Hi!
Summer is over... (and in Norway we are still waiting for it...)
I suspect cube handling is a rather important part of the game and in order to figure out how much I suck at it I added an option to get an overview of how you do in this part of the game (Obviously not going to use myself as an example here! :-) ):
After you have selected a player and clicked on the cube handling section you get a detailed overview (from my internal test server with rather few matches):
It can be a bit slow to get this information displayed so I have to see if I am able to speed it up.
You can click on the view button beside each category and get a list of positions which you can then go through (click on entries or arrow key through the list). It is sorted with the biggest error on top.
Earlier Hall wanted to see the highscore list for the challenges displayed at the front page so I added an option to hover over the entry in order to display it (html5 dialog which not all browsers support I fear...):
Hall also wanted some improvements to the 'play as' feature so I added a better display of how well you do against the player you chose to play as and also how well you are doing against XG:
In the player overview you can now sort on name and country in addition to number of available matches:
I haven't been able to identify the nationality of every player so if you go to the end of the list:
there are a fair amount if missing countries. It is easier if I know the grid gammon alias of the player but without this it gets a bit time consuming to locate the country. Who is "Mochy Sho" by the way? I also saw "Mochy Sho Noguchi" someplace. Is that "Mochy kicks ass" in japanese? :-)
Earlier I also added a positions section to the main menu which can be thought of as public bookmarks where there are direct links to interesting positions (or reference positions if I ever find one...). I haven't had the time to fill it up with too many interesting positions yet though.
I split the option to just view match errors as a separate entry in the menu:
When viewing match errors you now have some more options:
where you can checkmark a few of the positions and then bookmark them, play through them, browse them or create a challenge from them (you might not see this option though...).
Someone mentioned that they weren't a big fan of the color/graphics choices I have made. Shocking! :-) So I added an option to change the foreground/background color:
I guess I have to expand this to include changing some of the board graphics too at some point but I don't find this too critical to do at the moment.
Earlier I added something I chose to call showtime! where you can challenge another player to a duel over 10 random positions where the player who answers correct first gets 1 point. If you answer wrong the opponent get 10 seconds to come up with the right answer. There is also tracking of performance (if it works...) which gives you a rank based on average performance.
If you leave the page you also leave the chat so odds are good it will be difficult to find an opponent (at least for now) so you may have to bring a friend! I haven't tested it too much myself so let me know if it works! :-)
Earlier I added a display of where most players are from (Most popular country..):
Top 5 countries are displayed. If any country is able to overtake the US for the top spot everybody in that country gets 3 months free premium access to the commercial server! :-) (I'll give the US users a chance to overtake it again later if it ever happens!)
Earlier I ran into some disk space problems on the free server so I copied over the login data for all registered users to the commercial server. So if you have already registered you can try out the other server too. All of the above stuff should work fine there (most is likely to be missing on the free server for mysterious reasons...). I have since resolved the problems so the free server will remain running.
Give it a try!
http://www.backgammonstudio.tk/