Topic awaiting preservation: A game of go is like a sword fight..

"You must think first"... where did I hear that already?
Anyway, I am working on a game of go, and for the first time, coaching a small team, three other persons.
The project looks good so far.

I dare to label it "web design related" because:
1) it's java
2) it involves networking in several ways

To me, it's pretty much a job of parsing go boards, transmitting the result, receiving responses and translating them back
to visuals. Kinda like parsing a web page.

I have asked questions in the PS forum about the graphics, so here is the linkie to the runnable java stuff (java1.4.2+ recommended, java1.2+ required):


Back to the title of this thread, the game of go has been taught to warrior elite and students in Korea, Japan
and China and was considered a martial art for <a long long duration>.
It is a wonderful game.

If you want to discover it, pandanet has deluxe go game clients,
a whole network, a beautiful art gallery, documentation, a go tutorial, and more:
http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/

Enjoy. (My little app will also act as a pandanet client btw)

(Edited by _Mauro on 02-21-2006 19:02)

And if you decide to install java14.2+ or already have it, you can click the following
link to launch my application directly
http://www.beyondwonderland.com/data/java/xiego/xiego.jnlp

(no special security permissions are required, this works in the safe java sandbox, meaning "same java as in applets, core stuff" - I am quite proud.
Upcoming versions will be signed and will save, load, download and upload material)

Cool, I've actually considered making a Go game in JavaScript.
Btw, it's said to be the hardest game to play for an AI, simply because there are so many strategies and allowed "moves".

/TwoD

I know two2D, it's one of the most complex and immense tasks you could ask an AI to perform, but
without unveiling too much, let's just say it's not a concern at all.

Hmmm... what do we have here? An update?
http://www.beyondwonderland.com/data/java/xiego/xiego.jnlp

Is it a major update? Hell no.
But it is enough to get into more, and more interesting technical details.
This little thing now keeps a state of the go board, aka goban, in the shape of an object oriented representation
of such a board.

This is still an empty shell btw, no way to play yet, but we're getting there for two players, human or computer.

What's challenging here is that, pretty much like javascripts, everything is drawn by the cpu,
and through an interpreter (the Java VM, still not as fast as a native program/binary/exe file - but getting there).

Since the stones now have a state, the whole layout must be redrawn each time a stone is added.

Meaning, in some of the tests I made, something like 1920x1200 pixel operations.

~~Gosh.

Plus it's a swing component in essence, in order for it to integrate user interfaces easilly.
I had to turn off the swing double buffering and ~gosh again, completely handle mine.

What this means is that I virtually could have an applet show the very same board, with the very same fine alpha blending
and interpolation.
Please pay attention to the word interpolation: at all times, all sprites are shrunken down versions of huge gif/jpeg files,
so everything is scaled on each redraw.

And I could pack all this in a 1920x1200 pixels banner applet

Also, there's a lot of clipping involved here, it's all "core" Java without specialties, core instructions, so to avoid overdraw and drawing the same pixel
n times, I clip my buffers between each sprite redrawal.

Think about it in terms of clipping your javascript/html "divs" to be able to display hundreds of them.

So yeah, it's 2d, it looks simple and silly, but it's packed with magic already, and finely crafted animations are up next.
In the end, it should stand 361 stones exploding at the same time.
Then we will plug the AI in, the network features, and.. ~pop~^ Oops. Blew a fuse. Is it 5AM? ~sigh.