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.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Rich Text & Audio in Publishing

This morning, in bed, I realized that I forgot to do the Rich Text publishing part. This is non-trivial! Because images need to be scaled in an acceptable manner (you can't use Windows' BitBlt, it would look like crap).

So the "Rich Text" feature in Moyo Go Studio is both a curse and a blessing. The curse-part is the fact that everything that works with text also has to work with RTF, but the blessing-part is that spectacular output becomes possible.

In fact, Publishing is the "killer app" for Rich Text in Moyo Go. Because OK, you can put a picture of your favorite pro in his kifu, but it's really cool if you then can FTP the HTML to your website with Moyo Go so that everyone can see it.

Even more interesting: Publishing audio Go lessons that are simple HTML + MP3! You record an audio Go lesson in Moyo Go, publish the game to web and the sound will be converted to links to MP3/WAV files.

I coded the GUI part already: