The main new feature is Pocket GNU Go integration. A few other minor features have been added as well as bug fixes.
You can now play against the machine (or let it play itself). The buttons on the right side of the Playing toolbar are Undo, Ideas, Score, and Pass (Score and Ideas among other engine settings are also available while not playing under File > Computer). While the machine is thinking clicking the little 'Stop' sign aborts and exits playing mode; You can then File > Computer > Resume Game any time.
The Ideas feature will generate move ideas labeled 'A', 'B', 'C', ... in order of precedence (3rd screenshot). Score will display territory markup and calculate the score.
The game engine is a port of GNU Go 3.4 for Windows Mobile which Sidney Liu is currently working on (past work by Ivan Davtchev, Man Li, Alex Seewald, and of course the main GNU Go team deserves much credit as well). For more info, check out: http://www.vieka.com/gnugo/
The main Go Suite installation doesn't include the engine. Other features of Go Suite will work fine without the engine installed. There is a separate .cab file below to install GnuGoCE.exe (note: 2.5MB). The engine sits in Program Files\Go Suite and isn't super useful standalone (it has no GUI; just opens up a socket and listens for GTP commands).
Moving the jog dial Up will go to previous branch (as always), then from there Up again will go to the next previous branch (so you can quickly pop-pop-pop from a deeply nested node; especially useful while browsing KJD). It used to be that Up/Down would cycle through alternates/children if there were any and Up would only otherwise go to previous branch. Now it sort of stays in previous branch mode as long as you keep popping. If you use Down to start navigating alternates then Up changes modes and will more expectedly go to previous alternate rather than branch. It sounds confusing but it's what you'd expect once you start using it. Getting stuck cycling and having to go back one then up to previous branch was annoying.
I'm considering this build to be experimental but I want people to be able to play with it if they like anyway. Pocket GNU Go is still under development and Go Suite still has some known bugs related to playing as well.
At any rate, there are still some rather serious bugs but if you're adventurous, have fun!
To uninstall, just go to Remove Programs and remove Creation Go Suite or Vieka Pocket GNU Go.
It's simple, but this is my favorite feature:
On the left we have a common example of commentary using coordinates to refer to points and stones on the board (d13, n4, q6, d6). Labels would be so much easier to follow. Also, to save screen real estate I'd rather be able to leave Display>Coordinates off (and Display>Oversized Board on).
On the right you can see that in Display>Comment Cleanup mode Go Suite converts coordinates in the comment to labels on the board. Empty points are labeled with the next available letters (A, B, C) and stones are labeled with the move number. The comment text refers to them that way. Setup stones are marked and referred to as 'the marked black/white stone'.
All of this is just a display mode that can be turned on/off. The actual comment text remains unaltered.
While not in Edit>Record Game mode, tapping the board acts as a 'guess next move'. It will follow the game if you guess correct. Otherwise it will mark the guessed point with red, purple, or blue in order of proximity to the correct point (gray if nowhere near). It will mark the point yellow if it is nowhere near the correct point but is playing within the next five moves (proximity in time).
If you misplace a stone, you can simply drag it to the correct place. This makes entering game records much, much easier.
You can only drag the current play but it's simple enough to tap a stone placed several move back. This will navigate to that point in the game. Then drag it.
To clean up the UI a bit, Edit Position and Manual Zoom are now explicit modes with separate toolbars:
As a shortcut, you can now switch between placing Black and placing White stones by double tapping.
Toggled under Display>Territory, this displays TW[..], TB[..] SGF properties. It is not yet editable but is useful for viewing the settlement in KGS games, for example.
I've had numerous requests to support Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, etc. Go Suite now reads/writes properties in UTF-8 encoding (and sets the CA[..] SGF property). Getting the correct fonts and configuration set up on the Pocket PC is a bit of a pain but the result is nice:
To edit games in non-Latin-1 char set, you'll need some kind of input system. I like this kana keyboard which comes with ECTACO Partner Dictionary or any of a number of other input methods available (handwriting recognition, picking Kanji by radical/stroke count, etc.).
Have fun!
I want to eventually integrate the problem solving and tagging system from Go Album into it and add major new features such as a Joseki/Fuseki browser (you can browse KJD for now), an IGS client, a port to Smartphone, and many other things.
You can browse SGF files with variation support for both sibling (left) and child modes (right). I personally like sibling-style best but comments in some game records refer to variations as children (notice that the comments in the left screenshot make no sense). The comments field can be expanded/collapsed by tapping it (or by pushing the jog dial in). The solid colored square indicates whether you are in the main line (red), a variation (blue) or a the end of a line (gray).
It supports most SGF FF[4] properties including all game info, labels, various markup, dimmed/selected points, various board sizes, variations, game/problem collections (multiple records per file), etc.
The comments field at the bottom is one-stop-shopping for full game info (first node), and other position and move annotations such as "Hotspot", "Good for Black", "Even Position", "Good Move", "Doubtful Move", etc. Also, you can see that the node name (or file name in it's absence) is displayed on the title bar along with an indication of the current stone (or color to play).
Browsing is made very convenient on devices with a jog dial: Left/Right move to next/previous. Down moves to next alternate or, in child mode, hilights (blue box) what will be the next move. Up either moves to the previous alternate or, if there is none, it jumps back to the previous branch. That's very useful for exploring game trees: you come to a branch and explore to the end of each variation, then just pop back to the branch and keep going - all without using the stylus.
Tapping a stone navigates back to the node in which that stone was placed.
Buttons on the navigation toolbar are Main Line, Previous Branch, Previous Alternate, Next Alternate, Start, Back 10, Back, Forward, Forward 10, End. A little secret feature is that if you press and hold these buttons, they turn red and repeat - allowing you to speed through the moves. If you're using the jog dial, you may want to adjust the key repeat speed on your device by going to Start > Settings > Personal (tab) > Buttons > Up/Down Control (tab). Several other navigation options are available under View > Navigate and View > Search. Previous/Next Interesting means commented, annotated or branch.
You may choose to view with/without coordinates, numbered moves (notice captured points are numbered as well), and may hide markup and labels. Oversized board mode is a special mode that works only for 19x19 full-board view without coordinates - it displays slightly larger stones but allows them to go off the edge of the screen a tiny bit.
Notice that with ClearType the stone labels are quite readable even at this tiny size. Be sure to enable this on your device: Start > Settings > System (tab) > Screen > Enable ClearType (checkbox), then soft reset.
You can zoom and scroll around the board in Manual Zoom mode (View > Zoom > Manual). The toolbar changes and you have options for zoom in/out, jump to one of the four corners, and scroll left/right/up/down (also to jog dial allows easy scrolling while in this mode).
Additionally, you can automatically crop in around the stones on the board (for a partially occupied board - problem setup, joseki, etc.) and can easily jump back to full board (View > Zoom > Full Board).
To get out of this mode just uncheck Manual and continue to browse and edit while zoomed in. Or switch our by choosing Zoom > Full Board or Automatic.
Besides variation support, there is support for SGF collection files with multiple games/problems per file. This can be thought of as variations of the root node. In fact, you can flip through games as regular alternates if you are at the root node - that is, you can use Next/Previous Alternate buttons on the toolbar or use the jog dial. If not at the root node, you can navigate to Previous/Next Record under View > Navigate.
Also on the File menu you may choose Open Record... or New Record... to add to the currently open collection file. You can choose to Save Record... to save just one game/problem from the current collection into a separate file.
You can see from the title bar that in the above screenshot, we are browsing game #282 in the MegOfGames file (a single file containing several thousand games), and since we're at the first node, the blue Next/Previous Alternate toolbar buttons are available to flip though the games.
Normally, tapping the board will navigate if appropriate. Checking Edit > Record Game will cause tapping to add moves to the game record; creating variations automatically. You can, of course, also add stones to the board for setup, and add board markup. Finally, you can annotate the position (e.g. Good for White) or move (e.g. Interesting Move). Annotations are displayed in the comment field but this saves you typing, makes the record smaller, and can later be localized into other languages. These are the standard SGF annotations but I plan to introduce a bunch more in the future.
You can edit node info and game info which is displayed in the title bar and comment fields but again is a standard way to record this infomation for compatibility with Go databases, etc.
Juan: Just a quick note to congratulate you for such great software. The Comment Cleanup is plain awesome. I love it! Thanks!!
Anon: Question: Does the program GoSuite support the new 640x480 resolution display PDAs (for example the Asus MyPal? 730) ?
AshleyF: Nope, sorry it doesn't yet. It wouldn't be difficult but also not completely easy: The board control uses image resources rendered at various sizes on a desktop machine. I'd have to render at a bunch of new sizes not needed for 240 pixel wide display (96, 80, 68, 60, 53, 43, 36, 32, 28, 26, and 25-pixel). Already there's 450KB of embeded resources in GoSuite! I'd probably want to make a separate build for WM Second Edition devices. I'll add it to my list but to be honest, I probably won't get to it for a while.
Anon: Thanks for your answer Ashley. Well bad luck, I've just ordered a high res PDA today :(
AshleyF: Sorry. However, I did just verify in an emulator that it at least works - but it's pixel-doubled (except for text which looks nice and crisp).
It's funny to me to see Pocket PCs becoming more like small tablets and meanwhile a line of small Tablet PCs becoming more like Pocket PCs. The price diff is only about $500 right now. I bet they'll converge within a few years. Tablets will always exist, but Pocket PCs may be replaced by handheld Tablet devices running regular Windows! I'm just guessing. That'll be cool though. Then you can run SmartGo or some such truely-full-featured SGF software. I'd personally rather not enter the fray with GoSuite as a desktop app. Maybe I'll retreat to smaller devices - Smartphone?! :-)
Anon: Does it look good with the pixel doubling mode? Side note: My device was lost during shipping...or maybe stolen :)
AshleyF: It's hard to tell. The emulator screen is huge on a desktop display. I assume the high-res Pocket PC screens are still about the same physical size but with 480 pixels wide squeezed into that (rather than 240). In that case I'd guess that GoSuite looks about like it does on a regular Pocket PC - but only half as good as it could look.
Malweth: What time frame are you looking at for an IGS client? I'm looking into geting a Dell X30 (with 802.11b) and am very interested in using it to play online (since I want to be with my wife after work, not holed up on my desktop ;). I'm sure it's not a small task, but have you started designing it?
AshleyF: Funny you should ask :-). I just started on an IGS client for Smartphone a couple of weeks ago (so far can sign in, list games, and observe). If successful I may port to Pocket PC.
Sorry for my bad english 8-)
About Go Suite:
1. About calculating the final score. Programm MultiGo (for example) calculates final score in semi-automatic mode, when you choose which group is dead. Can you add to your programm semi-automatic calculation of score?
AshleyF: Yeah, I plan to do that. For now the score is purely calculated by Pocket GNU Go.
2. You can load SGF file in GoSuite and choose View->Zoom->Auto Crop to see only part of a board. But when you press button to return to the begin of SGF file, GoSuite automatically switches to the full view of a board. Can you make it optional?
AshleyF: That's bug. Thanks! I'll fix in the next release.
About Go Album:
1. Have you see Java programm GoGrinder for PC? It has some useful features for people, who likes to solve Go problems. There are:
a) Randomly rotate problem on board and randomly change color.
AshleyF: GoAlbum also randomly rotates/flips and swaps colors.
b) When you solve the problem, GoGrinder doesn't show you all alternate branches in SGF file. And when you choose wrong branch in SGF file (make mistake), GoGrinder allow you to go on it until the end of branch, and ONLY THEN GoGrinder tells you, what you didn't solve a problem correct. (It doesn't mean what GoGrinder have no "prompt" feature. It does. On a button "Navigate solution" you can see the way of solving problem). I think it's very interesting to solve the problem, when you have no idea until the end on the right or on the wrong way you are.
c) And I can't figured out how to solve a problems with more then one step.
AshleyF: 'b' and 'c' are both due to the fact that GoAlbum doesn't do variations at all! Each problem is just a single position with points marked good/best - no continuation at all. Some time I'll integrate the features of GoAlbum into GoSuite (w/full move trees) and make it work pretty much like GoGrinder.
It's hard to me to explain what I mean... I hope you understand me.
Thank you for two good programms. Cool design and graphics. I think it's the best Go programms for PocketPC.
AshleyF: Thank much! Glad you like it
Vadim Balashoff, Russia
balashof@rol.ru
Malweth Thanks for this program! Just got my Axim X30 high for Christmas (writing this on it). I haven't had a lot of time to use Suite yet, but so far it's great! I'm looking forward to new features - especially IGS and subdirectory support! Till then I'll be looking at some Takemiya and Go Seigen with the guess the move feature... Thanks again!
I'm terribly sorry again for my bad english, but I still have problem with final counting. :)
I have installed two packages: GoSuite.ARMV4.CAB, PocketGnuGo.ARMV4.CAB.
In GoSuite I can now play with computer, but if I choose Computer->Score or Computer->Ideas (or if I press icons for these actions), I always recieve message "Go Engine Error. Could not communicate with GnuGoCE."
Vadim Balashoff, Russia balashof@rol.ru
AshleyF: Ah, I see what you're talking about now. That is a very bad bug! The GTP reader/writer isn't handling floating point numbers correctly for UI cultures that don't use a dot for a decimal point! Great scott! I'll fix that. Note that it only affects Score and Ideas (as you noticed - playing should otherwise work). In the mean time the only workaround I can think of is to change your Region Options... I'll have a maintenance release in a week or two...