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Topic: Arimaa android app updates (Read 9025 times) |
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lightvector
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Arimaa player #2543
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #15 on: Jun 17th, 2015, 11:46pm » |
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Good timing. 
Over the last month, I *just* completed a huge refactor of the code, including also some rewrites of chunks of the logic. The refactor was to allow the following:
* Game tree support rather than merely a stack - the internals now use a game tree, although there's no GUI support for it yet, so in practice with the current GUI it's usually a linear tree.
* Board editing (woohoo!)
* Platform-independent board and animation and mouse/touch and button handling. I now have a working executable jar file for PC that shares a lot of code with the app, but with the UI using Java's swing libraries rather than the android gui libraries.
I'll release some stuff in the next week or two.
As far as sharing the code, despite the refactor, the code still isn't the most friendly for external devs, but I guess if people want to use it, I'm okay with that...
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #16 on: Jun 21st, 2015, 7:40pm » |
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New app version (1.2.0) just pushed to the google store.
More changes to come!
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Ail
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Rabbits can't push Rabbits!
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #17 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 4:26am » |
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Here's some things that I found to be weird:
After the update the game disappeared from my front-page. It was still on the phone but I had to drag it back to my front-page. Never had this seen happen to another app that just had been updated.
I had a crash when using the new set-up-board-feature after the game had already been lost.
It worked well on a fresh game.
When playing around with that feature I played Elephant+Rabbit vs. Elephant+Rabbit.
I noticed that the AI might not be aware of elimination-defeat at all. It would happily sacrifice it's only rabbit when it could have killed mine in the turn after. It didn't matter who had the first move. I always won with elimination-defeat.
Given the very limited amount of possibilities with only 2 pieces I really think there might be an oversight in this regard.
Oh, and one more thing. When starting a new game there's like a 5 second delay before you actually see the board. Not much of a bother though.
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| « Last Edit: Jun 23rd, 2015, 4:28am by Ail » |
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #18 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 11:22am » |
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Thanks for the feedback!
* I will push an update tonight fixing the icon disappearing upon update.
* Can you reproduce the crash using the board editing feature? I haven't gotten it to crash myself, so if you could give a sequence of actions that makes it happen, that would be really helpful.
* The new game delay is mostly due to bot_sharp initializing itself (also present in the old version). I don't know how to make this a lot better, although I can reduce it a little.
* For elimination, try running it on level 10. This might be surprising, but even level 7 is nominally only P1 + at most one ply of captures, and lower levels are worse. Level 9 is still only P2. It makes sense that it would play very poorly in that situation with such shallow search depths.
(The reason it normally plays as well as it does at those levels despite being the shallow search depth is due to the complicated evaluation heuristics it currently has, which don't help much when the board is this empty and unusual).
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deep_blue
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Arimaa player #9854
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #19 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 12:07pm » |
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When level 7 is only P1 and thus sucks at endgame, why don't you instead of fixing depth fix (very short) time per move? This should lead to much more balanced strength throughout the game.
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #20 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 2:49pm » |
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Interesting idea. Time is not an ideal bound here because that will be very inconsistent between devices and between positions, and it seems better to me if all but the highest few levels are device-independent.
Node count might be good though. I'm not going to prioritize that right now, but I'll keep it in mind!
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aaaa
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #21 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 5:19pm » |
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Can you add "instantaneous" as an animation speed option?
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #22 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 5:25pm » |
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Sure. Do you literally mean instantaneous (1 frame), or do you just mean "really really fast"?
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aaaa
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #23 on: Jun 23rd, 2015, 5:45pm » |
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Instantaneous, not only because of the impatience factor, but also because it adds a bit of an educational challenge to figure out what sequence of steps could have brought upon the change on the board.
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #24 on: Jun 24th, 2015, 12:09am » |
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Updated to fix the icon disappearance, and also adding the new animation speeds.
Given the current way the animation is structured, it turns out the most straightforward implementation has instant be instant step-by-step, rather than move-by-move.
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Ail
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #25 on: Jun 24th, 2015, 6:57am » |
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on Jun 23rd, 2015, 11:22am, lightvector wrote:
* Can you reproduce the crash using the board editing feature? I haven't gotten it to crash myself, so if you could give a sequence of actions that makes it happen, that would be really helpful.
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Well, I tried to but I couldn't. It happened the first time I wanted to use it as soon as I touched a piece of those that had been eliminated before. But I never had it happen again.
I have to say this board-setup feature is realized so brilliantly, that I cannot imagine a way to make it even better!
on Jun 23rd, 2015, 11:22am, lightvector wrote:
* The new game delay is mostly due to bot_sharp initializing itself (also present in the old version). I don't know how to make this a lot better, although I can reduce it a little.
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I guess you changed the time when the initialization happens. I think before it maybe happened right when you start the app, where it is more expected to come to a delay. Now the App starts quicker but the delay occurs the first time you start a game. It might even be better this way. It was just a little strange as it was different to before.
on Jun 23rd, 2015, 11:22am, lightvector wrote:
* For elimination, try running it on level 10. This might be surprising, but even level 7 is nominally only P1 + at most one ply of captures, and lower levels are worse. Level 9 is still only P2. It makes sense that it would play very poorly in that situation with such shallow search depths.
(The reason it normally plays as well as it does at those levels despite being the shallow search depth is due to the complicated evaluation heuristics it currently has, which don't help much when the board is this empty and unusual).
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Yeah, great... After losing three times in a row with this setup against Level 10 I feel really stupid now. ^^
Also knowing that on the other difficulties the game virtually has no search depth and just won due to superior evaluation makes me really feel bad at this game.
Seriously, I can go up against Stockfish for about 30 moves before I cannot prevent losing pieces and my position falls apart. But in Arimaa I feel the superiority of the computer to be even more drastical when it was supposed to be the other way around.
I feel like I'm lacking a game plan. In Chess I know what to look for in each phase of the game but in Arimaa I don't really know what I'm doing and often become impatient and do things with terrible consequences. Like losing half my pieces while fruitlessly trying to push through with a rabbit.
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lightvector
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #26 on: Jun 24th, 2015, 8:58am » |
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I figured out how to crash the app now. I'll push a fix for it along with an option for some new board and piece images tonight.
on Jun 24th, 2015, 6:57am, Ail wrote:
I feel like I'm lacking a game plan. In Chess I know what to look for in each phase of the game but in Arimaa I don't really know what I'm doing and often become impatient and do things with terrible consequences. Like losing half my pieces while fruitlessly trying to push through with a rabbit.
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Not too hard to fix that in most cases. Play games and discuss and review them with stronger players in the forum or chatroom here. You probably didn't get to where you are in Chess without some practice.
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Ail
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #27 on: Jun 30th, 2015, 5:23am » |
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on Jun 24th, 2015, 8:58am, lightvector wrote:I figured out how to crash the app now. I'll push a fix for it along with an option for some new board and piece images tonight.
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Since the new pieces are there, the crash-fix should also be there, right?
But I could just reproduce it:
I played a game from start to finish and lost it.
I picked set up board from that lost position.
I pulled my camel back on the board.
I tried to pull a cat back aswell but then the game froze and I got the Armimaa was closed due to an error briefly after.
I think the crucial thing is not that the game is over (it worked from my saves that I took from games that I won) but that you also must have lost it.
It was the same when I had it for the first time last week.
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lightvector
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Arimaa player #2543
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #28 on: Jun 30th, 2015, 8:18am » |
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Cool. Okay, so looks like I half-fixed the previous crash bug. There's yet another case I missed. I'll fix it shortly.
(It's not related to the game ending by the way, I was mislead by this for a while when trying to reproduce it. It occurs when you drag a captured piece and drop it on to an empty spot that another captured piece *would* belong. It used to also happen when you dragged a captured piece to an arbitrary off-board location.).
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lightvector
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Arimaa player #2543
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Re: Arimaa android app updates
« Reply #29 on: Jul 4th, 2015, 11:38am » |
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Fixed! I also fixed a funny bug where you can get a piece on the board that looks like one piece but behaves like a different piece (I have no idea what further mayhem you can engineer from there).
Poke me if there are any further crashes (on version 1.2.3).
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