Hi!
Happy New Year!
On 1st of January the first Norwegian Online Backgammon Championship was held on Backgammon Studio! This was pretty awesome (ok I could be a bit biased..)! :-)
It was a double elimination 9 points tournament where Christopher Hedberg came up on top winning the final against Torkel Haugødegård! Congratulations!
It started out just fine with lots of player logged on and lots of matches being played. Then after some time players started to get disconnected and everything fell apart like a house of cards! That got me sweating a bit until I found a 3 second timeout in some third party code I use on the server. Once increased everything was stable again.
This network problem could also be the cause for occasional network problems other players have had. If the client didn't respond after 3 seconds the server assumed the client was lost and closed the connection. If you've had network problems in the past while playing online matches now is the time to give it another try!
Some other problems became apparent when lots of players were online at the same time. Difficult to find your opponent:
It is now possible to sort the users list alphabetically and on interest. Want to find a particular user? Alphabetic sort is your friend! Want to find an opponent for a match? Interest sort is a better choice.
For new players who haven't played any matches before: How do you take the cube once offered?
It may not be immediately obvious that the area in the lower right corner can display different sections so now whenever a section is updated the client switches to display this (it could have been displaying the chat). You can also click on the cube to open a take/drop dialog.
In other news:
Oh hey! Backgammon Studio just passed 2000 users! Awesome! :-)
A few days ago I was informed by Lew Wilkinson about a problem with Android 7 devices where password change didn't work. It turns out that the email program on those devices changed the url that I was sending out so the verification always failed. If you have had problems with registering before this problem has been resolved and now is the time to try again!
I have removed the ad dialog as it was just a bit too annoying.
Backgammon Studio The Swiss Army knife of backgammon!
Best regards,
TP