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HN: Like playing Go? Review my new site. It was a "weekend hack."

81 points by davepeck 17y ago

davepeck 17y ago
Thanks for taking the time to check it out. This was a "weekend hack" for me -- really, two weekends since I implemented Ko enforcement and a few other requested features the weekend after the original code was written. I wrote more about "weekend hacks" here: http://davepeck.org/2009/01/26/weekend-hack-1-go/ http://davepeck.org/2009/01/26/weekend-hack-1-go/ The project is an open-source AppEngine application. The source code is up on GitHub; it is released under the AGPLv3. This was a hack, so don't expect the world's finest code base! http://github.com/davepeck/appengine-go/tree/master http://github.com/davepeck/appengine-go/tree/master Please send your suggestions (or, better, patches) my way. Happy Go!
- Maciek416 17y ago
  Can you explain the part about entering email addresses?
  - davepeck 17y ago
    This version of Go is played by correspondence. Email or twitter is required. There are no "accounts" on go.davepeck.org -- just people playing the game via their preferred contact mechanism.
- Scriptor 17y ago
  Are you using the Japanese or Chinese scoring system? EDIT: Also, I'd like a way to send a message to the person I'm requesting to play with. I checked to see what the message was like and for someone who doesn't know what it's about might be confused, even consider it spam.
  - davepeck 17y ago
    Now that it is open source, I'm aware of at least two efforts that will provide tools to help with scoring once the game is finished. Currently scoring is up to the players after the game is done. As for the message: interesting. It says, effectively: "Someone started a game of Go with you; click here to play." Is that really so confusing? What would you say instead? Do you want control of subject, message contents, both?
    - Scriptor 17y ago
      It's just that the message sounds a lot like that website that mass-emailed people with the message "someone wants to share pictures with you, click here to see them" or something like that. A simple textbox containing some optional text to be sent along with the email to provide some context would be nice. As for the message itself, maybe adding some of the game details such as board size and each player's colors? For someone who knows Go this would make the email seem more legitimate. And/Or you could add a "What's this" at the email's bottom that's only added to game invites that briefly described your app. Damnit, I know Python, time to check out the code and stop writing lists of stuff you should do!
      - davepeck 17y ago
        Haha, awesome. I think this would be a great set of changes! Cheers.
delano 17y ago
This is great! If it were possible to play against people I didn't know I would use it all the time. I've annoyed friends for years trying to get them to play. I like toggable settings by the way.
- davepeck 17y ago
  I originally designed this site so that I could play with _my_ friends, which basically meant I wanted to challenge them via email. As a result, the site is (currently) correspondence rather than account-based. If you want to play with strangers, Dragon Go Server is the place to be. I am thinking about adding accounts and rankings in the future but if I do so, I want to make sure I can differentiate enough from DGS to make it interesting to people.
- CGamesPlay 17y ago
  The toggle settings are extremely annoying. The drop-down combo box is over 20 years old at this point. Still here because it still works.
  - davepeck 17y ago
    Cool, good to hear this, and I was hoping to have discussion about the toggle controls. There are only two toggleable options on the entire site that would be better served by a combobox. The rest are binary. The two in question both appear on the sign-up page and both are rarely used (based on the site statistics.) Therefore I opted for the less "correct" (and less usable) but more visually consistent option. If all you're doing is spinning those two options around to test the site, then yes it certainly could be annoying. But my hunch is that for the average use case, it's just not a big deal...
rg123 17y ago
In addition to the Ko rule, you might want to consider handling the other repeated postion situations like at: http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html Rules vary for these, though. See: http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept The British Go Association has a great site in general, with good info on computer and online Go playing resources.
lukas 17y ago
Looks like a fun site. Anyone want to try playing me? My email is lukeb@cs.stanford.edu. I'm a 5dan (aga) but I haven't played for years.
- Scriptor 17y ago
  Oh God, I'm at best a 17 kyu and haven't played in a while either. Well, let's change that.
timwiseman 17y ago
Definitely impressive, but I think I prefer www.dragongoserver.net for the moment.
- davepeck 17y ago
  See my other comment about how I think my site relates to DGS -- I think they are complementary. And can you give me specific reasons that you like DGS better, or is it a case of liking what you're used to?
DavidSJ 17y ago
Is there a reason I should prefer this over http://www.dragongoserver.net/ http://www.dragongoserver.net/ ?
- davepeck 17y ago
  It depends on your needs. If you need any advanced features, or you want to play for rank, DGS is the place to be. If, on the other hand, you want to casually play games with friends, my site is probably better suited to that. My site has (in my opinion) much nicer visuals & interface, but most importantly it is easy to play with anyone you like -- they don't need to have an account. I am contemplating adding accounts and rankings in the future. But then I would stray into DGS territory.
pclark 17y ago
can you include a match making service?
- davepeck 17y ago
  This is a great idea! To explain the history a bit: I originally wrote this site so that I could play with my friends, whose email addresses (and twitter accounts) I know. That's why there are no accounts on the site itself right now. (And as I've mentioned elsewhere, accounts starts to look more like other services I know, so I'm less excited about going that direction.) The site has enough traffic these days that I could imagine a match-making service that didn't require an account; you just get in line and give a rough sense of how good you are, and when a match is found both players get an email (or twitter) and away they go. Does this sound like a good feature? I think it would be easy to add!
  - delano 17y ago
    Absolutely!
  - gambling8nt 17y ago
    I'd recommend giving a quick overview of the Kyu/Dan ranking system and then asking people in line to estimate their rank if they don't know it.
    - davepeck 17y ago
      Yeah. I'm starting to think that my site best serves people who are new to Go, or who are casual about it, and want to play some fun games without worrying too much about all the complexities. So having tutorials about the game, including this kind of information about Kyu/Dan (especially in the match-making section of the site) I think makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
    - sh1mmer 17y ago
      It would be slick if it figured out their approximate Kyu/Dan from watching them play. Not sure how you'd do that.
shaunxcode 17y ago
Could you put cursor:pointer on the clickable parts of the board?
- davepeck 17y ago
  I went back and forth on this. In the end I decided that cursor:pointer was most desirable for links, and that on the board I just wanted the standard cursor. Let me know if you feel strongly...
dimarco 17y ago
I'm a sucker for cool typography.
- davepeck 17y ago
  Haha! As it happens, I watched Helvetica a few days before I built this site. I had in mind the typographer who was viscerally angry about Helvetica's popularity; he described Helvetica as "textual dung." I decided I disagree!
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Too bad Safari doesn't ever kern: those Yo pairs end up garish, whatever the font.
    - davepeck 17y ago
      Is this a Safari thing or a Webkit thing? I notice it in Chrome too.
      - jacobolus 17y ago
        Apparently it’s a webkit thing, done for performance reasons. On IRC, it was claimed that when they last tried it, kerning slowed text rendering down 25% (because it makes it impossible to cache some glyph metrics or something), but that was apparently quite a while ago, and they said it "might be a good idea to test again".
timinman 17y ago
First off, I love it that you made a game without flash. way to stick it to the man. I also have some javascript games on my site http://kidbuilder.net http://kidbuilder.net To improve it: Why not add instructions? I'm not sure how to play. Also, The main page is just a little taller than the screen on my hp laptop. I had to scroll down to find the play link.
- davepeck 17y ago
  Drat! I tried to be careful about the size of the main page so that you'd never have to scroll. What browser, and what screen resolution do you have? I will correct for it. I definitely intend to add instructions to the site soon. I also want to add full-on interactive tutorials so that new players can learn the game. But... time! :-)
jkkramer 17y ago
Nice work! It's great to see a fellow go-playing hacker on HN. I'm the author of EidoGo (http://eidogo.com/ http://eidogo.com/, http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master), which is JavaScript-based, open source, and has features like branching and labels. Feel free to steal any of my JavaScript; I'll certainly be taking a peek at yours :-)
- davepeck 17y ago
  I played with your site and it's really nicely done. Following your project on GitHub now. Good to know about this; I've discovered a few other Go+GitHub types in the past few months. Cheers.
staticshock 17y ago
Wow, this is drop-for-drop exactly what i wanted to make for chess, because i wanted to play with friends over email. I went as far as to write the valid chess move logic, I just never set up the web app. Cool stuff, thanks, i've been playing Go for 4 hours!
- davepeck 17y ago
  Thanks! Chess like this would be a lot of fun, too. By all means, use whatever of my code is useful to build a similar chess service. (Note, though, that my Go service is under AGPLv3 which is a very restrictive/viral license.) Cheers.
andrewljohnson 17y ago
If anyone plays on KGS, I'm Blackthorn.
sh1mmer 17y ago
The site is gorgeous but the hidden navigation sucks it really needs some hints. I thought the underlining for email was decorative until I read the comments here and fiddled about looking for Twitter options. Some kind of tool tip might help perhaps?
erikb 17y ago
This tool feels great. And the simple interface to start a game is a breakthrough in my eyes. I like and will use it.

81 points by davepeck 17y ago

Thanks for taking the time to check it out. This was a "weekend hack" for me -- really, two weekends since I implemented Ko enforcement and a few other requested features the weekend after the original code was written. I wrote more about "weekend hacks" here: http://davepeck.org/2009/01/26/weekend-hack-1-go/ http://davepeck.org/2009/01/26/weekend-hack-1-go/ The project is an open-source AppEngine application. The source code is up on GitHub; it is released under the AGPLv3. This was a hack, so don't expect the world's finest code base! http://github.com/davepeck/appengine-go/tree/master http://github.com/davepeck/appengine-go/tree/master Please send your suggestions (or, better, patches) my way. Happy Go!

Maciek416 17y ago
Can you explain the part about entering email addresses?
- davepeck 17y ago
  This version of Go is played by correspondence. Email or twitter is required. There are no "accounts" on go.davepeck.org -- just people playing the game via their preferred contact mechanism.
Scriptor 17y ago
Are you using the Japanese or Chinese scoring system? EDIT: Also, I'd like a way to send a message to the person I'm requesting to play with. I checked to see what the message was like and for someone who doesn't know what it's about might be confused, even consider it spam.
- davepeck 17y ago
  Now that it is open source, I'm aware of at least two efforts that will provide tools to help with scoring once the game is finished. Currently scoring is up to the players after the game is done. As for the message: interesting. It says, effectively: "Someone started a game of Go with you; click here to play." Is that really so confusing? What would you say instead? Do you want control of subject, message contents, both?
  - Scriptor 17y ago
    It's just that the message sounds a lot like that website that mass-emailed people with the message "someone wants to share pictures with you, click here to see them" or something like that. A simple textbox containing some optional text to be sent along with the email to provide some context would be nice. As for the message itself, maybe adding some of the game details such as board size and each player's colors? For someone who knows Go this would make the email seem more legitimate. And/Or you could add a "What's this" at the email's bottom that's only added to game invites that briefly described your app. Damnit, I know Python, time to check out the code and stop writing lists of stuff you should do!
    - davepeck 17y ago
      Haha, awesome. I think this would be a great set of changes! Cheers.

delano 17y ago

This is great! If it were possible to play against people I didn't know I would use it all the time. I've annoyed friends for years trying to get them to play. I like toggable settings by the way.

davepeck 17y ago
I originally designed this site so that I could play with _my_ friends, which basically meant I wanted to challenge them via email. As a result, the site is (currently) correspondence rather than account-based. If you want to play with strangers, Dragon Go Server is the place to be. I am thinking about adding accounts and rankings in the future but if I do so, I want to make sure I can differentiate enough from DGS to make it interesting to people.
CGamesPlay 17y ago
The toggle settings are extremely annoying. The drop-down combo box is over 20 years old at this point. Still here because it still works.
- davepeck 17y ago
  Cool, good to hear this, and I was hoping to have discussion about the toggle controls. There are only two toggleable options on the entire site that would be better served by a combobox. The rest are binary. The two in question both appear on the sign-up page and both are rarely used (based on the site statistics.) Therefore I opted for the less "correct" (and less usable) but more visually consistent option. If all you're doing is spinning those two options around to test the site, then yes it certainly could be annoying. But my hunch is that for the average use case, it's just not a big deal...

rg123 17y ago

In addition to the Ko rule, you might want to consider handling the other repeated postion situations like at: http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html Rules vary for these, though. See: http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept The British Go Association has a great site in general, with good info on computer and online Go playing resources.

lukas 17y ago

Looks like a fun site. Anyone want to try playing me? My email is lukeb@cs.stanford.edu. I'm a 5dan (aga) but I haven't played for years.

Scriptor 17y ago
Oh God, I'm at best a 17 kyu and haven't played in a while either. Well, let's change that.

timwiseman 17y ago

Definitely impressive, but I think I prefer www.dragongoserver.net for the moment.

davepeck 17y ago
See my other comment about how I think my site relates to DGS -- I think they are complementary. And can you give me specific reasons that you like DGS better, or is it a case of liking what you're used to?

DavidSJ 17y ago

Is there a reason I should prefer this over http://www.dragongoserver.net/ http://www.dragongoserver.net/ ?

davepeck 17y ago
It depends on your needs. If you need any advanced features, or you want to play for rank, DGS is the place to be. If, on the other hand, you want to casually play games with friends, my site is probably better suited to that. My site has (in my opinion) much nicer visuals & interface, but most importantly it is easy to play with anyone you like -- they don't need to have an account. I am contemplating adding accounts and rankings in the future. But then I would stray into DGS territory.

pclark 17y ago

can you include a match making service?

davepeck 17y ago
This is a great idea! To explain the history a bit: I originally wrote this site so that I could play with my friends, whose email addresses (and twitter accounts) I know. That's why there are no accounts on the site itself right now. (And as I've mentioned elsewhere, accounts starts to look more like other services I know, so I'm less excited about going that direction.) The site has enough traffic these days that I could imagine a match-making service that didn't require an account; you just get in line and give a rough sense of how good you are, and when a match is found both players get an email (or twitter) and away they go. Does this sound like a good feature? I think it would be easy to add!
- delano 17y ago
  Absolutely!
- gambling8nt 17y ago
  I'd recommend giving a quick overview of the Kyu/Dan ranking system and then asking people in line to estimate their rank if they don't know it.
  - davepeck 17y ago
    Yeah. I'm starting to think that my site best serves people who are new to Go, or who are casual about it, and want to play some fun games without worrying too much about all the complexities. So having tutorials about the game, including this kind of information about Kyu/Dan (especially in the match-making section of the site) I think makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
  - sh1mmer 17y ago
    It would be slick if it figured out their approximate Kyu/Dan from watching them play. Not sure how you'd do that.

shaunxcode 17y ago

Could you put cursor:pointer on the clickable parts of the board?

davepeck 17y ago
I went back and forth on this. In the end I decided that cursor:pointer was most desirable for links, and that on the board I just wanted the standard cursor. Let me know if you feel strongly...

dimarco 17y ago

I'm a sucker for cool typography.

davepeck 17y ago
Haha! As it happens, I watched Helvetica a few days before I built this site. I had in mind the typographer who was viscerally angry about Helvetica's popularity; he described Helvetica as "textual dung." I decided I disagree!
- jacobolus 17y ago
  Too bad Safari doesn't ever kern: those Yo pairs end up garish, whatever the font.
  - davepeck 17y ago
    Is this a Safari thing or a Webkit thing? I notice it in Chrome too.
    - jacobolus 17y ago
      Apparently it’s a webkit thing, done for performance reasons. On IRC, it was claimed that when they last tried it, kerning slowed text rendering down 25% (because it makes it impossible to cache some glyph metrics or something), but that was apparently quite a while ago, and they said it "might be a good idea to test again".

timinman 17y ago

First off, I love it that you made a game without flash. way to stick it to the man. I also have some javascript games on my site http://kidbuilder.net http://kidbuilder.net To improve it: Why not add instructions? I'm not sure how to play. Also, The main page is just a little taller than the screen on my hp laptop. I had to scroll down to find the play link.

davepeck 17y ago
Drat! I tried to be careful about the size of the main page so that you'd never have to scroll. What browser, and what screen resolution do you have? I will correct for it. I definitely intend to add instructions to the site soon. I also want to add full-on interactive tutorials so that new players can learn the game. But... time! :-)

jkkramer 17y ago

Nice work! It's great to see a fellow go-playing hacker on HN. I'm the author of EidoGo (http://eidogo.com/ http://eidogo.com/, http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master), which is JavaScript-based, open source, and has features like branching and labels. Feel free to steal any of my JavaScript; I'll certainly be taking a peek at yours :-)

davepeck 17y ago
I played with your site and it's really nicely done. Following your project on GitHub now. Good to know about this; I've discovered a few other Go+GitHub types in the past few months. Cheers.

staticshock 17y ago

Wow, this is drop-for-drop exactly what i wanted to make for chess, because i wanted to play with friends over email. I went as far as to write the valid chess move logic, I just never set up the web app. Cool stuff, thanks, i've been playing Go for 4 hours!

davepeck 17y ago
Thanks! Chess like this would be a lot of fun, too. By all means, use whatever of my code is useful to build a similar chess service. (Note, though, that my Go service is under AGPLv3 which is a very restrictive/viral license.) Cheers.

andrewljohnson 17y ago

If anyone plays on KGS, I'm Blackthorn.

sh1mmer 17y ago

The site is gorgeous but the hidden navigation sucks it really needs some hints. I thought the underlining for email was decorative until I read the comments here and fiddled about looking for Twitter options. Some kind of tool tip might help perhaps?

erikb 17y ago

This tool feels great. And the simple interface to start a game is a breakthrough in my eyes. I like and will use it.