I am wondering about the status of Malkovich chat. Can it be read only by the person who types it, or also by the teammate?
5 Likes
i would hope it could be only the person who wrote it.
2 Likes
Ooo - good question. I think initially it will be “Oh, don’t do that!”
(I think that it would work in an undesirable way, until fixed).
3 Likes
OK - I’ve done the groundwork (and some actual work) towards this:
- A player can create a “Rengo” challenge, which is an invitation for others to participate in a Rengo game.
- Most game-creation parameters that are normally available, are available
- Rengo games are unranked
- Conditional moves are disabled
- Correspondence might work, but it is not required to as part of this implementation.
- Others can nominate to join that game (likely subject to rank restrictions on the game creation page, but not subject to “you have to be within 9 stones", which only applies to ranked games anyhow”)
- The original creator selects which team the nominating players are on (and whether they get to play at all in this challenge)
- When the original creator presses “Start”, the game starts.
- Ideally, the players get to “Accept” at this time, though this is not mandatory for this implementation.
- Minimum number of participating Rengo-Players supported: 4.
- Note: 3-player Rengo could also be supported, along with 4,5 … this bullet just says that ‘4’ is the number that must be allowable.
- Players should only be on the online-go.com site and not in need to visit other websites or use of external programs
- Each player has their own dedicated game board where they make a move every 1 out of 4 turns (if it’s 4-player Rengo, 1 in n turns in case n-player Rengo with n != 4 even gets implemented, which would be nice but not required.) They make a move by either clicking on an intersection of the go board to place a stone, or click on pass or resign, just like for normal non-Rengo games.
- A single clock applies to the activites of each side (black and white). The time taken by the active player on each turn is the time that is used in the clock.
- For making their move (play a stone, pass or resign) Players just use the same, usual UI functions as for non-Rengo games on OGS, no need for entering coordinates manually or other helper functions.
- Each player just needs one browser tab to participate in the Rengo game, same as for normal non-Rengo games on OGS.
- No need for account sharing or credential sharing, every player can just participate with their normal OGS account like they would in any normal non-Rengo game too.
- Undo is not required to work in any particular way.
- Hopefully one turn of undo will work, but there may be unforseen complications.
- Malkovitch chat is not expected to work in any particular way on Rengo games.
- It probably won’t work “properly”
I need the email address of a sponsor to send the escrow request, and we can start the clock 
@Gozart ?
4 Likes
Looks good. I sent you a message with my email address, which should be kept private by the way.
Edit: Hm, the escrow.com platform seems weird though. Despite picking “Services” it forces me to choose one of these 3 item types: “Vehicles, Merchandise and Domain names”. What’s up with that? Also, I cannot enter another inspection time instead of the default of “1 day” (I intended to change it to 4 days).
Any suggestions for another escrow service?
If you are familiar how to work around the bugs of that platform maybe you can just create a sell-service offer which I then accept.
1 Like
Yay that’s great. Let’s persist with escrow.com, just because it appears well-recommended: I’ll try to set up as a seller.
1 Like
Great; Just two more things -
There seems to be no time limit in this escrow thing. It should be set so that money won’t become inaccessible indefinitely in case of an unforeseeable black swan event, but there is actually some sort of deadline. It can be set as far as you’d like to have it, just there should be SOME deadline at some point in the future.
Also it’s kinda funny that it refers to a forum posting that can theoretically be edited or deleted by any OGS moderator (or yourself of course). >_>
So for persistency I’d strongly suggest instead copy/pasting the actual contents of the posting into the escrow-contract.
4 Likes
Yeah - I tried copying the content in, but it had a character limit 
In terms of editing that post, everyone can see the edit history, so the “as at today” is what applies.
For deletion - posts are almost never deleted, they just end up hidden from sight. So moderators can help in the case of dispute, unless they all team up against you 
It is slightly less than ideal I agree. But it has the advantage of also being on the public record, scrutinised by all here
I had thought that the escrow thing would give us a due date … I’ll take a look at that from my side.
Update: at second attempt, I put the due date into the Description, and made sure we share the escrow fee.
4 Likes
Alright, we shall rely on the forum link then for terms.
I cancelled the old transaction with the one-sided escrow fee. I cannot see the new one with shared fee yet, though. (I noticed there were 3 other transactions that you had already cancelled. I currently have an empty list under “action required” transactions.)
Edit:
And I think that might have been a mistake on my part and I have cancelled the actually correct transaction:
The one I cancelled said “Escrow fee 32,50$. The buyer is responsible for 100% of the escrow fee.”
However, “responsible” might just have meant that it is deducted purely from the sum provided by the buyer, and that hence you would receive a reduced amount (1967,50$).
I was a bit tired and too quick to interpret “100%” as “one-sided” fee.
So if the actual escrow fee was actually 65$ please just reinstantiate that transaction and inform me, so I can accept it this time, sorry.
2 Likes
LOL no problem, it would be a lot easier if they let us edit transactions 
New one sent… (with “50/50 escrow fee shared” specified)
1 Like
I have accepted the transaction, wired the money and marked the payment as “sent” on escrow.com.
I actually had to replace the “#” in the reference note by “No.” because my bank doesn’t allow the “#” character in any text messages. I’M SURE ESCROW.COM CAN HANDLE THIS.
3 Likes
Exciting
I can see escrow has the status as you say.
FYI I’ve done about 30 hours on it at this point. I’d say I’m about halfway through “getting it to a testable state”, with luck, barring unforseen gotchas.
4 Likes
Rats, missed my chance to offer to “hold onto the money for you guys” 
haha
4 Likes
… then there’s the remaining 10% of effort after that, that takes 90% of the total time 
3 Likes
Oh I’m fairly sure you’ll be fixing bugs in rengo tournaments 5 years from now, even. 
2 Likes
(not sure if someone else already replied with something like this, I haven’t caught up with the topic yet and have to go soon)
I believe Pair Go was specifically named like that in Japan to differentiate from Rengo, since Pair Go was supposed to increase the popularity of Go by putting more female players in the spotlight. Something like that anyways.
Rengo, 連碁, literally means something like “group go”, since 連 has (next to the meaning of connection and of leading along) the meaning of “group”, “party” or “gang”, so Pair Go isn’t a real translation either, and true Rengo may be played with more than two people in both teams, taking turns.
3 Likes
I’m hoping this will be the case in what I build, also.
2 Likes
In case you succeed in that, you can automatically get extra kudos for implementing Zen Go, which has an odd number of players going “around the table” and switching teams, so to say.
1 Like
Hmm - no, I guess we were talking slightly different algorithms. I was meaning I hope to support N players per team, where N can be different for both sides, but the teams still rotate through their own players.
That said, if I do it right, any form of rotation, such as the one you describe, should in theory doable on top of it.
3 Likes
But which would need a different name to not get confused with Zen mode…