Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

Moyo Go currently does not have a way to export all its SGF games in one go. You can export them very easily one-by on though.

I decided not to built in limitations (SmartGo has to be re-started every ten games you export).

A few people asked me for a feature that exports all games, and I am reluctant to provide it, because exporting all games takes ages. The games are heavily compressed in a database, and exporting them would go with ten games a second on a fast PC. I can’t really see what the use of all those games is, if you already own Moyo Go Studio, with a queryable SQL database, a “Kombilo” pattern searcher, an SGF annotation program and all the rest.

Of course it is very interesting for me to know why one would want to use those games in another program, because I will react by adding the features of that program to Moyo Go!

Meanwhile, I am now exporting all games from a Moyo Go install to SGF, because I had thrown away all my SGF’s, because those 450 000 SGF’s occupied 1.75 GB. I could have kept them but as I mentioned before, in a bout of anger I got rid of everything. Using R-Studio to recover the SGF’s is not an option due to the sheer number of SGF’s, and the fact that they have non-descriptive names. I need to be able to know from which Go server they came from, and R-Studio will not give me their parent folders’ name, only files grouped by file extension. Using a modified Moyo Go build to export the games, this still takes a waking day on a very fast machine. I have not much to say about the exporting speed because I use a third-party SQL database source code licence for the game data for practical reasons: Writing a state-of-the-art SQL database system takes a few years.

The reason I need those raw SGF’s is that I want to add a feature to Moyo Go that neccessitates altering its database fields. I need to add a way to quickly (!) filter on player’s name. Not in the SQL database, but in the example (”learned”) pattern database. When moving over the board, you see patterns and the system spits out the games in which they occur with a speed of tens of thousands a second. What I need to add is a way to get only Go Seigen’s games, etc. But it should not make the retrieval speed slower. That’s really hard to do. I tried it twice already. Yesterday I concluded that the only way to do it is a little comp-sci trick. So I’ll have to build it and re-import the SGF’s.

But that trick changes a database format. In case of free updates, I would have to redistribute 1.5 GB worth of databases to customers. Not very practical. Having only one (major) update a year for not too high of a price solves this problem, at least for the pro games.