicated already. Too many things to tweak, too easy to forget one. Since pressing "decline" is easy and straightforward, I'm really reluctant to add another button and make an already-too-complicated GUI even more complicated.
- ~ian~ I have been making an SGF replay applet for Wings Go Club. I found that on KGS the up and down coordinate positions have been switched. What is the reason for this? Any games transferred from the server will be mirror images.
- wms: Are you sure that it is KGS that has them reversed and not your applet? Nobody else has ever reported this, and the x/y setting I use have been around for about 8 years now (if you count cgoban 1), so I'm 99% sure that KGS has the coordinates correct.
[8] Technical/Other/Dunnos
[81] Discussion of Development Fundamentals
- Bignose: Release the server and client code as
free software, so that changes and improvements can be made and shared without requiring time from wms.
- Hu: wms has stated many times that this is not going to happen this year or anytime soon. wms enjoys working on CGoban2 / KGS and enjoys controlling it for the time being, and that is not only his right, but he has earned it and more.
- Bignose: Then please allow me to correct the implication, originally at the top of this page, that wms *must* be the one to implement the changes. Any of these changes can be made by any talented programmer motivated to do so, if wms were to allow it.
- crux: wms, would you consider giving out the source to volunteers who wish to fix some of the things on this list for themselves and promise not to distribute it? I'd be interested in having a go at some of the things that have been annoying me.
- Fhayashi: It's not like wms is not aware of open models of software development. If he wanted to release the source code, he would have done it already. People who think this is somehow 'wrong' should go and write a better Go server/client.
- Port to other languages besides Java.
- Velobici: ["What's the point"]. WMS's choice of Java provides us with an excellent SGF editor and KGS client for all computer platforms. Any other language would give us less portability. True, Java takes a little longer to start, but once the JVM is loaded, Java is nearly as fast as C and certainly fast enough, by a significant margin, for the task.
- mgoetze: The main problem with Java is not the speed, but the humongous amounts of memory it consumes - on my machine, watching a game on KGS costs about 64 MB of RAM. For older systems with 128 MB or less, that might be too much (depending on several other factors, of course). I know for instance that Fernando Aguilar said that he liked KGS very much, but it was just too heavy for his home machine. gimpf: What's the point? I've an 6 years old pc and it works quite fast. Any other reasons? Hu: Ran fine when I had 64 MB.
- Hu: It is unfortunately a problem for a minority, but as time and computers advance, it affects fewer people. The huge effort involved is not worth it.
- Source code (yes we know, fat chance). How about an API?
- Jochie: Is it possible to synchronise the .cgoban2rc file (or whatever it is on non-unix systems) immediately instead of waiting until the program exits? I have kept it running for days if not weeks and would hate to lose changes to buddy lists and such if it crashed (which of course it never would).
- Jochie: Any reason not to use an text based configuration file?
[82] Connection and Responsiveness
- crux: If the connection dies, at least under Linux you can't close the room list. You have to exit and restart the entire application.
- kaiou: Don't close all the games that I was watching when it disconnects for inactivity.
- mgoetze: Ability to force reconnect to server. It takes ages for CGoBan2 to notice when my ISP resets my connection and gives me a new IP. :(
- JoshuaRodman?: Improve client responsiveness under slow internet conditions. Waiting several seconds for any feeback from mouseclicks results in massive frustration. I understand you must be confirming with the server, but displaying moves in ghosted state or similar would be a huge improvement. Also, the client tends to lock the entire gui during network lags, where typing, scrolling, etc. does not update. Perhaps you need to split the gui out into a seperate thread.
- wms: The GUI is a separate thread. The reason for delays is the model/view/controller thing - the view and controller are on your client, the model is on the server. OK, so that's a lame reason, but it is the reason things work the way they do. Actually, the moves not appearing (and your own chats not appearing) is on purpose; it tells you that you have netlag, you don't see your moves & chats until other people do also. Some things I could make faster - like closing windows - but sometimes I do want to know when I truly leave a room or game, in which case not seeing the window close until I really left is handy. I'd have to really think hard about when things should happen immediately and when you should wait for the server to tell the client that the change has really happened.
- JoshuaRodman?: I think I didn't make myself clear? Or maybe I misunderstand you. You refer to moves and chats not appearing or windows not closing until after a delay. I refer to a brief total gui lockup where buffered text heading for an entry buffer on the local client does not even appear, or even more tellingly, where a string of text freezes half-entered for several seconds before springing back to life. Seperately, I understand what the delay before stones appear is about, but the lack of any feedback at all before they appear causes me to have the most unpleasant experience that I tend to actually scream at the computer/screen/program. Personality flaw? Fair enough. Usability flaw? You betcha.
- wms: If typing text does not appear in the text boxes, that is not my programming. There is no time that the GUI thread is hung waiting or network I/O - all network I/O is caught by a separate thread which then queues it for processing by the GUI thread. That is probably due to Java, perhaps it decided to GC at that time, which is a problem - more of a problem when memory is low than otherwise.
- mAsterdam: Just an idea. Take the best of both worlds, (drawback - it may be much work) like this: have the client give feedback in a clearly temporary fashion, e.g. a move first appears as a semitransparent stone, a closed room is greyed but not (yet) removed, you own chat is greyed from the time you hit 'enter' until it's fed back from the model.
- (Sebastian:) Good idea. - And play only half the sound ;-)
- This is done. As you move the mouse around, you will see a "ghost" (semitransparent) stone. When your move has been sent to the server, the ghost disappears. So if you see no ghost, then the move is sent.
- Joshual000:Currently if my internet connection is dropped, KGS closes (all fine and well). However, after I reconnect it is difficult to re-join my in progress game. (Either I can search for it in the list of current games, or I can view my user info & dbl-click the bold game on the top of the list) - What would be nice is one of the following:
- If I have a currently open, unfinished game when I login, open the game by default.
- Build the ability to go to the open game into a button/menu somewhere on the main window
- Weight my game on the game list so the sorting is still applied, but my game is on top (excluded from the sort)
- Weight games of my buddies so the sorting is still applied, bu my buddies games are on top (excluded from the sort) (My user is already on my buddy list to make it easier to locate on the user list)
- WMS, If you have a better plan, I'm all for it. This just seems to be a very useful feature, especially to those with less than reliable connections - Joshual000
[83] Other Technical Issues
- Hu: Have a way to force Garbage Collection (Java internal issue). At least have the New Game dialogue or challenging an offer cause it to occur so that it does not happen right when you accept a game and the clock is ticking. +
- crux: Are you sure it's the garbage collection and not network lags you are seeing?
- Hu: Yes. My computer has a disk activity light and makes disk noises. When network lag occurs there is none of that.
- Evand: Hu, it may be possible to do this externally without wms doing anything. Does this matter enough that it would be worth my time to attempt? It should actually be reasonably simple, but would be easier with the source available, obviously
- TJ: A timestamp system for moves to counter problems with lag bursts while playing?
- Anon: Very, very difficult problem. Some computer scientists claim this is impossible, since the server can never completely trust the client. If it is not done right.
- Helcio Alexandre: Some online chess servers have been using timestamp for years like www.chessclub.com and www.freechess.org. But it can harm the game if one side is lagging badly. On these chess server, you can see if your opponent have netlag and choose to play or not. It also filters to you users that are lagging badly so that you don't recieve match from them.
- Hu: I am told that IGS uses client-side time and some people have hacked clients to gain a consistent time advantage. wms is firm about retaining server-side time.
- PatrickB: I've also had confirmation from a reliable source that someone in the past has hacked client-time on a server to gain a time advantage in blitz games.
- Helcio Alexandre: The server can check the client information to see if it's true. The server can for example ping user machine for extra information about netlag and traceroute to it. And, if someone suspect of a hacked client, sysadmin can take actions against it. Implementing server-side or client-side has both advantages and disadvantages. The main online chess server decided that implementing it client-side has more advantages than server side.
- PatrickB: A traceroute and ping to every client is a significant amount of additional overhead for the server. Adding significant server overhead that to make is slightly harder for people to abuse an essentially broken idea seems like a bad idea. wms is dead-set against client-side time keeping, and I agree with him. I can virtually guarantee that this will not be added to KGS.
- sita: I see the advantages and the disadvantages. The Arguments for both sides are quite strong. Thus I think the best solution might be to make client-time optional, like game type, rule set etc. The game would only be on client-time when both players agree with that.
[9] Discussion of this Page
(Obsolete discussion about page ordering has been moved to CompostHeap)
[91] Voting
If you like an idea, mark it with "[+|YourName]", if you don't with "[-|YourName]". (-- Sebastian)
- gedh: Weird. All I can see where Sebastian has tried to add "[+| 'Sebastian ]" or similar, is one of those ' ą ' symbols with no name visible. Clicking on the symbol takes me to Sebastians home page.
- (Sebastian:) This is not a bug, it's a feature. Normally, you can use it e.g. when you refer to a page from within a sentence where the name wouldn't fit. It seems that it is nowhere really explained. I use it here to hide the name, because it would only distract from the content. But I wanted the connection to a name so that no one is tempted to just add "+" signs after his wish. After you read this, could you pls move this discussion to a more appropriate place - maybe HowToUseWiki?
- gedh: I see. Having looked at your home page i can see that the symbol is not supposed to be a "plus sign above a minus sign", but a "plus sign underscored".Maybe it was/is just me, but seeing something like ' ą ' made me wonder whether you were entering a vote for, a vote against, or perhaps even registering a state of indecision! Maybe in your explanation on how to vote you could say something about how a 'for' and 'against' vote will actually look once cast, and the fact that the persons name will not appear alongside it. Maybe i'm just 30k at wiki editing, but perhaps others may find it confusing too.
- (Sebastian:) Good point. I tried to put stones
or Unicode characters such as ♡, ☹, ⊕ or ⊖ into the link, but they only dispplay as code within links. (Besides, not all Unicode characters display correctly on all systems.) How about one of the following:
- Use a stone plus an initial, and put the link on the initial, such as
g for good or S for bad.
- Write yea and nay.
- Or should we leave it as is because several people have used it already?
- TJ I'm curious concerning the usefulness of voting in this context. Isn't it more useful for interested parties to present different sides of an issue, and to leave well enough alone if their point of view has already been presented in the forum? I'm concerned that simply + or - won't help wms decide anything at all about making a decision based on merits, since people may be discouraged from putting in their thoughts for, say, why purple go stones would be a bad idea. Think of it like this: if two lawyers are to present a case before a judge, and one side presents a case while the other side gives a list of a million people who think the first side was wrong and little else, it's hard for the judge to see the merits of the second lawyer's case. I just think discussion is much more interesting and useful than a list of yays and nays disembodied from an interesting point of view.
- (Sebastian:) I can't follow your argumentation.
- KGS is not, like a court trial, an attempt to find the truth beyond doubt. It is, like most software, or even most products in general, an attempt to make a majority of users happy. This is why companies invest millions in polls, just to get a rough idea about how many users prefer their products in purple.
- Sensei's Library allows wms to obtain this information for free, and the plus or minus signs allows to display it with minimal disruption.
- If a million people all voted for purple go stones, then of course wms should favour their demand.
- We're all thinking people here (or else we wouldn't play Go). I can't see how anyone could be discouraged from contributing a new aspect to a discussion, just because someone else marked it with a minus sign.
- If you want to discuss something - by all means, do it. But if you just want your voice for or against purple to be counted, then you now have an appropriate representation.
- If wms really wants to find out why you hate purple, he can ask you, thanks to the link in your vote.
- Repp: How about we just forget about negative voting entirely? Good ideas will be supported by a wash of "+", and uninteresting ideas will be dropped. A negative vote is, in fact, a wish for a different feature... so suggest it!
- (Sebastian:) I proposed both because I love symmetry. But in reality people here are so nice, apparently they don't want to tag a minus to someone's contribution. Let's do it like this: If anybody writes a "+" to your proposal, we'll officially bury the minus. If someone writes a "-", then we'll keep it. Sounds fair?
[92] Page categorization
mdh? Would it be possible to break this up page into multiple pages, each based on a Major catagory?
This page was wikiapprenticeedited by Sebastian on 2003-10-22.
This is a copy of the living page
"KGS Wishlist" at
Sensei's Library.
2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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