Hi!

The improvements are piling up so I have to release another update:

Backgammon Studio 2.4

Improvements since 2.3:

• Several new challenges (training tracks if you like):
  • The End! Less than 6 checkers left! Time for one last mistake!
  • 3rd roll checker 2! 3rd roll! Too early to make a big mistake? And now the clock is ticking!
  • Opening reply 2! Can you handle the opening replies to perfection? And now the clock is ticking!
  • Battlefront! Slot the front of opponent prime or not? Dangerous but sometimes a must!
  • Great escape! Escape a prime or hang back and wait for a better opportunity?
• Match video support - You can now open up a video dialog and play a recorded video of the match while playing through the match in Backgammon Studio looking at the XG evaluation as you go along. This requires that the match video has been linked up to the match.
• 97 videos has so far been added to Backgammon Studio (played through youtube).
• You can expand/shrink the video to fit your needs. Overlaying the video over the board but keeping the pipcount visible seems like a good choice.
• Multi part video is supported. You get buttons below the video window to jump between video segments.
• Match video filter - You can now choose to only display matches that have a video link in the Matches/Play section.
• Less than n checkers left - You can now also specify if one or both sides should have a specified, greater or less amount of checkers left.
• You can now enable notifications so that if you are in a different browser window you will see when someone challenges you to a duel.
• Moving a match to a new tournament in your private database if it didn't have a proper tournament name to begin with.
• Evaluation can now be updated on already uploaded matches if the XG evaluation is found to be poor.
• Improved hitting throws dialog.
• The amount of match players is growing very large so now there is a section for selecting your favorite players.
  • Select all players from one country.
  • Select all players from the Backgammon Giants list.
  • Select/deselect individual players.
• Blast from the past! All matches that were found for 2006, 2005 and 2004 has been added to the database.
• +Many bugfixes. Most interestingly the cube action now shows the correct error depending on who did the cube error if you specify only seeing errors made by one player.

Some images



I found this to be the most convenient way of playing a video while watching the XG evaluation. Click on the match you want to see and then move the dialog over the board keeping the pipcount visible. Start the video and then click in the move list to activate it. Now you can click down-arrow (on desktop, click forward button on devices) to move forward in the match following the action in the video.



In the Matches/Play section there is a new column on the rightmost side where you can click on the checkbox to only display matches with match videos attached. You can also play the video directly from here if you want.



An example of notifications. You need to accept the notification request that you receive when visiting the page if you want to see these. I guess it could be used for other purposes. When a potential duel opponent logs in?...



New hitting throws dialog. I suspect that this could be expanded upon perhaps adding some sort of probability calculator. This also revealed a bug as you can see in the picture. If 3-1 hits then so does 1-3. I was blissfully unaware of this problem until it got displayed like this. It is fixed now. The dialog also automatically updates when you move forward in the match.



There is now a lot of match players and scrolling through the rather long dropdown is a bit tedious so limiting this to a handful of players can come in handy.



You can manage your own list of favorite players adding/removing them to fit your preference.

I haven't identified which country every match player in the database is from and there is a way to locate those. Go to the Player overview section and click on the Select country button. There is now a question mark button there (I see I need to fix the alignment there...):



which will display all players with an unknown country. If you know where some of these players are from let me know! I use gridgammon and chicagopoint as sources for finding this info but only when the number of matches for one player is getting large (4-5+).

In other news

There is a new guy in town! Atrifix is just crushing all opposition on my server!



I am amazed how quickly the titles have fallen into Atrifix hands! Faster than I am able to create new ones! Well done! :-)

Other news: There is now over 3000 matches in the database even after I made an effort and removed 30+- duplicate matches. Matches that had different names and were analyzed by different users (I suspect) were able to slip through my defenses but I was able to come up a way to root them out.

Backgammon Studio is coming along nicely! :-)

I am sure you will be able to run into a problem or two (I don't too much time testing every browser/device combination out there) but if you inform me about your problem I'll do everything to help you out!

Did I forget to mention that some of the features/challenges are limited to premium users? Oh the cruelty I am able to come up with! Hehe.. but there is still a lot of fun (and available to all) content to explore there!

Feedback is also more than welcome! Likes, dislikes, suggestions, whatever! :-)

Worth a try!

http://www.backgammonstudio.com

Best regards,
TP