Dear Backgammon aficionados,
it has been quite a long time since the last release. I needed far
longer than I expected (should have been ready in December!), but the
cubeful match equities were quite difficult to understand and there is
very few information about it available and this little is not free of
errors or complete.
Further I was a little delayed because I was asked to make BGBlitz the
AI behind a BG-server, so now play65.com and gammonempire.com use
BGBlitz to evaluate interrupted games :))
And I'm working on another BG related project, which you will see the
later this year (I hope..)
Well what's new in this release?
- Finally! BGBlitz uses cubeful equities in match play too. This
improves the cube play in matches considerably.
- The evaluation in matchplay, especially at double match point was
improved.
- Improved cubeful equities in money games.
- BGBlitz got configurable random number generators (RNG). With a
network connection you could even have *real* random numbers from
www.random.org Additionally the state of the RNG is displayed during
the game in the upper right half of the status bar, so you can control
the numbers always and you can even look at the *future rolls*. I wrote
some additionally explanations on the 'Does it Cheat?' page. Will this
stop the 'BGBlitz is cheating' mails? ;)
- A Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' compatible version is included. This version
is about 30% faster than the 'Panther' version.
- A Turkish translation is included. Thanks to Özgür Albayrak
- There is a new graphics artist supporting BGBlitz! Russ Taber brought
us a 'fishy' board, with different sounds. Michael Darooge
contributed an excellent board with transparent checkers. (Both need
Java 1.2 or higher, so they don't work with Mac OS 9). Further I wrote
a little documentation: 'How to create your own theme'. So if you
ever wanted to create your own theme, this should give you the
necessary informations.
- The 'Select Theme' dialog box now shows previews of the themes.
- BGBlitz now resigns in hopeless situations.
- Shortcuts for 'Quit Game' (^G) and 'Concede Game' (Shift-^G) were
included.
- The 'Best Moves' dialog box shows the actual equity difference to the
best move
- I fixed two difficult to find bugs, that happened only under rare
circumstances. Many thanks to all people sending error reports to me,
especially to Rainer Schmid who gave the decisive hint. Some minor
errors has been fixed too.
- A bunch of small improvements in functionality and usability are
included in this release too.
- I planned to raise the requirements to (at least) Java 1.3 with the
release 2.0 and support Mac OS 9 with release 1.9.4. Unfortunately I
ran in some bugs of the MRJ. I spent nearly a week to find some
workarounds but it was in vain. So the release 1.9.0 is the last
release with works with Java 1.1.8.
Many thanks to Özgür Albayrak, Alex Cumbers, Michael Darooge, Linc
Davis, Peter Grotrian, Tom Hipschman, Jan van't Hull, Radu-Dan Sabau,
Christian Schmid, Rainer Schmid, Michael Stein, Russ Taber and to all
people providing error reports, made suggestions or helped in any other
way to improve BGBlitz.
You could download BGBlitz at www.bgblitz.com
All the best
Frank