Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

Some customers are not very happy that I promised them free bugfix releases an am now reneging on that promise.
I’ll see what I can do. One of the main problems (the only really big problem, perhaps) is downwards compatibility with the databases. When I add fields to the databases, the bugfix release should somehow downgrade its available feature set. That is such a can of worms that I don’t want to go there. Not to mention the need to either let people export all their games and re-import them in order to rebuild the database to its new format, or to redistribute the Gigabyte of game databases for free.

The problem with the first alternative is that importing all 450 000 games would take over a week, on the average PC. The problem with the last alternative is how to get 2 GB of the latest databases to hundreds of people, without providing access to those tenthousand users of the free version. These huge databases really are a problem. In order for the program to have such an unique pattern capability (there are rumors of another program being “better” but I believe it when I see it, at least it has not half a million example games like Moyo Go has), the importing process is relatively slow at about a game a second. You can redistribute the SGF’s as 7zip files, but you can’t expect a 125-hour importing process to go well, especially not because the larger the database, the more RAM required for the importing process (up to 1 GB free RAM, and RAM only, not pages on disk).