Posts:
1,032
Registered:
Dec 16, 2001
From:
Powell, OH
Age:
37 Home page
DSG's Intern
Posted:
Feb 20, 2005, 4:14 PM
Exciting news everyone, DSG now has it's very own intern! raginrhino is interning with DSG this semester for one of his classes.
We have agreed on a pretty interesting project, creating a new client program in Flash to play at DSG (with all sorts of bells & whistles). It is a huge task, but could become something really great!
Hopefully raginrhino will post here every so often and let us know how it's going.
More specifically I'll be working on the Games History section of the site. Dweebo suggested that I basically make it more like the game room. When you load a specific game it will more closely resemble a game being played live (i.e. players names in the "seat" in the upper right, moves displayed below that, etc.) Other than that I just want to make it more user friendly in general.
I'm open to suggestions on what else should be added, changed and so on. I may not be able to add everything mentioned, but now is the time to get your 2 cents in.
Posts:
542
Registered:
May 9, 2002
From:
Northeast USA
Re: DSG's Intern
Posted:
Feb 27, 2005, 5:36 PM
I would suggest that you might want to take a quick read through all of the previous forum threads here at DSG and start to compile a check-list of items requested regarding the games history. I know there have been many suggestions spread out over many different threads. Just to name a few, the ability to differentiate between speed/regular games, being able to filter out nonrated games, being able to specify ratings for player 1/player 2 (such as, > 1800, etc), among several other "filter" options. People also would love to see more brainking/IYT, etc games added to the database, perhaps in some automated way. This requires cooperation with other sites though which is a tough sell. There have been many suggestions regarding the games history. It will be fun to see what you come up with!
I did some searching of the forums and so far have been unable to come up with anything besides what you just mentioned.
I like the ideas about time settings as well as ratings filters and they shouldn't be terribly hard to work in.
One thing that I thought of when looking at the current page would be the ability to search for specified player(s), but not being required to specify what seat they were in. If you wanted to see every game in which a specific player has participated, you have to search twice, once with the player specified in either seat. This change will not only eliminate the need to search twice, but the confusion created by ending up with two lists of results (was game x played before or after game y?). This would also help if you wish to find a series of games played by two specific players. The games would all be listed in order in one place, allowing you to go step by step through any number of games played by the player(s) you have specified.
Posts:
1,032
Registered:
Dec 16, 2001
From:
Powell, OH
Age:
37 Home page
Re: DSG's Intern
Posted:
Feb 28, 2005, 1:27 PM
Additional filters for most things are not that hard to add, but they are tedious and you have to modify code in a bunch of places to get it all working, its a real pain.
I too have thought of being able to search for just games by 1 player name (as p1 and p2), and that is something we will try to add (most likely reachable from a player's profile). In my opinion, it never really fit in with the Games History tool because it was originally designed to show what the next moves from a given position were (and win %, count) in past games. If searching for just a player name, those win % and count are meaningless since they are combined for when that player was player 1 and player 2. Of course, I could probably have made it work, it has always been one of those TODO tasks. Hopefully Ragin will get it all working.
My advisor eventually recommended that I take a different intern opportunity on campus. Along with being busy, I felt a bit embarrassed about backing out on the project and hadn't logged in for quite a while. I hope to run into some of the old friends I made while playing here before.
