Life In 19x19

Does anyone have some information about the status of the html client? There has not been much activity in the related Google+ group recently ...

I have some info!

I haven't had much chance to work on it. I keep hoping to find the time but it isn't happening. I will update the google+ page when there is anything to say.

Sorry about this. I know it's really important, but every day something comes up...

No worries wms, the main competitor (kaya) has been announcing the release of beta for months and they have many people working on it...

sefo wrote:No worries wms, the main competitor (kaya) has been announcing the release of beta for months and they have many people working on it...

I agree with the sentiment (i.e., I'm not criticizing wms in the least--I'm a longtime KGS+ member, and plan to continue to be). But, to be fair to the guys at kaya--they are not just developing a client, but an entire server. Big difference.

sefo wrote:No worries wms, the main competitor (kaya) has been announcing the release of beta for months and they have many people working on it...

I've heard beta coming out at us go congress. GoPanda2 is also out which was a huge rewrite for them as well.

semi-open beta for kaya.gs has been out for a while now. limited account releases take place roughly weekly to coincide with updates to stress-test the server. open beta is coming soon.

with KGS having such a large userbase, a web-client that doesn't rely on Java will really be a big asset.

Archivist wrote:semi-open beta for kaya.gs has been out for a while now. limited account releases take place roughly weekly to coincide with updates to stress-test the server. open beta is coming soon.

with KGS having such a large userbase, a web-client that doesn't rely on Java will really be a big asset.

Unfortunately, I feel like kaya still has a very long way to go. And some of the problems they have seem like they will be very difficult to fix. For example, I joined a game last night and from the time it left the "waiting' screen and changed to the actual go board showing both players in the room list it took close to 1 minute. And there were only 20 people online. What happens when there are 2,000 users online?

As an engineer myself, I feel like there is something fundamentally broken about the server architecture for this to happen. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am.

Then of course there is the issue of how to get a significant number of pepole to actually start using it. They've had numerous account releases now, in beta, and still when I get on there are only about 10-15 people on the entire server, and it's still impossible to find an actual game. Same as it was 6 months ago when it was still alpha. And it's always the exact same 10-15 people.

I have high hopes for it, but I just hope I'm not let down.

What I really would like is for KGS client to simply go open source. If wms refuses to maintain it, I don't see what the big deal is about letting other willing participants help out. There's probably 20-30 simple one-liner fixes that would greatly improve peoples' experiences on KGS, but because of some silly political reasons that make no sense, we can't have it.

I hope that the KGS HTML client works well on mobile devices. I tried kaya on 3 different devices and it was totally broken on all of them.

badukJr wrote:I hope that the KGS HTML client works well on mobile devices. I tried kaya on 3 different devices and it was totally broken on all of them.

I could sort of get it to work, but couldn't really navigate the game since the buttons were so small. Chatting was about it.

oren wrote:

badukJr wrote:I hope that the KGS HTML client works well on mobile devices. I tried kaya on 3 different devices and it was totally broken on all of them.

I could sort of get it to work, but couldn't really navigate the game since the buttons were so small. Chatting was about it.

Two of them, it was just a green screen.

The other one (ASUS tablet) it loaded up kinda, and the buttons flashed when I hit them, but nothing happened beyond that.
Its a pretty feature rich site though, I guess you need something more bare bones to do mobile properly.

Lamp wrote:What I really would like is for KGS client to simply go open source. If wms refuses to maintain it, I don't see what the big deal is about letting other willing participants help out. There's probably 20-30 simple one-liner fixes that would greatly improve peoples' experiences on KGS, but because of some silly political reasons that make no sense to me, we can't have it.

Fixed that for you.

Lamp wrote: What I really would like is for KGS client to simply go open source. If wms refuses to maintain it, I don't see what the big deal is about letting other willing participants help out. There's probably 20-30 simple one-liner fixes that would greatly improve peoples' experiences on KGS, but because of some silly political reasons that make no sense, we can't have it.

The problem is that a bug in the client can cause the entire server to crash, and wms doesn't want people (malicious or otherwise) making and using clients that could cause crashes

speedchase wrote:

Lamp wrote: What I really would like is for KGS client to simply go open source. If wms refuses to maintain it, I don't see what the big deal is about letting other willing participants help out. There's probably 20-30 simple one-liner fixes that would greatly improve peoples' experiences on KGS, but because of some silly political reasons that make no sense, we can't have it.

The problem is that a bug in the client can cause the entire server to crash, and wms doesn't want people (malicious or otherwise) making and using clients that could cause crashes

That is not a concern of mine. The server is complex enough that it's entirely possible that a bug could crash the server, but that would just mean I need to work on the server. The reasons for keeping the client closed source have been given before, it's long and I don't want to repost again.

Oh, sorry

wms wrote:

speedchase wrote:

Lamp wrote: What I really would like is for KGS client to simply go open source. If wms refuses to maintain it, I don't see what the big deal is about letting other willing participants help out. There's probably 20-30 simple one-liner fixes that would greatly improve peoples' experiences on KGS, but because of some silly political reasons that make no sense, we can't have it.

The problem is that a bug in the client can cause the entire server to crash, and wms doesn't want people (malicious or otherwise) making and using clients that could cause crashes

That is not a concern of mine. The server is complex enough that it's entirely possible that a bug could crash the server, but that would just mean I need to work on the server. The reasons for keeping the client closed source have been given before, it's long and I don't want to repost again.

Can you (or someone else) provide a link? I searched and did not find anything. I can understand not wanting random people comitting to the main line, but an authoritative model (with karma to filter out bad submitters) similar to what's used on Linux where Linus must personally approve all commits seems to address that with minimal effort on your part. Perhaps this is addressed in the original topic where you discussed the reasons for it being closed source, but I can't find it.