Hi!

There have been a few more improvements to my site since my last update.

One important change is that I am in the process of retiring the old freebgstudio.tk in favor of backgammonstudio.tk. The site is still free (you can switch to premium for additional features if you want) but there is less maintenance for me to only maintain one server.

The last change I added today was support for more board options:



While not as generic as I would like it is a start. If you have any suggestions in connection with this (or anything else) let me know!

Perhaps the most interesting new feature is the Showtime! section where you can challenge another player for a duel over 10 random positions. There are two versions:

Duel - this is a gameshow style duel where the one who answers correct first gets 1 point. If you answer wrong the opponent get 10 seconds to answer. Pretty crazy but fun if you win! :-)

Consultation - Here both players get to answer before continuing to the next position and there is a chat where you can discuss the position with your opponent and hopefully gain some valuable insights into the game. After you finish you can go through each position for a last review:



You probably have to bring a friend as it is difficult to find someone there at least for the moment. I'll be there most of the time though. Get a friend from your local backgammon club to join you and you can finally settle the score who is the best backgammon player? :-)

You also get rated for your performance and the interesting part here is that luck has very little impact on your rating as no roll of the dice is involved. The more knowledgeable player will pretty much always win! :-)

Another interesting feature is that you can now get answers to a "What if the position was a little different?" kind of question as you can view a position and then move one or more checkers around and then click 'hint' and gnu backgammon will provide an evaluation of the changed position:



In the configuration department you can now more easily move buttons around by drag and drop them to either the 'home' button or to 'other actions'. For instance if you're on a mobile phone you don't care so much about the 'public archive' of xg matches as you're unlikely to have any need to download these files to your phone. On desktop this can be useful.



Another important part of this is that you now have a different configuration depending on which device you use. While using backgammon studio on a phone is perhaps not too great (It does seem to work ok on my iphone) you can make modifications on the phone which won't affect your desktop version.

I have made some changes that makes it work better on ipad (and possibly other tablets). Match list had too much information and was hard to use and I think there were some other minor fixes related to ipad. Ah yes there is a separate latest news section on ipad as the information doesn't fit well on one page on ipad/iphone.

Another interesting feature is that you can now get a good overview of your cube handling performance:



and you can find out who of the backgammon giants misses the fewest cubes or other stats. With your own private database you can in a couple of clicks find every missed cube you have in every recorded match you have uploaded and then go through them and see if you can improve your cube handling.

I suspect there are many more minor improvements that I have added since last update but the above is perhaps the most important ones.

I have copied the login info for the 250 users who registered on the other server (that also validated their email) so you don't have to register a new account if you have already used my old server.

Give it a try! :-)

TP

www.backgammonstudio.tk