Hi all, olaugh, jfultz, and I would like to make some notes regarding Quackle to everybody. If you wish to reply to this email, or send more comments about Quackle, please join the Quackle Yahoo! group, and reply to there.
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/quackle/ * First and foremost, Quackle (er, me and olaugh, perhaps especially me as I'm distributing it on my website) could indeed in a shitload legal trouble if somebody wanted us to be. Because of this, we promise to ship the next version of Quackle, which will require you to input the layout of your favorite crossword game's board manually, within two weeks after the Dallas Open ends. * The second feature on our priority queue is a one-press/click way of placing and committing plays. Thanks to Dave Wiegand for a hint at a solution; whatever he wants, he gets. This will also be implemented in the next Quackle release. * The third feature on our priority queue is import and export of game logs. In the future ISC logs can also be imported. None of this will make the next release unless a new developer joins and helps us. * As we've mentioned on each Scrabble mailing list now, Quackle doesn't try to play endgames perfectly. Get over it :-) It'll get better eventually. Quackle's static evaluation is currently just score+rack leave in all nonendgame situations. This will also improve eventually. * If you want to implement other features in Quackle, contact me or olaugh and we can help you with any questions you have regarding Quackle's inner workings. * We forgot to enable compiler optimizations when making the release packages. Therefor the next version of Quackle will probably simulate more or less than 50% faster on all platforms. * Please understand that Quackle was never exhaustively tested on Windows; olaugh and I just plain don't use Windows. Therefor there may be a few things we can improve in Quackle to optimize Windows performance, and sadly a large number of things in Windows Quackle are are literally broken compared to Linux or OS X Quackle (like, in Linux or OS X Quackle, the plays in the move box never disappear during the first tens of simulation iterations, and the same "bug" is probably responsible for slowing down Windows simulations, which are quite slow compared to running on Linux or OS X), and we are appreciative of people pointing these things out. Just please bear in mind that we are not peccant regarding a lot of these issues. Some great news for Windows users is that jfultz has broken through with a new Windows Quackle installer that will be used for the Windows package in the next Quackle release. Actually, jfultz in general is good news to Windows users. More kudos to him. * Us releasing Quackle now to distract top players before the DO -- now that's funny :-) The only top player I've royally borked over is myself who hasn't slept more than 4 hours a night this week :-) jfultz and olaugh have put in similar schedules to get this release out the door; it was an admirable team effort. * Aaron Bader is working on a users manual for Quackle that will be distributed with the next release and maybe at the Dallas Open. If you'd like to help, contact him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thanks for everything again and I hope to have a good time in Dallas. good night, here's to the next release (and not getting sued), kwak Jason Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quackle/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
