Announcing "LOA board": a new web interface for LOA games analysis

Hi all,

(moving the post to a separate thread)

Since it turned out that we don’t have any LOA web interfaces so far, I decided to create my own. Here you can see an example of a running game:

http://horna.org.ua/lg/1610848

Note that only 8x8 games are supported now. I’m going to add “9x9 Black Hole” used in the championship and other variants later.

In order to analyze your own game just put its numeric identifier in the URL above, i.e.

http://horna.org.ua/lg/your_game_id_here

LOA board has the following features:

- Display of all moves made in the game.
- Move navigation by clicking on the moves.
- Creating your own variations by making moves on the board. You can start a new variation from any move of the game. Only one active variation is currently supported. I can try to add support of the full variations tree, but it complicates the interface and is probably not really needed, at least for me.
- Highlighting of the last move (in yellow) and possible moves when a checker is clicked (in green).
- Meta information about the game (players name, tournament, link to LG site, number of remaining checkers).

Thanks to Chaosu for support and for some of the ideas!

Please let me know what do you think about it, any feedback is appreciated.

Ivan.

BTW, full code for the site is available on GitHub in case anyone is interested. Please feel free to send pull requests :)

https://github.com/sphynx/loa-board

I don't know why but it feels slow, there is almost a 1 second delay between clicking a move (from moves list) and moving. Not much of a problem but just wondering. Another feature I'm dying for is arrows to move to previous/next move. BTW I also dislike this on littlegolem, because of ads in top of the page the move arrows are appearing on different height, making it harder to blindly click the next move arrow.

In our game http://horna.org.ua/lg/1580847 I believe your move 41st wasn't optimal, should have played c5-a3 instead (which you played in 43th, but it had less impact). I'm pretty defenceless against that and you can just slowly move remaining two pieces to the bottom and then to the right.

For some of my games http://horna.org.ua/lg/1334756 or http://horna.org.ua/lg/1334759, the move list and game details are not available, I see nothing special causing this.

Also do you intend to code a win detection?

maybe resign as last move?

Yes thanks, that's it!

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback, guys! Indeed, the problem was in the "resign" move, which was not properly handled. I've fixed this, so Carroll's games are now displayed properly.

Chaosu: regarding slowness, what browser/OS do you use? I've tested it on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and iOS Safari (it works decently even on my phone!). Regarding arrows: I'm planning to add keyboard shortcuts, so that you can just click left or right arrows, what do you think about it? Probably arrows won't hurt as well (to use on touch devices).

Carroll: regarding win detection, yes, that's in my todo list :)
https://github.com/sphynx/loa-board/blob/master/TODO

Eagerly waiting for new bug reports and not-so-hard-to-implement proposals/usability improvements ;)

Thanks for the feedback again, it's pretty inspiring that someone else except me is going to use this.

Ivan

Chaosu: regarding our game and 41.c5-a3, I still can't see why it is so powerful, but maybe I am missing something. What about replying 42.e6-b3 and then if 43.d1xb3 reply with 44.d6-d3. Looks not too bad...

I've added keyboard shortcuts to improve navigation. Now in the main line moves, one can use "left" and "right" for "one move back"/"one move forward". Also "up" means "go to the first move" and "down" means "go to the last move".

In the variations line, "left" means "take back the last move". Other keys do not work in this mode.

I should also add some help describing the keybindings and other non-obvious stuff (for example "Game info" panel is collapsable, just click on the "Game info" text ;))

You should put black player first in the game details otherwise the score seems reversed...
Clickable left or right arrows would be great for tableters.

Ivan: I haven't thought of 42. e6-b3 and it's indeed enough to defence but your line of attack with 43. d1xb3 is not a good idea, d1 serves as a block for f3 and I think shouldn't be moved until the very end (winning move perhaps?). Unfortunately 42. e6-b3 opens up 44. c8-f5 and that gives white too much of an advantage.

Carroll: this reversed score and mess with the players name is caused by weird notation in LittleGolem's PGN. For example, let's take a look at this game:

!https://api.monosnap.com/image/download?id=zGC8IRk6OgIQaBWJzpgmwBpmwQu3e0!

Definitely I am white and VSapristi is black (we have checkers of corresponding colors, and colors above our flags are the same). But let's take a look at game's PGN:

http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/game/png.jsp?gid=1610843

It says:

...
[White "VSapristi"]
[Black "Ivan Veselov"]
...

So it is reversed! I think this is either just a bug or is caused by the fact that black moves first in LOA and [White] tag means effectively [FirstToMove].

So I needed to overcome this issue by display white player from PGN as black and vice versa, but this led to reversed scores. I'll fix that soon, thanks for letting me know!

Breaking news :) I've finally added all LOA variants support, so now it is possible to analyse any LG game, including championship games (in BlackHole variant). Enjoy!

Here is an example of BlackHole championship game (the black hole is in the center, it's not really black, probably I should draw it more carefully):

!https://api.monosnap.com/image/download?id=8aQgP8zUTwXFSeCgXE6kWXN3OYIqPe!

Great!!! Thanks a lot!

Only one little thing. On my small tablet, the text boxes overlap with the playing field. Is this browser dependent?

Hi Elsabio! Can you send a screenshot? It's weird because I tested it even on the small iPhone's screen and it does not overlap (on the phone screen panels from the right (moves and game info) are just displayed below the board. I assume that by "text boxes" you mean panels from the right (or maybe you mean coordinates?).

@Ivan: In the portrait-view everything workrs fine: the panels are under the board. After 90° turn, in landscape-view the panels overlap about the half of the width of one single square. That is not to much, the game is still playable. Sorry I have no tool to make screenshot.

@Elsabio: do you know what is the screen resolution of your tablet? Is it Android-based tablet or iPad? I tried to reproduce your problem by resizing my browser window, but I can never reproduce this overlapping behaviour you describe. Also it works fine in landscape and portrait modes on my phone. It's interesting that I am using Bootstrap framework from Twitter which was specifically designed to work well on mobile platforms, so I am surprised that we still get these problems.

Regarding screenshots: you can google for "android tablet screenshot" or "ipad screenshot" to find out how to do it, it's a solvable problem I suppose :)

!image /mnt/sdcard/Pictures/Screenshots/Screenshot_2014-02-28-22-08-31.png!

I took a screenshot, but the upload doesn't work. I used the path to the png-file as url in the ! Ima...! tag freom the textile format but no picture was uploaded. So ???

Mm, I think you need to upload the screenshot somewhere and then include it in the message using "!"-signs as quotes. Currently I can see that you are using the local path from your computer (/mnt/sdcard/Pictures/Screenshots/Screenshot_2014-02-28-22-08-31.png). Hehe, I can say that you use Linux at least ;)

Or easier: just send it me to veselov@gmail.com

...done

Absolutely brilliant, thank you, Ivan. I was trying to cobble something together myself, and then I remembered this thread.

Now that there's link from game page directly to analyzer can we get the following:

- black pieces,

- buttons/arrows to move back and forth (and to start and end),

- ability to display URL with all the moves, so it's possible to send links to other games/analyzing variants?

Hi Chaosu,

You can use "left", "right", "up" and "down" buttons on your keyboard to navigate in moves list.

I'll try to encode moves in the URL, so that we can share variants, it's a good idea!

Not sure about black pieces, but I'll take a look.

Ivan.

But can we have buttons like in new LG design? I'm very used to it. In old design these were appearing at different height depending on the size of advert in top left corner, but in new design it's just perfect.

Hi Ivan: (or to any one that cares to respond to my question)

Sorry to ask something that it's not mentioned in this page…

But I would like to know, how to include a Picture in my profile…

I play Chess and Go and I think, that seeing the other person's face, not only where they are from. it makes me feel better and closer to all…

Not that I have a fancy hung up at my looks, at my age, (66), but I believe in looking to faces instead of random geometric figures…

so... any one knows if a non member, that uses this site, for Go and Chess,  can insert a pic on the Profile ???

thanks kindly,

Alex from Uruguay...

Hi Alex,

I believe that the new design uses universal avatars from this site: http://gravatar.com

So you have to register there, upload your picture and it should be automatically picked up here on LittleGolem.

Ivan

Hi Ivan,

I think the navigation buttons would be a welcome addition.

Otherwise I think design, visual presentation and functionality are just fine.

Congratulations and many thanks,

VS

Hi Chaosu, VSapristi,

I've added some basic navigation buttons similar to the original LittleGolem buttons, it should be helpful for phone/tablet users. On top of this, you can use the keyboard (left, right, up and down buttons) while using a computer.

I must admit that I don't like how black pieces look on the board, so I'm leaving red ones for now :)

Ivan.