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Title: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 14th, 2010, 2:03pm Hi guys, long time no see. Congratz to this year's champion, I seem to sense a pattern of alternation along the years :) I'm going to move to a new web domain, and I thought I'd shake the dust off my old notation converter (EDIT: removed the old URL link), making it in javascript so it can run offline as well, and maybe add new features. So, do you guys use it and would you suggest improvements? Thanks! EDIT (October): The converter is now hosted on the arimaa.com server: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/notconv/old/ |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by omar on May 15th, 2010, 6:39pm Nice to hear from you Leo. I've linked the notation converter on the Games page, but I don't know how much it is being used. The chat room you built is pretty heavily used :-) As a small suggestion for improvement, perhaps you can add the Arimaa setup notation as another way to input the position. For example: Ed2 Hg1 Ra4 eb6 rf4. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 15th, 2010, 10:26pm Hi Omar! :) The format which I labeled "PGN" is actually the setup notation. I should rename it to "Setup" maybe, and the official position notation to "Diagram"? So the chat system hasn't broken yet? With the advances of the browsers during the last two years it might be possible to improve the cross-compatibility of it. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by camelback on May 15th, 2010, 10:58pm Hi Leo, I used that tool often when you first introduced. It is a great tool and is very useful when you develop Arimaa content. Currently the tool requires a static final position notation, Instead it would be even better if we could paste the complete game PGN and get the final position or wiki format or image from the tool. For example if Adanac (or somebody :D) wants to paste 18g of a game in wiki, he can copy the PGN until 18g and generate the required wiki format or image from the tool. I used to have a perl script to generate the static position and then use it in your tool to generate the required format. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 16th, 2010, 12:09am Hi camelback, Maybe we could make the converter an addon to the "Plan Game" tool on the arimaa web site, which has already all the game mechanics coded in? I wouldn't mind coding the game logic in javascript (I've already done it a number of times in other languages) but I have the feeling it would just end up replicating the functionalities of the Plan game tool. I'm working on a compact URL notation (takes between 1 and 33 chars) to pass a position parameter to the converter so it can be called from the Plan game window or any other place. I don't know which solution is best. But the forum sure will make the magic one appear :) |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by omar on May 16th, 2010, 5:32am on 05/15/10 at 22:26:51, leo wrote:
Oh OK, I missed that. Very nice. I had setup a black and white image generator for Karl to help with producing the images used in his book. http://arimaa.com/arimaa/fig/ Maybe this should be merged with your tool. I can send you the code and images used for this, if you want. If you convert your tool to JavaScript would it be able to generate the JPEG images in JavaScript or would that still be done on the backend? |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 16th, 2010, 7:48am The merger looks like a good idea! I think I'll have to keep the server side php script for picture generation, unless people are ready to use SVG? Ideally the interface would offer the choice of raster vs vector, but only the vector would work offline. Even better, the vector image could be made interactive and used to position the pieces. Sleepless nights ahead... ;D |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 24th, 2010, 9:27am I'm slowly working on the js version. Meanwhile I'd like to share my thoughts about a compact human-readable (with some training) notation for passing as an argument in a URL. Here are the (tentative) codes for the squares: Code:
The piece positions would be written in this order Code:
A missing piece would be written ".", two missing pieces, ":". Trailing missing rabbits would not be noted. There are ways to make it even more compact but it wouldn't be human readable anymore. Thoughts? Maybe this has already been done and I missed it. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by Fritzlein on May 24th, 2010, 3:56pm on 05/24/10 at 09:27:19, leo wrote:
Your suggestion doesn't seem all that human-readable as it stands. Using a single letter for each square would require a lookup table; no one could tell you whether '3' was next to 'W' or not. The algebraic coordinates 'f4' and 'g3' are far easier to visualize without a cheat sheet or translator at hand, although they are of course twice as verbose as using single characters per square. My suggestion for position notation is a straightforward port of FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) from chess. For example, in the video script, I suggested that the position 8/8/8/2R5/2e2m2/1ErD2C1/2D2Mh1/8 be used to illustrate winning by elimination. I didn't even explain how the notation works, but I'll bet the majority of Arimaa players could guess what position I intended to indicate. If you don't even have to explain it, then it's human-readable! :) I believe the position would be rendered as RN:KTW.5/03O.::S under your suggestion, i.e. using half as many characters as FEN, so obviously FEN isn't optimally compact, but that's not what you were asking for, right? ;) |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on May 26th, 2010, 8:29am Thanks Karl, you convinced me I should forget about human readability, so I can use the more compressed version for URL query with no remorse. It's only meant to provide short URLs, users shouldn't need to write or edit it by hand, it will be automatically generated for each position explored on the web app. That esoteric version prefixes a character that encodes how many pieces of each type (except rabbits) are present. PS: The query encoding for my old board image generator is actually a FEN variant :) |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by rbarreira on Aug 12th, 2010, 3:40pm The link seems to be down, actually you seem to have lost the domain? |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on Aug 15th, 2010, 3:35pm @rbarreira: Yes, the domain that I said I was moving to will hopefully remain mine for long. But my former hosting company extended my old domain to put ads on it. I planned to have the new converter finished when the old domain expires but I didn't make it in time. I'm not even in time for the new chat room, argh. If necessary, I can upload the old converter in a temporary folder of my new domain. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by rbarreira on Sep 20th, 2010, 5:18am Yes it would be nice to have it! |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on Sep 28th, 2010, 2:56am Sorry for being so slow :-[ The old converter will be hosted on the arimaa.com server so that people can safely hotlink to the generated board pictures; Omar or I will post a notice here when it's done. I'm thinking of integrating the new converter to the game viewer/explorer which Clojure is currently developing, and I'm still eager for suggestions for improvement and new features for the converter, as well as ideas for how to integrate it smoothly into the viewer. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by clojure on Sep 28th, 2010, 6:41am Yo Leo, nice to see you on the board again. I actually am not sure what kind of converter this is, text to image (something beyond that, less?)? Let me hear implementation details, and let's figure out how to use it as part of the viewer. In what language is it written in? Does it use some library to generate the image file that is not easily having replaced in other environment? |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on Sep 28th, 2010, 8:49am I've uploaded it there temporarily so you can have a look: EDIT: removed the url now that it's hosted on the arimaa.com server It's all in PHP but I want to make the new converter in javascript so it can work offline. The picture generator couldn't work in javascript though, especially when used to hotlink of course. |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by clojure on Sep 29th, 2010, 7:11am on 09/28/10 at 08:49:17, leo wrote:
Hi, if we did the board rendering in html5 canvas, we can export it as png in offline use: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/the-canvas-element.html#dom-canvas-todataurl If I guess correctly, we just use the board representation as canvas and with that toDataURL function we get url that we could put into an img tag, which users see. This would be useful if user is interested to export image for himself. But as you say, if we want to create a hotlinkable image to anywhere to put in, it's a different story and your tool helps there. Anyway, cool tool. Next you should do png -> text notation converter ;) |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by leo on Oct 2nd, 2010, 10:31am The canvas to picture file conversion is a clever idea, Clojure. It can be implemented directly in your game viewer if canvas is used for the interface as you envision. (As to the picture to notation conversion, that's on my top priority list of course ;) ) Now comes the question of how to integrate a notation converter into your viewer/explorer. A collapsable pane? The converter and image generator is now hosted on the Arimaa server, it's now safe to hotlink to the generated pictures to use on the forum: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/notconv/old/ Thank you Omar :) |
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Title: Re: Revamping the notation converter? Post by omar on Oct 6th, 2010, 11:10pm Welcome Leo. But thank you for developing this nice tool. |
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