Hi all,
BGBlitz 3.2.0 is available (Deutsche version anschließend). Some new features, a lot of usability improvements and bug fixes.
The most important new features:
-
Some may know the graphics Alex Eshagian presents to analyze why a move is better than another. You now have the first two diagrams under
"Game / Move / Analysis". Ask if you want to see more diagrams. -
A lot of new themes and three(!) new artists.
- I licensed a theme from Rain that cork lovers will appreciate.
- Rich Jenkins created a new Theme "Andromeda" with some color variations and
- about 60 themes from Jorge. Some will remind you of physical boards
Jorge provided so many that he gets a page for himself ( Jorges Themes - Backgammon Shareware for Windows | Mac | Linux )
Only four of them are included in the download. Don't miss the others ( Themes - Backgammon Shareware for Windows | Mac | Linux).
-
Support for red/green blindness ("Setup / Miscellaneous Settings / Other / better color for red/green blind").
The Tutor-LED, move arrows and colours in the dice distribution etc. use blue instead of green. -
GnuBG (if installed) can be used as an AI in BGBlitz the same way as TachiAI can be used. Why did I include GnuBG?
If you look at chess or Go you have a flourishing scene of AI. Why is it not the same for Backgammon? The smaller community is one reason for sure, but imagine you write a top backgammon AI .... and now?
You have to invest another 5-10 years to get a complete program. Backgammon lacks a plugin mechanism. In chess you can not only plugin the leading AI Stockfish in Fritz or Shredder, Stockfish has no UI at all! We don't have such a thing. BGBlitz was always intended to support plugins (that is the reason why the AI of BGBlitz has it's own name TachiAI). I dropped the idea of internal plugins some years ago and I tried to include GnuBG as an external AI. First as a PoC and BGBlitz then supports already 2 of the current relevant AIs. If someone contacts me I'll provide an API for
general use. BTW because I don't include GnuBG in any way but use only an installed version, I don't see any license issues. GnuBG can be used in BGBlitz on Windows, Linux and MacOS (you have to install it on MacOS with macports) -
support of xgp-files. Either drag&drop or copy/paste as you will do with pos-files. Comments are shown in Evalbox and BestMoves. Because documentation and reality dont seem to match, send me the file if you have any issues.
There are a lot more smaller improvements and some great usability enhancements, see them here: News - BGBlitz - Backgammon Software for Windows | Mac | Linux
I hope you enjoy and I appreciate your feedback.
best
Frank