Vying Games : Blog

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.