white or black cross only when dead stone is inside territory of opposite color.
if dead stone is not inside any territory then draw gray cross without square inside. Such stone never exist in properly finished game, so its not very important to make it very visible.
these red crosses look especially weird in small preview
Alternatively, we could keep the red cross in the scoring agreement phase, as it’s good for dead stones to be clearly visible and stand out, and then switch to just transparent stones once the game is definitively scored and finished?
Or would it be even more confusing to show dead stones in two different ways?
Consistency is extremely important for minimizing cognitive load
Honestly, I like the red cross as it is. Really easy to see what’s marked dead
I also don’t have an issue with the red cross.
If anything, I have more of an issue with the transparency of the dead stones.
The contrast between a dead white stone and a lighter background color (like the default board color) seems a bit low, and the contrast between a dead black stone and a living black stone also seems a bit low. And I’m not even visually impaired.
Yeah, the red X looks clean and semantically clear
If I wished for one thing, it’s that the red cross didn’t extend quite so far.
But other than that I’m in the “I like it” camp.
(I also have it on my list to see if we can customize it 
)
I can see that
Nice 
Still in the prefer to have an option to hide the Red Cross camp 
Feel so weird to see it each time.
do a stone scoring / group tax system
and each player has a button to use auto play
katago will fill the board optimally
only allow the option after 200? moves
godspeed
Current work in progress for the crosses that I think looks better, thanks for the suggestion @stone.defender . If the stones have been removed and their removal has resulted in the intersection being considered territory for their opponent, the same color of the square is used for the X. If the stones have been removed but no territory has resulted in it, they are gray, and finally if they are removed from your own territory that’s almost surely a mistake (although there’s probably some situations where it’s not), those are marked in red to draw attention to them.
Is there a scenario where stones are marked dead in a neutral zone, and it’s not a mistake?
When territory isn’t sealed yet primarily, I didn’t want the marked removal of those to look like a mistake and draw attention from the sealing marks. Also, if you’re manually toggling, I didn’t wan to blare red at folks while they were still clicking through groups.
Nice!
Can you try it without a separate square marking on top of the X, but give the X the same gray border that your squares have? Like the X is a variant of the square shape. Maybe it shouldn’t go all the way to the edge so it’s less extreme.
One thing I’m thinking is that when counting the score Japanese style, you would count one point for each square, and two points for each X, just like drawing the X takes two strokes.
We are OK with this kind of thing, right?
I still think that the bright red cross attracts too much attention.
Looks much better, in my opinion.
Worth trying.
After looking at the pictures, I started to think that maybe removing the square from the cross is a nice solution as well, but for the cost of consistency.
I don’t know, even this looks fine and clean, especially if the dead stones are transparent:
yeah looks like an error when it’s not, I’ll just get rid of the red all together (except when there is territory for the wrong color?)
I’ll play with it some more, it’s already a “stroke” so I’ll have to form the shape of the X a bit differently, but should be doable.
The weird way it marks capturable stones in seki maybe?