Software

I've just been playing with the new 1.02 version of Universal 3D Chess and having fun with a couple of new features. Acutally, they might not be the most useful features in the net, but the video export may be welcomed for viewing games when the platform doesn't allow SGF files (i.e. some portable devices).

Massive rendering allows you to activate at once lots and lots of games on your screen. The first attempt I did, loading 100 games at once was quite funny, but then I overclocked the graphic card just to find out that 420 games loaded at the same time is too much for my computer. Anyway, here you have the picture of the 420 games:

And, on the next video you can watch a sample made with the new "video export" feature.

The video above has a 720x480 resolution with 25 images per second and lasts for 45 seconds. The total file size compressed with Xvid with 80% rate is 5,41 MB.

Here are the specifications of my laptop, so that you get an idea of how this might look like on yours:
-Dual Core T9100 (2,5Ghz, 6Mb Cache L2).
-4 Gigs DDR2.
-Nvidia 8600GT overclocked to 8700GT.
Obviously, the graphics card is the slowest part of the whole, but it still gives good results when it comes to Go graphics

Indeed, any Quad Core with a couple of 9800 GTX working on SLI may easily reach the 500 games with a decent frame-per-second average. I'll be waiting for your images.

A couple of days ago I received the new version of U3DC. According to the developer (and I agree on most of them), these are the improvements:

- Add a title bar to the main 3D view with short cut to functions (Next/Prev games, Full screen, Edit game info ...)
- New file format decoding, now able to load image in jpg, png, tga,gif, tiff, bmp, pict, psd, ps ...
- Drag feature to move the menu with your mouse if the screen is notbig enought
- Interface is more easy to use and more reactive
- New dialog box when quitting the program
- New game list style
- Borders between games
- Add board tag
- Game informations editing tool
- Conversion of an image to a game (GO) works not so badly now (but still experimental)
- Bug corrections in SGF file format

What stroke me the most when I first opened the version is the feeling of the whole application itself. It actually looks like a finished project, where the first version had some bugs to be fixed, now they are mostly solved. The navigation bar, though not necessary, looks quite cool and might be useful when working with massive amounts of games. The user interface and style have been improved a lot and it gives the sensation of a much nicer application (while the essence is exactly the same).

Here you have a screenshots of how it looks like (keep in mind that I've loaded a quite heavy image so that you get the final real quality):

Another feature which has been improved a lot is the "image to sgf" tool. Now it can actually convert an image to a sgf file so that you can play with it in U3DC. The only requisites are related to the amount and contrast of the colours you should use.

As you can see on the left, white and black stones must have plain colours while the board should remain in painful contrast with the other colours. Darker colours such as brown and red, will lead the program to convert it into black stones, thus giving a wrong result.

The result of the conversion of this image can be seen here:

I think further development in this line would be great, following the path left by Image2Sgf, so that it could automatically load the image from a camera into this wonderful 3D board.

By the way... have you ever wondered how to picture your girlfriend in a go board??? Playing with the some of the pictures of your collection is just... hilarious...

Yesterday Google launched a beta version of his new browser: Chrome. 

On one hand, first independent analysis show that this application uses less resources than Firefox and Internet Explorer. It introduces some good features, as the internal task monitor... On the other hand, as it's a beta version, there are already 3 security bugs described and you'll need to upgrade to java 6.10 version if you want to use any java tool on this browser. KGS' homepage appears to be somewhat unformatted and the java applet doesn't load. I've tried a few other applications (not java based) such as EidoGo and they work perfectly well.

Unfortunatelly, there is only the windows XP version available, MAC and Linux versions are supposed to be released on the forecoming weeks. You may be surprised by the news if you already know that Google is the main sponsor of Firefox, but is is all logical if we take into account google's plans... By the way, if you are used to Firefox's keyboard shortcuts, I'm glad to tell you that they are exactly the same in Chrome.

The more I'm using unix systems, the more homesick I'm of windows. It is very secure and has lots of advantages when compared to Microsoft's operative system, but the lack of powerful go software for Unix as well as good drivers for 3D cards are two of the major drawbacks.

Today I've been playing with some programs and Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) trying to get them working.

Here you have the results, ordered from worst perfomance to best.

Worst:

Good:

Other newer programs such as Universal 3D chess... show problems mostly related with the 3D card drivers. On the specific case of U3DC, the drop-down menus are disabled and the variation tree doesn't work, once you click on the variation tree, the program breaks down. On the other hand, it is a very good piece of software for making demostrations and so on.

If you want to get more information on how to load these programs as well as screenshots and a nice trick for loading them if you have a windows partition, click on the continue reading article

Here you have a review on the final release of Universal 3D Chess:

Currently you can only watch it through youtube or download this version with a 1036x676 resolution HERE (encoded with Xvid).

The final public realease is already available at the project's homepage: VoilaMonsieur