I broadcasted NGA summercamp tournament games to OGS this weekend using suomigo account. I learned some important stuff and I’m now sharing them with the developers.
Demo games show “Review by suomigo” in the game title. That’s a bit misleading when we are talking about broadcasted games. It would be MUCH better to fill that space with the game name. Now the game name couldn’t be found anywhere.
There is no “game info” in demo games. So no way to see the rules used or timesettings(there is no place to fill the time settings btw)
There is still no move numbers in the shared variations in demo games
Unregistered users can join and watch the game when they are linked(very good). However they cannot be “seen”. There is no way to tell how many people are actually watching the broadcast. You only see registered users.
Broadcaster cannot edit the game name, player names, ranks, rules, or anything after the demo game is created. This makes big pressure for the broadcaster when there is usually little time to set things up after the pairing is out and players start to play. It also doesn’t allow one to fix typos.
If(when) there is a mistake in the beginning of the kifu and it is noticed only later (so as many many moves have been played)
There is no way to “fix” that mistake while keeping the rest of the kifu. Like copy/paste the rest of the moves after that move to a correct move. Or move a single stone in the kifu.
EDIT: I am stupid. I could have used the editing tools to remove the misplaced stone and then replace it. It will create a new variation but it will still keep the rest of the stones as they were. Had I only thought of this in the first round when I struggled to replay the whole game (and failed)
The gametree that is shown to spectators will show shared variations as the top most branch. When the game actually reaches that point the gameline will be on a branch going down. The game line should ALWAYS be the top most “branch”
Score Estimator doesn’t work in demo games. Also demo games have no scoring tool.
In demo games, when using the “full screen” mode found in the right menu. There is 20-30 pixels “extra” in the rightside “chat+other stuff” height so it will show a vertical scrollbar for the whole page. It is annoying.
I forgot one more thing. The demo games are not “promoted” inside the server in anyway. So “big” broadcasts still have less people spectating than normal high dan games that are played in OGS because they can be found from observe games or the graphs.
It would be nice if demo games could be included in there somehow. This all comes back to sorting by spectator count.
I like how KGS allows the moderators to pin games to top of the game lists to show important events.
Today I broadcasted three games from the 2014 Finnish Championship qualifiers
I gained more experience and found some minor bugs. I wanted to make a new thread but realizing that most of the stuff I reported last time are still the same. I decided to just use this thread again.
Still the same.
Still the same.
FIXED. Very nice to see guest users back.
Still the same.
As for the other stuff I can’t say if they are the same or not because this time I was broadcasting with my tablet and couldn’t try those things.
Some “new bugs” occured though.
All the comments are marked as “Move 0”
This makes it very hard for new spectators to follow the kibitz history.
While broadcasting. The “Move comments…” box is so rarely used (I used it once in each game to mark the result in the end…) that it takes disproportional amount of screen estate for the broadcaster AND the observers. It would be very nice if it could be minimized to a icon (something like malkovich blog) and it would highlight or automatically maximize (each time user navigated to a move that has a move comment. It would then needed to be manually closed again)
This could also be the case for game tree. Only pop the game tree into existence when there is a branch.
When focus is on the game tree and one hits END(on keyboard) or double forward arrow(also end…) it will actually go to move 0 instead of the last move. All other buttons work correctly.
Some of my old private messages opened up when I opened OGS for my tablet. (I know it’s really old “bug” but still worth repeating)
Weirdly sometimes when I open my own demo games(that I have made before) I can see the game as I left it (on the last move) but I see “0” as the move number and the small refresh icon is red. Clicking that red icon doesn’t change anything but just changes the move number to the correct last move and then the icon turns gray. I don’t know if this is related to opening the game on a different computer or after removing cache.
This is for Android and latest Chrome(android).
After focusing chat input(or sending a message…) and then scrolling up(to see the board) after placing a move I will get instantly scrolled back to the chat and the virtual keyboard will open ready for typing. This might be correct way of doing it on a desktop where one can see everything but on a mobile where one has to scroll the page to see the board/chat it is very annoying. I had to “click” something on the background after each message I sent to unfocus the chat input.
This is for Android and latest Chrome(android).
When first loading a game window I can see the board as a tiny size and below the chat and other buttons/info
Once the page is fully loaded the board moves on top of everything and the size is correct. This is for latest android chrome.
Last but not the least.
As I was opening OGS with my tablet I got HAMMERED by the default overview page (“My games”?) because I have around 200 on going games.
I couldn’t do anything with the browser. It just kept loading. Luckily I had bookmarked the chat and I could use that as “lightweight” landing page for OGS and then I could create the demos.
Oh one more thing. There are still no move numberings on shared variations… This is a major “wow” factor feature. Broadcasting tournament games is the best way to gain visibility and having clean and working kibitz for those broadcasts would give very nice first impression for people who just click a link to see a game.
Today I broadcasted two more games and found a very weird bug.
I can only reproduce it on my galaxy tab 7.0 plus with latest android chrome.
On my note1 with exactly the same android chrome versio it will not “trigger”
If I had “none”,“bottom-left” or “bottom-right” selected for “goban labels” (aka coordinates) then just clicking anywhere outside of the board, like the player boxes or “remove branch” X button. There would seemingly randomly be a new move added to the top most first line(line 19)" of the recording. I tested this more than 7 times. Each time I could reproduce it with my tablet(tab 7.0+) but never on my phone(note1).
After setting “goban labels” to “all sides”, “top-left” or “top-right” I could never reproduce it.
It was major WTF feeling recording a game and getting stones appear on the board seemingly random. Then trying to undo them by removing a branch just to get them again because of doing that.
Another bug I found that when the virtual keyboard appears then the whole page zooms out a little bit and the board will resize to somewhat smaller size. That is not so critical but when I am finished at typing or just hide the virtual keyboard then the page is zoomed to it’s original size but not quite. On the right side there is always some 4 character wide area that doesn’t fit to the screen and I had to manually pinch zoom the page a tad to be able to see spectator icon or right most coordinates of the board.
As a whole I think OGS is pretty usable for recording. I used old hardware(Tab 7.0+) that had some problems keeping more than one game page “open” at the same time. I had my own recording and then I wanted to watch some other game but if I left one of these game windows alone for too long and later returned to it then the whole page would reload(instead of just quickly drawing the latest new moves) and it would take some 3-7 seconds to finish. If I manually kept both pages “busy” by not leaving them in the background for too long, then I never had to wait for a full reload. It would just quickly draw the new moves to the game page.
Might be that the Tab 7.0+ has too little memory or something
OH, and what I got comment and that would improve your user experience would be numbering comments. Now every comment is numbered by infamous ‘move 0’.
yeah, and I can’t emphasise how much that reduce user experience from relayed games,
shouldn’t be that hard to fix, just extra CurrentMove=NumberOfMovesInMainTree in some right place.
