Re: Snowie and GNUBG

[Joseph Heled]

People are people. Marc, who owns Galaxy, pays a lot for the right to use XG, and would like to reduce this cost, but did not consider using the free GNUBG. 

Perhaps because it would look less "professional", who knows.

Me, when I re-analyze my Galaxy matches in GNUBG I see exactly the same checker and cube errors. 

I wonder if any of you (who own XG) run GNUBG games through it? if so, I would be interested to know what kind of PR GNUBG gets....

-Joseph

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 08:24, Rich Heimlich <rich@pcserenity.com> wrote:

Snowie had a lot of credibility in its day. Heck, many people saw the $400 price tag and just immediately genuflected as a knee-jerk response. It had to be good for that price. It was also revered by top BG players early on. Snowie, simply by its approach, carried a lot of cachet. GNUBG was often looked at as "that mishmash free software that's trying to be Snowie or Jellyfish, but will likely never get there." It carried the reputation of being the software you settled for if you couldn't afford Snowie. 

Understand, this was not my opinion at all. I owned a large game development company and we did a lot of work on tabletop games and even did several polls on backgammon games for the industry. Snowie ownership was like Bose and Rolex ownership. It was often just as much about bragging rights as it was about backgammon.

I'd love to see GNUBG experience another day in the sun (and maybe even fix an old display bug I've been waiting to see fixed for many years). In the meantime, it's still damned good and free. That's a pretty good combination.

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 2:00 PM Joseph Heled <jheled@gmail.com> wrote:

The development of Snowie stopped long before GNUBG grinded to a halt, and yet the people I meet now (online) tend to mention Snowie before GNUBG. Go figure.

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 07:52, Timothy Y. Chow <tchow@math.princeton.edu> wrote:

Just to be clear, when I talked about regaining ground, I was thinking
about "market share" and not speed or playing strength.  Market share, of
course, is controlled by many factors, but if one product has active
development and another product does not, then the product with active
development should be in a much better position to increase market share.

Tim

On Thu, 3 Dec 2020, Joseph Heled wrote:
>
> My impression is that speed is a factor, but much more it is the XG+ (or
> ++), i.e. moves based on relatively short truncated rollouts.
>
> Of course, speed is what makes the truncated rollouts possible.
>
> It is a major feature to add, but that would cut a large part of the
> lead.
>
> -Joseph
>  
>
> On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 03:06, Tony Lezard <tlezard@gmail.com> wrote:
>       Tim Chow wrote:
>
>       > But being free is always a plus, and now that Xavier seems to
>       > have all but abandoned XG, there could be an opportunity for GNU
>       > to regain ground, if there is the desire for that.
>
>       Xavier is working on XG 3. Expect a release next year.
>
>       Tony