Hi!

Backgammon Studio keeps improving and today I have updated the version number to 3.5 with these fine improvements:

Backgammon Studio 3.5

Improvements since 3.4:

• New actiontags:
  • Make one or two points.
  • Close board or not.
  • Make anchor or homeboard point.
  • Counter blot or not.
• New training tracks:
  • Great barrier bearoff! The deuce point can act as a great barrier against bearoff. How to safely get your men across?
  • Deep stacker! Creating deep stacks on the 2 or 3 point can often look pretty ugly but perhaps the alternatives are worse?
  • All you need is 6! The 6pt is such a sweet point to keep and it is easy to overlook when you should give it up for tactical reasons. Is now the right time?
  • Trapped! Create a blocking point in front of an opponent anchor? Possibly trapping your opponent behind a prime? Could be worth a try!
• Pass criteria on equityloss in cube training. Suggested by sita.
• Unrated online matches. Suggested by tnt-foxtrot.
• Forum postings now show who posted the initial message.
• You can raise dialogs by clicking on the header.
• You can now attach notes to bookmarks.
• Dynamic thumbnail generation when viewing positions and no limit on the number of thumbnails displayed.
• Board menu now says 'Menu' instead of 3 horizontal stipes as it wasn't immediately obvious to everyone that the stripes opens the menu.
• Bookmarking positions now has options where to place the bookmark.
• You can now search for bookmarks.
• You can now tell what time a chat message was sent by hovering over the message.
• A new welcome dialog.
• Money game cube action in cube training (rather few money games in public database though). Suggested by Tony.
• Search for comments by specified user. Suggested by Tore. (++)
• Added ability to specify men (checkers) back in your opponent homeboard/bar. Suggested by Tore.
• You now receive an email when someone answers a position you are seeking an answer for.
• Bugfixes:
  • Gnu hint dialog on mobile didn't use fullscreen dialog (content is too big so it should).
  • Swiping on phone while checking answer moved you to the next position.
  • Menu button (3 stripes) was hard to hit on phone and replaced with 'menu' button instead.
  • Button could be hidden behind empty div (tab commands) and require scrolling instead of being directly visible.
  • Some tabs (statistics++) didn't display content on ios (old ios hack was removed but is still needed).
  • My progress report challenge answers didn't scroll properly.
  • Moving and resizing chat dialog on iOS now works (ios browser doesn't support resize argument).
  • Error bookmarks folder could end up with hundreds of bookmarks after some time and visiting these was painful. Now thumbnails are dynamically generated so everything won't grind to a halt when you visit these folders.
  • Fixed some view by date bookmark inconsistency.
  • Invalid moves no longer enter the equity loss overview in player statistics.
  • Swiping in forum had some unexpected side effects.
  • Chat dialog didn't behave properly on Internet Explorer (kept expanding when it shouldn't).
  • Scrollwheeling through a match and moving between games could make the navigation stop working.
  • Scorecard on frame was displayed wrong on firefox (possibly firefox bug). Thanks Nyo!
  • Playing as white was reported incorrectly at the end (playing as black).
  • Play as: taking a nodouble while a pass was played didn't give you equity bonus for taking.
  • The switch to https created a limit of 15 concurrent users. I have increased it to 150 now. Thanks Nyo!
  • Prevent online match to continue after completion (you should now get an alert that the match is over.)
  • You could end up with nothing found if you enter a space in one of the numeric input fields when searching for positions. Thanks negheonegu!
  • You are no longer sent to the friend section when you send a friend request (say while playing an online match and clicking on ctrl-u).

Known issues:

• When playing live matches you will sometimes see the spinning wheel continue forever. This is a network problem where a message fails to show up on the client. Click to roll dice again and they will quickly show up. The message that never arrived will show up later as a strange dice briefly displayed until some other dice are displayed.
• If you start to look at previous positions while playing an online match you may have trouble getting back to the current position.

Some images



I was wondering which new training track I should add for this release and then yesterday Michy asked about how he could locate positions where the player is bearing off against a 2 point anchor. Hey! Problem solved! :-)



And today I see Michy has taken a shot at taking the champion title and that he did! The sharks at Backgammon Studio are an eager bunch so who know how long it will last? :-) And I see I have to give it a few more tries or I'm the next guy out of the highscore list...



The ideas for new action tags were piling up so I had to throw in a few more. How many action tags are there? 87!



Some time ago Tore asked about creating an option to search for positions where you can specify how many men (checkers) you have in your opponent homeboard/bar and the same for your opponent. Tore suggested a usecase: "This would allow us to practice positions where we have escaped our men and need to find the right balance between leaving shots and getting flexibility and playing safe."



Inspired by a presentation held by Michy during Gothenburg Open I added the option to attach notes to your bookmarks.



Also inspired by the Michy presentation you can now search through your bookmarks.



You can now search for positions that has comments and also search for comments by a specified user. Suggested by Tore and I seem to remember someone else also suggesting it. The name must be an exact match or the number of positions found will drop to 0.



You can now toggle all positions you locate instead of manually checkmarking each position. Also when bookmarking positions you now have an option to specify where the bookmarks are placed. Earlier all bookmarks ended up in the root of your bookmarks and you had to organize them later.



There is a new welcome dialog when you login on Backgammon Studio. This explains a bit of the basics around selecting how Backgammon Studio should look on your device. Returning users will also see this and you can scroll down and close the dialog if you're happy with your current selection.



If you have a widescreen monitor the board may sometimes be displayed outside your screen which isn't ideal. Earlier you had a couple of ways to solve this by either using the classic menus which takes some screen width or narrowing your browser window. You can now also manually change the size of the board to fit your preference. This is useful to do before you play online matches as you may want to see the chat area below the board.



The thumbnail generation is now dynamic and the 50 position limit has been lifted. You may see some missing thumbnails and after a couple of seconds they will start to show up one by one.

In other news

The number of users at Backgammon Studio is steadily growing! Sweet! A big thanks to everybody who are spreading the word and recruiting friends!

The number of matches is also steadily growing! A bit thanks to all transcribers out there who keep providing new matches to add to the database!

If you have any problems registering/logging in don't hesitate to contact me directly and I'll help you out!

https://www.backgammonstudio.com The swiss army knife of backgammon!

Best regards,
TP