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BGBlitz 2.7.0 is online

Posted By: Frank Berger
Date: Monday, 4 October 2010, at 7:56 p.m.

Hi

BGBlitz 2.7.0 is available: A pretty long time since the last release. There have been a lot of things that were more difficult than expected, things that were promising but didn't help and so on. And although there are not all things included that I wanted to implement in this release, the list of changes is the longest of all releases so far. Small stuff, larger stuff and nice things.

The list of improvements is too long, even for this posting, therefore I omit the minor ones.

  • the checker movement looks more smoothly now
  • support for the new Look and Feel "Nimbus" on Windows and Linux
  • two new themes, "1001Tawlas" by elSpaan "Feltastic" by Sam Rich
  • The dice rolls are animated
  • visual feedback for used dice (not available for all themes)
  • the doubling dialog shows an image of the current cube value
  • small screen sizes are handled better better, especially on Linux and netbooks
  • When you use manual dice, you can now enter the dice with the keyboard
  • there is a shortcut for doubling (^d)
  • the font size is adjustable in case your visual ability is reduced
  • the status bar shows the EPC (equivalent pip count) instead of the Thorpe Count
  • if you want to train calculating pips, there is a new toolbar button, that can be used to switch on/off the display of the pip count and shows the value of the pip count in the tooltip
  • in the best moves dialog you can select to shown up to 50 moves and this dialog and the evaluation dialog always shows cubeful equities
  • in the edit position dialogs you can also enter the combined position/matchID and the XGID. Further you can copy and paste either the combined position/matchID and the XGID or drag and drop those IDs on the board to get an evaluation (if no game is running). In all exports (ASCII, HTML) the XGID is given too.
  • the only small thing in the AI that has been changed in this version is a better cube liveness heuristic in end game situations
  • for casual players the level of game play for lower strength settings was reduced and made sure they can't accidentally use a higher search depth. Would be great if I have some guinea pigs to check whether those settings are o.k. for beginners.
  • do you know the feeling: "Why I get always the worst roll?" There is a new dialog box, that shows you how good each roll of dice would have been. You find it here: "Game/Distribution of rolls"
  • you can now install BGBlitz on an USB-stick (Just copy it on the stick and add a folder ".bgblitz" in the bgblitz directory
  • there is a new command line interface. It allows evaluation of positions and might be extended in the future if you have some ideas how to use it. You can use the programming language Groovy to write your programs.
  • Support for Snake is included (a Backgammon variation with a different starting position)
  • you can read/import/convert "sgf"-files
  • a Czech translation
  • I invested a *lot* of work to make BGBlitz faster. Tuning with modern Java implementations and the newest CPUs with Turboboost is a nightmare because it is very hard to measure what is an improvement and what is noise. Nevertheless I succeeded making BGBlitz faster. The improvement depends heavily on the operating system (32 or 64-Bit), the Java-version and your CPU. The speedup is between 15% to 70% (64-Bit, Core i7 or Atom). This new stuff does some things that might not work on all computers, and even crash BGBlitz in rare cases therefore you could disable this speedup with "Setup/Miscellaneous Setting/No Unsecure Speedup". If problems occur, please drop me an email. If the new code is disabled, BGBlitz runs rock-solid as usual, only a little bit slower.
  • some improvements for the network play, so it works better with multi homed computers and routers
  • Close to 50 further improvements and fixes....
I hope you enjoy the new version.
I'm always glad getting some feedback.
If you find some errors or quirks please drop me an email.

regards Frank

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