Everybody knows that OGS’s AI analysis is one of its greatest boons, but there’s an issue that actually hinders its usefulness and even deters some from using it at all, the ghost variations.
The problem is that once you enter an AI suggested branch, the ghost variation is stuck to the board, obscuring the view of how the current position within the branch looks. This is for two reason: firstly, the ghost variation makes it difficult to read other variations mentally, and secondly, it is difficult to differentiate between the actual position and the ghost variations to start off with.This is impractical. Removing the ghost variation entirely is also not good, seeing as having a holistic view of the branch can incentivize you to either explore it or not, as well as giving a nice overview of the intention behind the first move.
It’s worth mentioning that the “Disable AI analysis” button does effectively do this, but one would need to refresh the page, and it makes switching between the AI analysis and variations tedious. It is important to note that toggling the ghost variations will not remove the AI’s suggested moves (for instance, the next blue move), only the branch’s ‘watermark’.
My suggestion is to simply add a toggle button to the analysis dash board. Something like this:
We have this great tool available, why not expand its usefulness with this simple implementation? I added a feeler poll to see what you guys think.
Yes there is Go to settings > game preferences > variation stone transparency. Set value to 0.0. Then go look at some variations in a game. Does this provide a good-enough work-around to achieve the desired outcome?
Yes, if it could be set without constantly having to enter settings. The idea is to have the flexibility during analysis. Just make the button set the transparency to zero or switch between your present transparency setting. I haven’t actually checked it out yet, but will do so soon.
It still doesn’t get rid of the variation numbers though. That is you have the AI analysis on, you play through the variation, then you turn AI analysis off, but the transparencies stay even from the first move in the variation. Then if you turn the transparencies off the numbers still stay.
I’m not surprised it has been mentioned before, it’s such an obvious hindrance at times. Personally, and especially when its all clustered around a local position, can’t make much sense of the board state at all. And yes, your concern is valid, the numbers shouldn’t be visible with the suggested feature either. The idea is that one can get a clear view of the position, and only the position, which currently is impossible without disabling AI analysis.
Yeah I agree. AI is a huge boon. Especially since Lizzie development stopped and Katrain is kinnda hard to use and understand. Ghost numbers are annoying as hell tho.
I understand the concern and in a fighting scenario it can be annoying, what I do is play in a position like A1/T19 to break the sequence chain to be able to see the position more clearly, not ideal but works
Haha, fair enough. Looking more for a solution than a work around though. It really shouldn’t be that hard to implement, I mean there is already something that is turning it on and off as the AI variations appear.
Even if you wish to use ghost variation, its too hard to comprehend it
while you click those moves one by one, numbers eat your attention
So there should be option to turn off ghost variation even in order to use ghost variation
But, how to know where to click if numbers are turned off?
Variation should automatically appear in variations window if you click AI suggested move, so you can use keyboard right arrow to look at this variaion
It would be much faster to use and easier to understand that way.
So strange that this still hasn’t been adressed. Complete consensus and a clear, big annoyance to almost everyone using this feature. Is it time-consuming to fix it? Is that the reason again? Hard to understand the decisionmaking on this server.
Tons of unnecessary changes were made to the user interface recently, when making menu and search bar visible was the only needed change. Reporting interface was changed. Rengo was implemented. I don’t know the inside workings of course but I see a bad priority order from where I stand. I can understand the interests of devs influencing some of the process but to overlook bugs this much in favour of implementing new features seems almost irresponsible to me.
Epileptic demo board bug and this issue seem have been an annoyance to people who use OGS for study purposes, for a while. These are clear bugs that need fixing. Maybe we should try to convince the hands more actively to adress these issues?
Yes but i don’t see consensus on how to solve it. The design of a good solution is not that obvious.
That was a request asked a long time ago. Even someone invested money in it to get it done (by someone else as the main developer)
It’s hard to disagree on this, but we are not decision makers. I still enjoy my free access here and hope bugs to be adressed sometimes. Happy long life to OGS!
I don’t see the problem being adressed by anyone from the team. I see a suggestion on how to solve it and I don’t see objections. What kind of consensus would you look for from the community before devs step in to the convo or start looking into a fix?
You think we should offer money for this to be fixed? Is that how it works?
I’m just happy that even someone like you, who admires everything about OGS so much, agrees to this.
I see more as 1 suggestion. For example someone favors popup window for variation of the AI. Seems interesting but i guess not so easy to implement and quite a change in OGS design.
There isn’t a team as such btw, more contributors, friends or such for what i know. And who knows, those who contribute in the forum and in this thread may be part of them.
Well that’s how it worked. Not saying you have to, but saying that this surely helped rengo in the queue of things to be done.
Aren’t you going a bit far? You may go read a bit my posts again, you’ll be surprised.
I’m not confusing it at all - I have a good pc with kata on it and I don’t mind using that for AI review at all. This isn’t a big personal annoyance to me. It is just a big shortcoming of one of the biggest features of the server, also shown by the votes - it is rare that there is this much consensus on forums.
The user interface change… Were they really asked for? Can you point me to requests other than “make menu and search bar visible”? Most people I talked to took all the rest of the interface changes negatively. I am not aware of any requests regarding re-organizing everything.
Reporting interface change… Again, could you point me to users asking for this change? I thought this happened pretty quickly after demands from certain moderators. It wasn’t a community issue, it was a moderator issue. On the contrary, people I talked to were annoyed at this change and found it hard to report afterwards, especially with the in-game “call mod” button disappearing. If the changes are made upon demand, why was the “call mod” button removed initially and then added back again shortly after? It sure seemed like a change initiated by mods and tweaked after community discomfort.
Rengo wasn’t implemented because it was asked for earlier. Like Groin pointed out, it was added cuz money was involved.
By saying “these things were asked for long before”, are you suggesting that things are done in order of request? Are we really waiting for this issue to get its fair turn? It seems silly to change random or minor things just because they were asked for earlier and I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. I am more convinced by the “dev’s choice” argument.
It’s just that, it seems like a bad choice, letting huge bugs linger for so long.
Go to settings > game preferences > variation stone transparency. Set value to 0.0. Then go look at some variations in a game. Does this provide a good-enough work-around to achieve the desired outcome?
