Little Go
iOS Universel / Jeux
Little Go is a free and open source iOS application that lets you play the game of Go on the iPhone or iPad. You can play against another human (on the same device), or against the computer. The computer player is powered by the open source software library Fuego (http://fuego.sf.net/). The minimum requirement for running this version of Little Go is iOS 15.0.
Features:
- Board sizes between 7x7 and 19x19 (start a new game to change the board size)
- Let the computer player suggest a move or immediately play the move for you
- Calculate the score at any time during the game (area scoring is the default, territory scoring can be selected at the start of a new game)
- Adjust the computer's playing strength and resign behaviour by selecting from a number of presets, or by fine-tuning advanced settings
- Play even games, or games with 2-9 handicap stones (fixed stone placement)
- Select from 5 pre-defined rulesets when you start a new game, or adjust game rules to your preference (komi, ko rule, area/territory scoring system, number of passes to end game, resume play by alternating/non-alternating play, four passes end game)
- Place arbitrary black and white stones for initial board setup before a game starts
- View board positions for moves played earlier during the game
- View and create game variations
- Discard moves (aka "undo")
- Display move numbers and coordinate labels
- Zoom & scroll board
- Create and edit board and move annotations (e.g. good/bad move, good position for black/white, etc.) and add textual notes to a position
- Mark intersections on the board with symbols, markers and labels, and draw arrows or lines on the board
- Display player influence (aka territory statistics) for an estimate who owns an area
- Computer vs. computer game for entertainment
- Save & load games to/from the archive
- Use file sharing to transfer saved games from your iOS device to your computer, and vice versa
- Import/export game files from/to other apps on your device (e.g. Mail, DropBox)
- In-app user manual
- Submit bug report email from inside the app (yes, this *is* a feature :-))
- For the technically inclined: Watch what happens behind the scenes when Little Go and Fuego talk to each other over the Go Text Protocol (GTP)
Your contribution in any form (coding, UI design, testing, bug reports, creating an app video preview, website design) is welcome - please contact me or visit the support website to find out more.
A note about the project state: Several years of development have gone into Little Go since its inception in January 2011. The app now has a feature set that is, I believe, quite nice :-) for a free program. My main focus therefore lies on fixing any remaining bugs (of which I am sure there are plenty) and keeping the app running under future versions of iOS.
Little Go is released under the Apache License 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).
Quoi de neuf dans la dernière version ?
This is the Little Go bugfix release 2.0.1. It contains a fix for a bug that caused the app and Fuego to become out of sync when a game with handicap was started, or when a game with black or white setup stones was loaded from the archive (#430).
The previous release was the Little Go feature release 2.0.0. An overview of the changes follows, for more details read the in-game Changelog.
Features
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Support for game variations (#380):
- The app now supports displaying game variations. For that purpose a new view was added at the bottom of the Play tab. The new view displays the tree of nodes formed by all variations of the game.
- The tree view can be resized, zoomed and scrolled, and you can tap on any node to change the game board to display the content of that node.
- The app also supports creating new game variations: Go back to an older node and play a move and the app will automatically insert a new game variation.
- A number of new settings were added under "Settings > Tree view" and "Settings > Game variation" that let you control various aspects of how the tree view is rendered and how game variations are inserted.
- If you do not want to work with game variations you can also use the settings to hide the tree view completely and disable creation of new game variations.
Improvements and changes
------------------------
User manual overhaul (#419):
- The user manual has been rewritten from scratch, complete with icons, illustrations, a few animatons and hyperlinks.
- Besides the in-app version of the user manual there is now also an identical online version that can be accessed in any web browser at https://littlego-usermanual.herzbube.ch/.
- Many users have had trouble with the dry text-only user manual of the past, often being unable to match textual descriptions of icons to the actual buttons in the app. Hopefully this is now an issue of the past. Many thanks go to Andreas Fischlin who gave me the impetus to take on this long overdue task.
For more improvements/changes see the in-game Changelog.
Bugfixes
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- In-app web views now continue to display their content after an external link is opened in Safari (#428). Affected views: Help tab, About tab, Credits tab, Source Code tab, and any one of the entries on the Licenses and the Changelog tabs.
- The app no longer crashes when a handicap stone is removed while board setup mode is active (#399).
- Fixed a bug where sometimes handicap stones were not properly marked up while board setup mode was active (#400).
For more bugfixes see the in-game Changelog.
Regressions
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- Fixed the "Select player" screen to show a non-transparent background color even when no players are available (#421).
Technical changes
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- Support for iOS 9 up to 14 has been dropped (#409). The minimum required version is now iOS 15.0.
- See the in-game Changelog for a list of devices that are no longer supported.
- Also see see the Changelog for other technical changes.
