Vying Games : Blog

Update: There's a Roadmap to the Next Release post on the forums that I'll be posting updates to occasionally.

So, I've been talking a lot about the "next release" on the forums and in private conversations for a while now. There are lots and lots of new features already finished, and a number of tricky new features that are not as close to completion as I'd like. A few of those features I think will be easier to implement down the road, so I'm going to push them to a future "next release".

Anyway, given the longer than usual delay between releases, I figured I'd lay out the roadmap for Vying Games. I don't really track the server with version numbers, but I'll give it some simple version numbers for the purpose of this post.

Version 0.9.0

This update has broad and sweeping changes, but will fall just short of what I've envisioned as a feature complete 1.0. In brief:

• Redesign of the messaging / invite system. 99% done.
• Finishing the tourney system. 99% done.
• Finishing the archive section, complete with search. 100% done.
• Browse / search series. 100% done.
• Redesign + additions to the user profile / prefs. 90% done.
• Forum bug fixes + new features (preview / search). 90% done.
• Better blog integration. 100% done.
• Built in wiki. 70% done.
• Group chat. 0% done.
• Paid memberships (plus member only features). 20% done.
• Minor changes to the rating system. 80% done.
• Anonymous accounts. 90% done.
• Move the bots to a separate server. 0% done.

A small note on paid memberships. Every feature on the server now and most new features will be available for free. Users with paid memberships will have access to non-core features, but the site should be perfectly usable / enjoyable on a free account.

Moving the bots to another server is the critical feature needed for this release. When Cephalopod was released the server was overwhelmed by people playing the bots. I haven't been heavily promoting the site lately because I want to fix that scaling issue first. Other features could be pushed to a later release without harm.

Between Version 0.9.0 and 1.0.0

There are a number of new games pending release. I plan on releasing one game every week or every two weeks starting the week after the release of version 0.9.0.

Version 0.9.5

• Game variation support. 50% done.

Version 1.0.0

• Realtime optimizations / structural changes. 0% done.
• Remote API (for bots, other apps) 20% done.

The big thing here is that I'm punting on some of the realtime optimizations I have planned. I'm feeling stuck on this, at the moment. Vying Games uses Rails / ActiveRecord and I'm somewhat frustrated with both. This is not to say that Rails / ActiveRecord are not great, simply that I'm having a hard time getting them to work the way I want for Vying Games. In many ways Vying Games is not at all a typical Rails app. Rails is very good for rails-esque apps, but I'm spending too much time fighting with it lately.

Having recently reviewed DataMapper (an ORM like ActiveRecord), I'm excited to see that they've made design decisions that match up much better to what I want to do. This means I will likely try to port Vying Games to Merb / DataMapper when I start on the optimizations / structural changes.

While playing around with DataMapper recently, I got the impression that it's progressing rapidly, but not quite ready for use, yet. I'm hopeful it'll be production ready sometime this summer.

It should be noted that while Merb and Rails are quite different in philosophy, they're similar enough that most of the code will require only minor changes. UI development can and will continue in Rails during the process of porting. So features listed after this release could actually be moved up ahead of it. The Remote API might also be finished before the rest of this release.

Version 1.1.0

• Internationalization / Localization. 0% done.
• Tutorial system. 0% done.
• Self-play system. 0% done.
• Game analysis system. 0% done.

Several players have been generous enough to offer to translate parts of the UI. My plan for now is to build in gettext like support and let users contribute translations. I have no experience in this area, and I don't expect it to be anything less that complicated and difficult.

The tutorial system would allow players to create interactive tutorials for games. I don't have a concrete design for this, yet, but I think it'd help the adoption / promotion of games.

The self-play system would basically allow a user to play around with a game without an opponent.

The game analysis system would be akin to the tutorial system. Anyone could take any game and add analysis / discussion to any of the positions.

Some of these features might move up to an early release, though I don't think that's particularly likely. These aren't particularly high priority.

That's it...

So that's my current roadmap for Vying Games. As far as release dates are concerned. I'm going to put a goal of June 20th to June 22nd on the release of version 0.9.0. We'll shoot for minor releases every week or two from that point, and I'll post updates on the other milestones as we go.

On this day one year ago, Vying Games was released. It wasn't exactly the Vying Games you see before you today -- okay, it wasn't even close. At the time there were only two games (Othello and Connect6) and you couldn't play against other people, only the bots.

The March 29th release was not really announced anywhere. The site wasn't "done" in my mind (still isn't), and for a week or so games were played only by myself, my fiance, and a couple friends. Looking back through the database, it wasn't until April 6th that the first outside visitors played a few anonymous games. On April 13th and 15th I posted a couple blog entries to reddit and about 100 anonymous games were played against the bots.

On April 15th, 2pies was the first new user I didn't know personally. He/She only played 3 games and moved on. A few hours later William signed up for an account. William hasn't been active in quite a while, but he did a lot to help the site grow. He added a link to Vying Games in his signature on XKCD's forums. It's funny how big an effect such a small gesture can have. For a while I think more new users came to the site through his sig than through any of my efforts. Thanks William!

Five days after William signed up, chrisdesalvo and ROBdaROB joined. Both are still around and active. Thanks for sticking with the site through all the development and slow growth, guys!

I won't recount when every active player joined, or how much each player has done to help the site grow. Needless to say, the site wouldn't be where it is without players. In June you could start playing other people, but you couldn't chat until July. It's funny to think how primitive the site was for so long. Today I can't imagine playing someone, but not being able to wish them "gl". It's really since that point, that the site began to blossom.

The feedback and encouragement I received from the players has done so much for the site. It's around that time that I really moved from developing whatever game caught my eye, to developing (almost exclusively) games that were suggested by other players. I'm not sure Phutball, Footsteps, Ataxx, Nine Men's Morris, Three Musketeers, Pah-Tum, or Dots and Boxes would be here had players not directed my attention to them and pushed for their development. For that I'm grateful, these have become some of my favorite games. Some of these games I may not have even heard of otherwise!

Speaking of games, there have been about 92,000 games played in the first year. An extraordinary number! I never could have imagined that many games being played when I released the site a year ago.

Don't read too much into the above table. For one, release date has a major effect on the number of games played. For another, some games are more popular for bot-play which naturally leads to a greater number of games played. Some games are longer than others... it should be no surprise that a game like Footsteps which can be over in as few as 6 moves (3 bids per side), would rank first.

Also, the only games ever deleted from the server are abandoned anonymous games in which no moves have been played. During our server problems last week lots of games of Cephalopod were started, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than a few were abandoned and may be deleted in the future. However, it's certainly impressive that Cephalopod was so well received.

Lastly, I think, the latest game always benefits from being released on the latest (and hopefully best) version of the server software, as well as having access to a larger community of active players.

So, to wrap this up, it's been an awesome first year! (totally cool... rad even) I have to thank all the game designers for having created such wonderful games, the players for making the community what it is, all the software developers who have contributed through the excellent libraries and tools this server is built upon, my fiance for being so supportive, and all the players again. Thanks so much everyone, I'm looking forward to next year being even better!

I just pushed out a minor update to the server. This is mostly bug fixes, and a couple small user interface changes. Mostly things you're not apt to notice. There is one change, though, that I wanted to draw attention to.

If you leave one of your games open while waiting for your opponent to move, the document title will be updated when it's your turn. In most tabbed browsers the title appears in the tab, and will be prefixed with an asterisk (*) when it's your turn to move. The turn indicator comes on when it's your turn to move in any of your games, not just the one you left open.

This way you can browse away in another tab, and you only need to look at the Vying Games tab to know if it's your turn.

A few notes:

1. The title is only updated when you're viewing a game, because those are the only pages that update automatically.

2. If you leave for an extended period of time the server marks your status as "offline". You won't get any updates while "offline".

Or, where are we and where do we go from here?

We're quickly approaching Vying Games' 1-year anniversary. I'll commemorate that moment with another blog post when we reach it on March 29th, right now I'd like to focus more on the present and the future.

In the last week we saw a major update to the play page, and the release of a new game, Cephalopod. There were a number of bugs, mostly minor and fixed pretty quickly, but there were also a couple severe bugs. Internet Explorer 6 proved again how fragile it can be, complaining of javascript errors when in fact it didn't like a div that was set to position: relative.

Browsers

A few words about web browsers: Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all wonderful browsers. This site makes heavy use of the canvas tag. These three browsers all provide excellent native support for it. Internet Explorer doesn't support the canvas tag. There's a javascript library called Explorer Canvas that adds canvas support to Internet Explorer, but it's (a little) buggy and (a lot) slow.

In a lot of respects, I think Internet Explorer is holding up a lot of progress on the web. If it had native support for the canvas tag, for example, there's so much more I could do with the games on this site. That said, Vying Games will continue to support Internet Explorer 7. I'll keep trying to make everything work in Internet Explorer 6 as well, and when Internet Explorer 8 comes out of beta I'll make Vying Games compatible with it as well.

A Traffic Surge

Anyway, back to the last week. On Sunday night I posted Cephalopod on reddit. Last time I posted a game on reddit it was quickly buried and we only got about 100 new visitors. This time, I'd estimate we had around 4000 new visitors. All of whom wanted to play Cephalopod against the bot. I would estimate that each bot game consumes 400-500x the server resources as a single human vs human game. So, the server was swamped throughout the day.

If you take a look at the traffic for the week, you can see that this was no small incremental step up in traffic. To add insult to injury, I also discovered a bug that would cause the server to get into an infinite loop. It only struck two of the server processes (out of 10), but it would have been enough to kill the server even without the extra traffic. I fixed that bug, but with upwards of 50 simultaneous bot games the server was still toast for much of the day.

Server Architecture Changes

I think it's pretty clear that the bots need to have their own server resources separate from the main server. Ideally, on a day like yesterday, the bots become less responsive, but the server itself continues to be fast. Everyone playing human vs human games continue to play without realizing how heavily loaded the bots are.

Right now the bots execute in the web server processes (a cluster of Mongrels running Rails). This setup was simply convenient. In the future, I'd like to setup a DRb (Distributed Ruby) server that houses all the games. The Rails processes would hold connections to the DRb server and it would manage the games. The bots would run as clients of the DRb server.

One upshot of this architecture is that it will allow the bots to be persistent. This'll make it easier for the bots to cache game-tree search results between moves, dynamically build opening books, start analyzing a position during your turn, etc. All of these things should be possible now, but they become easier with these architectural changes.

More generally, I suspect this setup might perform and scale better. Right now there are just so many round trips to the database, or bringing objects in and out of memcached (fast but has a lot of serialization overhead).

These are major changes, and I intend to tackle them in a separate branch of development. There's no reason that development and the release of new games and UI improvements can't continue while the server is being restructured.

Funneling People into Games with Each Other

While separating the bots from the rest of the server is a good thing. Even better, for the server's resources and the site's community, would be to get those new visitors into games with each other. I'm less sure how to accomplish this. Ultimately, I think, it means making a lot more progress into realtime play. However, it's accomplished I think this clearly needs to be one of the highest priority goals for the site.

Open Source 'Vying' Library

The heart of Vying Games, the library aptly called vying, has been open source for a while now. I've been holding off on making a major announcement about it until I meet a few more of my goals for it. At this point, there's really only one major goal remaining (not that the library is anywhere near complete).

In the next couple weeks I'll add a clear and simple api to the Vying Games server. It'll be http-based and hopefully make it simple for people to write scripts to interact with the server. This should allow people to write bots capable of playing games, accepting invites, joining tourneys, chatting, etc. I've already talked to one developer who's shown interest in doing just that.

These bots would be different from the built-in bots. They'd appear just like any human user, and play the games in the same turn-based fashion. With the built-in bots my goal is to provide a realtime experience, which severely limits the amount of time available to think about a move. Naturally, this results in weaker bots. Not that stronger bots can't be made to play quickly, it's just more difficult to accomplish.

As I develop the Vying Games server api, I'll also add client functionality to the 'vying' library and try developing a couple new bots. The new bots would connect through the new client functionality, and play more slowly (deliberately?), but hopefully much better than the existing bots.

Once these goals are reached I'll announce the 'vying' project on the Ruby mailing list. Hopefully, I can interest a few developers in contributing to the project.

New Games

I've released 17 games this past year. That's a pretty good clip, and I'd like to see that pace continue over the next year. I would like to see a little more variety though. The site is heavily populated with 2 player, perfect information, deterministic, abstract strategy games right now. I'd like to see some games for more than 2 players, as well as more games with random elements or hidden knowledge. Hopefully we can also expand beyond board games. The one thing that will remain constant though, all the games will continue to be multi-player turn-based strategy games.

User Interface Improvements

We made some huge steps forward recently, but there's still a long ways to go. I'd like to improve / update the blog, the forums, the messages (inbox) pages. The tourney pages are also in need of a major update. Additionally, I'd like to make significant changes to the user profile page.

Okay, I'd like to update almost every part of the site. I have a long list of user suggested improvements and I need to make significant progress on them.

Membership

At some point in the next year, the site needs to start supporting itself. This will likely mean a value added membership and/or advertising. I'd prefer to keep the site advertising free, so it's likely we'll explore adding a membership fee first. The site will remain free and open to newcomers, so we'll have to come up with some extra benefits for paying members.

Personal Work Situation

I just finished some contract work, so I'll be at a crossroads again fairly soon. I'll need to decide whether to look for more contract work or a full-time job. I'd like -- and intend -- to complete a lot more of my goals for Vying Games before considering for full-time employment. Either way Vying Games development will continue to be a big part of my life.

Many Thanks

In the 1-year anniversary blog post I'll get more into thanking everybody for such a great year, but, well, thanks for a great year! Developing and running Vying Games has been so much fun, and that's in no small part thanks to all the great people I've gotten to know in the process. So... thanks!

I'm very happy to announce the release of a new game, Cephalopod. Cephalopod is a board game invented in 2006 by Mark Steere. It's a territorial game played with dice as game pieces and interesting approach to capturing.

Cephalopod itself should be very stable, but with this release coming so soon after yesterday's major release, please let me know if you find any bugs!

As usual, I'll have open invites posted (and, I wouldn't be surprised if Mark won't have a few posted as well). I've also created a Cephalopod round robin tourney to help you get started getting some games.

Enjoy!

I'm very, very, very happy to announce this latest update. It's a big one, with lots of goodies for everyone. In fact, it might be easier to say what hasn't changed than to list out all the new stuff.

Anyway, the focus of this update has been on the "play" page. The layout and functionality there has changed drastically. You should be able to discover most of the changes on your own, but here's a quick synopsis:

Review No Longer a Separate Page

The review functionality has been integrated into the play page. This should make reviewing the game as you play it much, much easier. The review functionality has also been greatly enhanced. There's a list of all the moves, so in addition to back and forward buttons, you can now jump around.

Please note, on Vying Games, moves don't necessarily map up one-to-one with turns. Sometimes you make multiple moves on your turn (for example, a double jump in Checkers, or a series of jumps in Phutball, or completing lots of boxes in Dots and Boxes).

You can also try out alternate move sequences. When you're viewing an old position, you can enter moves from that point by clicking on the board. You can enter moves for any players (not just yourself), and the new moves are inserted into the move history as a separate branch (labeled "1b", "2b", etc).

Beware: You can't start a branch from the last position! You can only make new moves from the last position.

If you use move confirmation, the moves will appear in the move list labeled "1c", "2c", etc. This allows you to move back through the moves you're checking out. Previously, if you made a mistake 5 moves in, you're only option was to cancel all 5 moves. Now you can back up to the 5th move and correct it.

Be aware that if you want to return to a historic position later, you should click the "permalink" and then bookmark it or save the url. If you want to direct someone to a historic position, you should do the same.

Limited Undo

In games where you can make more than one move on your turn there is now limited support for undoing moves. You can only undo a move if you made it and it's still your turn after the move. To put it simply, you can't undo the last move of your turn. This is the big difference between undo and move confirmation. Move confirmation allows you to cancel any of your moves because they were never actually submitted to the server.

Polling Changes

Because the review page has been removed, anyone can view the "play" page for a game. When you view someone else's game you won't have access to chat and some other info.

Chat is and will remain private to the players of a game.

You can, however, watch someone else's game in realtime. Since most players here take a turn-based correspondence approach to playing this isn't too useful. But, if you happen to see players playing in realtime you can watch. (If you just want to check it out, watch someone play the bots)

General UI Changes

I'm leaving a lot of the UI changes unmentioned, but I think they're fairly discoverable. That said, if you find something confusing or annoying, please let me know! I happen to like this new interface, but I'm more than willing to make changes to make it better. And, of course, there's been a lot of code churn between releases so I expect that there will be bugs. If you find one, the sooner you let me know, the sooner I can get it fixed!

Please post your bugs on the forums or send me a private message, or just mention it in chat.

If you want to suggest an improvement, please post in the forums so we can get more feedback on the suggested changes.

New Games Coming Soon

Once this release has had some time to settle down, I've got a couple games ready for release. Hopefully the first one will be up well before Monday.

Yesterday was a pretty tumultuous one as far as updates go. There was an initial release that included substantial refactoring server-side. It took about 15 minutes to load due to database updates. With the new release came bug fixes and, of course, new bugs. Throughout the day there were a number of minor server updates to fix the newly introduced bugs. I think we've got them all at this point, but if you find something, please let me know!

The major bug fixed in yesterday's release was the move confirmation caching bug. This is the bug that would prevent the default setting for move confirmation from sticking. So, if you had problems with move confirmation before, please give it a try now.

Dots and Boxes Released

Enough about yesterday. Today I released a new game, Dots and Boxes. Yes, the pencil and paper children's game. I was surprised recently to learn that it has a lot more strategic depth than I would have guessed.

I've posted a Dots and Boxes tourney, so if you want to get some games going, that's a good place to start.

Enjoy!

Last night I updated the server. This release is really about getting out some bug fixes and minor updates in advance of a more major release.

Amazons Territory Calculation

In Amazons, the score is an approximation of how much territory each player has access to. The score doesn't really effect the outcome of the game in anyway, since the game doesn't end until one player can no longer move. But, it's handy for deciding when to throw in the towel.

The old territory calculation only considered arrows as impediments. Queens were ignored since they could move. This essentially meant the score was worthless until ever queen was separated out into territories by arrows. Since players often place queens as sentinels blocking off a territory, this calculation was not particularly helpful.

The new code computes territory as contiguous blocks of empty squares. Queens and arrows divide territories. For a territory to be counted in your score, you must have one of your queens adjacent to one of the territory's empty squares. The score updates both after you move and after you fire an arrow.

Hopefully, this more dynamic scoring will lead to better play and less time wasted counting squares by hand.

Pah-Tum Draws

I've been surprised by the number of draws in Pah-Tum. Many of the games are not in contention for many of the final moves. This can make some of the games tedious to play out, so I added the "offer draw" link.

Bug Fixes

The Three Musketeers selecting bug is fixed. As with all the other games, selecting a piece highlights it. Clicking a selected piece again would unselect it but it would (incorrectly) remain highlighted.

I also fixed several minor typos in this release. For example, the "this tourney will start when -1 more players sign-up" bug.

There was also a bug where checking the last move of a game would not update the score. I was unable to reproduce it in development, so apparently I fixed it. : ))

More Tourney Automation

I've been manually creating and starting tourneys. Creating the tourneys is not hard, but I sometimes don't notice that a tourney is due to start. I've added a script to start tourneys that'll be run hourly.

There's a bug in the score calculation for tourneys where rarely a win or draw will be counted twice. I haven't tracked this down, yet, but I've added a script to recompute a tourney's score. I'll be running it against our existing tourney's periodically until I can figure out the bug.

Next Release

The next release will have some more major changes and at least one new game.

Holiday Schedule

I'll be gone for large parts of December 24-26th. I should be able to check the server now and again, but between travel and spending time with family, I doubt I'll be playing too much. Which is too bad because...

New Games

I've decided to more aggressively move games out onto the server. There's a pretty good number of games that I've coded up rules for, but haven't released on the actual server. There are a number of reasons for this. Sometimes, I'm dissatisfied with the state of the bots for a game. Sometimes, I don't have a decent enough UI put together (card games). Sometimes, the game is just kind of uninteresting (Tic Tac Toe).

Anyway, I've decided to push hard to get every game in the library out onto the server. A big part of this is the impending open source release of the library, and the goal of providing a client api for the server. Basically, if a game exists in the library, I want the server to support it.

This means games will start to appear on the server that are in a less complete state than our usual releases. The development process will be much more open in the future and part of that is getting to see some unfinished work on the production server. That said, today's new set of games is fairly polished.

Amazons

Amazons is a territory game with Chess-style queens. It's a very compelling game that I've wanted to add for quite a while. The AI is a little wanting. It makes sensible individual moves, but doesn't really see the global state of the board very well. Otherwise, Amazons is in very solid shape.

Nine Men's Morris

Nine Men's Morris is an ancient. abstract strategy game. I'm very pleased with the state of the UI, for NMM, but I'm more than a little disappointed with the AI. At an earlier stage in development I had a respectably smart bot, but I had trouble balancing the search depth. NMM is somewhat unique in the way that the branching factor can shift drastically throughout the course of a game. So, I've had a hard time finding a search depth that leads to smart play, but doesn't bog down at points in the game.

Pah-Tum

Pah-Tum is another ancient, abstract strategy game. Fans of n-in-a-row games should give this a try. It's a fun change of pace with it's randomly placed blocks and scoring system. I'm very happy with UI, though, again, the AI leaves a little to be desired.

Three Musketeers

Three Musketeers is a very unique addition to Vying Games. It's the first game we've added that features unequal forces and unequal objetives. This is the roughest of the new additions in the sense that I don't have any bots prepared for it. You can try it out against RandomBot (it does exactly what it's name suggests), and if you play as blue, you might find that even RandomBot provides a challenging game now and again.

Games List

There's a new list of games. As the number of games continues to grow, a summary table like this should become more and more handy.

New Layout for /

Speaking of more and more games, I think there are now too many games to show "screenshot" style listings on http://vying.org/. There's now a smaller list of featured games (that will change occasionally), and a link to the full listing I mentioned earlier.

New Layout for "about" pages

The "about" pages, listing the rules, top players, recent games, etc, for the games have been redone as well. In addition to the layout changes, open invites and tourney listings have been added. Hopefully this will give both open invites and tourneys a higher profile.

New Icons

I've done some work on the icons in the upper-right corner of every page. The envelope icon is now dedicated to messages. The new dice icons lead to the list of active games, and cycle through active games. There isn't really any new functionality there, I'm just hoping that the new icons will be a little more intuitive.

30 Day Time Limits

There's now a server wide default of 30 day time limits on all human vs human games. Like the tourney time limits that's 30 days per turn. These time limits aren't intended to rush play, but rather to allow abandoned games to time out.

And, Much, Much More

There have been other changes, in addition, to those mentioned above. But, by comparison, they're all pretty minor, so I'll leave them for you to discover on your own. : ))

As with any release, please, please, please, let me know if you find any bugs. This release is much larger than the typical release, and even though I think it's pretty sound, there are bound to be bugs. If you find something, please post on the forums or send me a PM. Or, if you prefer, you can try me via email.

Thanks, have fun, and happy holidays!

Today I moved on to phase 2 of adding time limits to all games here on Vying Games. The first phase, in case you're worried you missed it, was putting time limits on tourney games.

These time limits are not for the entire game, but rather, the amount of time you have to make each move. For tourneys I've settled on 7 days between turns as a fairly safe number. The tourneys are moving at a good pace, and shorter time limits were leading to too many games timing out.

I think it's time to start assigning time limits to non-tourney games, starting with "abandoned" games. These are games that were abandoned by players who appear to have left the site for good. These tend to be unestablished players who started games as a trial of sorts and then never returned to finish them.

To clear out some of the abandoned games I've set a time limit of 7 days from this afternoon for any game that hasn't been played for one month or more. There were 528 of these games (out of 40,000+, not too bad), and a surprisingly large number of these are vs the bots. I know it's highly unlikely that any of the games will be continued in the next 7 days, but I didn't want to be too hasty with this.

If you check your "My Games" page, old games will now show up with a message like "time up in 6 days", followed by the player who's turn it is. If that player doesn't move in the given number of days they'll forfeit the game.

Phase 3: Time Limits for Everyone

Sometime soon I'll add time limits to all games. It'll be something long. Very long. The goal is simply to clear out abandoned games, not to force quick play. For short time limits, join tourneys. For casual games, expect a time limit on the order of 30 days. I'll post another blog entry when 30 day time limits are added.

Let me know if you see any problems with time limits, etc, or would like to suggest a shorter / longer time limit.

Have fun!