New features, lots of fixes, and big updates coming

A new version of BGDB went live today. Most changes will go unnoticed, fixing bugs and making small improvements. The biggest upgrades have happened behind the scenes, with lots of work to build the next major version of the software.

The most visible improvements you'll see today are to the Match and Game sheets. The Error types tab now shows a waterfall of equity loss, subtotals and totals. Performance by game shows checker and cube PR, and an equity loss waterfall (the old two-player tab is still there under Game by game). The Game sheet is now tabbed too, and gets its own Error types tab.

Other improvements and fixes:

• Cube decisions are now clearer on the board, showing a question mark next to the cube. This makes it more obvious what the decision is when reviewing a thumbnail of a position.
• The eval bar now shows the candidate move, not the best move. The vertical bar on the side of the board shows each player's chance to win the game (the cubeless game equity). Before, it always showed the evaluation after the best move in the position is played. That's not very useful. Now it shows the selected candidate move. By default that's the played move, but as you hover and select other moves the bar will animate, showing the overall equity change between the moves. There's also a tooltip on the bar showing the win/gammon/backgammon splits for each player.
• Move notation improved in various ways to match what you'd expect from other backgammon apps. You'll now see 13/11*(2) rather than the odd 13/11* 13/11, for example. Moves are also now sorted with the highest point on the board first, matching the ordering you'd expect in XG.
• Improvements to arrows. Bear-off arrows now point to their own space in the bear-off tray, instead of every checker pointing at the same square.
• The settings screen now has a reset for individual sliders, to return them to their default.

Plus various other bug fixes, including:

• Capped the checker stack on the bar at 4 (was 6) to prevent overflow on some displays.
• Shared positions carry the engine used for analysis.
• Keyboard shortcuts now only show the shortcuts for the given context, and they no longer fire when typing in a text field.
• Positions walkthrough improvements: capped to 250 positions (to keep it snappy), better responsiveness and loading screen, a move list that respects your collapsed notation setting, and event tags on the notes sidebar.

Behind the scenes, I've laid the groundwork for a lot of the big items on my todo list:

• User accounts, so that we can offer cloud sync and multiple device support (so you can, for example, do quizzes you've set up on desktop on your phone).
• Server analysis with GNU Backgammon, for full matches and individual positions, up to 3-ply. Upload your text files directly to BackgammonDB; no need for a trip to XG/GNU yourself first.
• Position editor with instant analysis feedback.
• Notebooks to collect multiple positions.
• An opening book that I plan to open source.

That's a lot! Most of these are pretty close to completion but need to go through lots of testing, so watch this space.