What happened with our Twixt game board design ?

The new one with the last site upgrade is just horrible...

Agreed it looks better on a phone though ;-).

The pegs are much too big compared to the grid...

And the letters and numbers references have disappeared...

yes, horrible new design.  However, the analysis board is the same as before, with coordinates

I agree, the board looks terrible, any chance it will revert back? It is just so far from the actual 3M board. It would be nice to see it changed back.

I like the new design. The larger pegs make it easier for me to read the position. The most recent peg is no longer red. And I remember when the default image was without guide lines, and you had to know how to select an alternate view. But this is a useful lesson for me writing my Twixt GUI app, some people prefer smaller pegs.

One thing I just noticed which I do not like, why are there corner holes?

Pegs are a little too big yes but the real problem are the corner holes, need to remove this as far as possible, with the possibility to play on the corners twixt is... A stupid game :D

BTW like David I need time but I think I like the new design. Just reduce a little the size of the pegs, bigger pegs is a good idea but maybe not that much, now with two adjacent pegs they are almost touching each other.

The pegs are slightly too big.

But more than that I am missing the coordinates!

Oh god the coordinates :P

Hi Florian !

The corner holes are visible but not "playable" : no one can put a peg in it.

I would like the ability to choose the game board design, similar to the ability of changing the hex board design

Except for the missing coordinates and corner holes it actually looks good for 30x30.

On the contrary, in my opinion new view is MUCH better than the old one. I think the best idea is to give players a choice, in QYPS there are at least 5 or 6 available interfaces.

It would be best imo if the dots were just small enough not to touch the links. Apart from that and the useless corners, the design seems fine (though rather ugly, as usual (sorry!)).

And one suggestion from me - I would use stronger highlight of last move.

most recent move has a red 'glow' around it. (meow)

Yes it does, but I think it is not as visible as it should.

There used to be a choice of boards.  Where has that gone?  I want to go back!!!!!!!!!!!!1

20 of the prior 21 comments include some degree of negativity about the new board design. I think that says it all... and I agree.

i like the + in the middle to see the center. coordinates would be cool, looks fine otherwise

So let me increase the number of positive opinions about the new design (or actually double it) - I really like it. For me the bigger pegs, the last move marker and the "+" sign in the center all help in better visualibity and board orientation.

Add me to the "opposed" side. I like the old board much better.

I'm not opposed to the new design (but I'd like coordinates).

The best would be to have both options and everyone can choose their preference, like in Hex.

Yes, a "design scheme" button like there is for Hex boards would placate some of us. And Alan Hensel's analysis site is still a click away. However, Alan did not intend for his site to be used so extensively for analysis during games. The purpose was mainly for post mortem discussion.

Of course, the main thing Richard has committed to are the larger grid sizes 30 and 48. I wouldn't necessarily expect Alan to set up the same arrangement for the larger boards. If he does anything, which we have no right to expect, he might set it up for post mortem only.

So maybe this will get more people interested in Jtwixt, which can handle 30x30 but not yet 48x48. I am now officially responsible for upkeep of Jtwixt, so bother me about it please, not Ignatius a.k.a. Kevin Walker.

On my screen the new board is far, far too small. Ain't playable, really. Like lynx, I hardly can see what options I have... :-(

How can we send a message to the owner?  I forget how.

@slaapgraag

That is strange! It is bigger on my screen now.

It also adopts to the screen size.

Steven, there is a little, blue 'contact' button at the bottom left of this page.  That might work.  I WILL say that it appears to me that Richard HAS been paying some attention to the comments in the forum; he does not reply, and does not always act, but does sometimes.  (meow)

If someone can list out precisely all the changes that were made from the old design (in a way that I can understand – I've never played Twixt before), I can add the old board to the BiggerGolem extension so people who preferred the old layout can continue to use it. BiggerGolem already does similar changes for Go, Chess, Shogi, and Othello.

You just could add the same design as the commentator also which is similar to the previous one.

http://twixt-commentator.duckdns.org/game/1972609

As we said, a problem since we can go to 30 by 30 instead of 24 by 24 is the coordinates...

Thank you apetresc. Here is an image of the old board.

There is a link with every 24x24 game to Alan Hensel's analysis site, which many players here depend on to help them find moves. Maybe the board image scheme used there would be preferable?

You should know that new grid sizes 30x30 anf 48x48 have recently been introduced, and are currently available as rating games or in the infinity tournaments. The other tournaments may be added later. Here is a link to a 48x48 game. If you look at the move list there, you will see that Richard uses lowercase a ... z followed by uppercase A ... V for the columns. There is also a button there to download a text file in "tsgf" format, which ostensibly means Twixt SGF, but there are several deviations from standard SGF. The alphabet is used for both coordinates there, but the rows and columns beyond 26 do not show up as letters under ASCII encoding. It's what I would call a mess.

I mention this because Alan's analysis site does not currently work for these larger grids, and may never work. See my earlier post in this thread. One nice feature Alan's site has for standard Twixt is a link to download a binary file for the Java applet Jtwixt, an analysis tool which may be the only alternative for those who want some kind of virtual board to work out moves. Currently Jtwixt can handle boards up to 36x36. The coordinate scheme for Jtwixt does not differentiate between lowercase and uppercase letters. After Z there is AA, AB, etc. I am working on modifying the Jtwixt code so it can handle up to 48x48. Also I need to make Jtwixt able to import text which is copied from the lowercase-uppercase move list (NOT the tsgf file.)

 It would be convenient for users to be able to download a Jtwixt binary file from the LG page in the meantime. That's a LOT more than you offered to do, apetresc. I just thought I would mention it. I don't even know if anyone uses Jtwixt besides myself. There may be more users as time goes by and these larger grids become popular but there is no easy analysis page one click away.

Thanks again for your help!

Thanks Mister Cat.  Much appreciated.

I would suggest the columns should be labelled with A to Z recurring

But columns above Z are recorded like a spreadsheet eg the next ones are AA,AB,AC,AD etc

Okay, thanks for the details all, especially David. It's going to be a bit of an undertaking but I hope to get to it this November (I'll be on paternity leave from work so hopefully I'll have a bit of time in during the newborn's naps!)

I've handled the larger-than-26x26 problem in SGF before, with adding support for it to Hex-Gui, so that part should be relatively simple.

Damn...i had forgotten why i stopped to play TwixtNow i have new games i remembered the reasons ¬¬