Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Freeware Editor Headaches

Yesterday night I spent a few feverish hours trying to make an update to the Freeware SGF Editor (to add translations, multiple gobans and drag & drop skins/files).

Result: I destroyed the sources for the freeware version. The problem is that maintaining the same sourcecode for two versions is complex. MoyoGo is an enormous application and I have to disable thousands of parts with conditional compilation compiler directives, but I also have to physically remove all GUI widgets that are not used or hide them, whatever is appropriate.

This process is labor-intensive, and as I now know, error-prone. I simply have no time to do it, the coming months. It's too much stress, I need to concentrate my efforts on the tactical module and a few other things that suck up time and that are much more important at the moment.