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Comment by tslocum | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, author here. Glad to answer any questions.

If you don't know how to play backgammon, check out this guide[0] and/or this video[1]. There is a lot of history[2] behind backgammon. bgammon.org is AGPL-licensed, the client[3] and server[4] source code is publicly available. The graphical client is powered by the excellent Ebitengine[5] game engine.

  0. https://bgammon.org/blog/20240201-how-to-play-backgammon/
  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDvvKWi0ijs
  2. https://bgammon.org/blog/20240115-history-of-backgammon/
  3. https://code.rocket9labs.com/tslocum/boxcars
  4. https://code.rocket9labs.com/tslocum/bgammon
  5. https://ebitengine.org

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It might be worth while looking at lichess and take some direction from their interface, which is quite nice.

Lichess has been a large inspiration for the project. I gave Lichess a shout-out for its influence in this blog post: https://bgammon.org/blog/20240101-hello-world/

That's awesome. I also took inspiration from Lichess for https://woogles.io - a way to play a Scrabble-like word game online that is also open source, AGPL, etc. (Also like yours, written in Go!) It's hosted a number of big tournaments and I believe we're about to hit 6M total games (5.984 million so far! within the next day or two). Computer analysis with a WASM program that is going to improve, etc. I hope bgammon achieves a lot of success; I've always wanted to learn backgammon and will give it a try.

Thanks. Lichess really has paved the way for other libre online games. Congrats on the upcoming milestone. :)

I'm really tickled by a lot of the stuff on your page. For example your own backgammon interface language (UBEI) - I'm also coming up with a language (UCGI) and slowly translating our clients, bots, analyzers etc to use it :)

I'll plug your site on our Discord, it's neat.

Is there a way to resign a game? I don't want to play against a bot until I get totally demolished.

Also, if I click in the text input, a huge keyboard shows up even on desktop, obscuring much of the game. Why?

Yes, you can type /resign when it is your turn to end the game.

Thanks. The keyboard input should only show up if your browser is indicating there is a soft keyboard available for the device. On Android, the device keyboard doesn't work for some reason. It definitely shouldn't show up on desktop, though. I will look into this.

The desktop version[0] shouldn't have this issue, if you want to give that a try.

0. https://bgammon.org/download/

Why does "Play now using your browser" link to the play store?

If the user-agent claims to be Android, the play link is changed to the Play Store. This is because the web client runs single-threaded[0] and has reduced performance when running in a browser on desktop, let alone when running on a mobile platform. When running as a native Android app, all of the device's CPU cores are utilized.

0. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28631

It would be best to also change the text then, not just the link. The text could read "Install the app and play now" when the link is changed to point to the play store.

I would much prefer to run single threaded in the browser than be cajoled into installing another fucking app.

I would rather offer the browser-based version to everyone, but it is an objectively worse experience because of the state of the Go compiler. You can still visit the broswer-based version if you want to, it's just a link swap on the page done in JavaScript.

Out of curiosity, what do you think I should do? Keep in mind, not everyone feels the same about being "cajoled" into installing an open source application. But virtually everyone won't appreciate the UI hangs.

Maybe you could offer both links, with a note that says what you just said?

(I don't think you're forcing free open backgammon down people's throats, but there's an existing fatigue due to less scrupulous publishers detecting mobile browsers and pushing people away from otherwise functional websites.)

Why would a backgammon game need multiple threads?

I agree than the basic functionality should require so little work that multiple threads should be useless. Some features like bots or game analysis could benefit from multiple threads, and should at the very least run outside the main UI thread. However these are only nice-to-have, and I'd be happy with a web-client that either doesn't support these at all, or only uses a single worker thread. And I see no reason to support this on desktop, while redirecting to an app on mobile.

Moving those features a webworker so the UI stays responsive should be easy, however I'm not sure how synchronizing multiple webworkers to take advantage of multiple cores compares to synchronizing multiple threads in a native app.

So the UI can respond while the CPU is calculating. Assuming the AI is using some sort of alpha-beta search the CPU also will scale embarrassingly well across multiple threads.

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