jsPgnViewer & stuff

I’ve been quite busy with the army life for the past months and have not put much energy into the jsPgnViewer. The features that have made it to this release are:

• New configuration options
• Queen, bishop optimizations. The speedup is real one!
  • In a 60 move game the the findFromBishop function took 300ms. After optimization 0.72ms, findFromQueen 300ms to 0.30ms. Basically I’m saving the location of the pieces. For example when a move Bd3 comes up I get the color of the d3 square – it is white. I use the cached white’s white bishop’s location to make the move. When there are more than one same colored bishops I perform a search on the diagonals. More or less the same optimization is for queens. It gets kind of tricky when it comes to knights and rooks but i’ll look into next time i have time to work on the viewer.
• Visuals. Showing the moves pane should not produce glitches in the layout of the board and game info anymore.

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.3.6 and to the issues list to add feature requests.

I have updated WordPress to the latest version. The upgrade went well (just a lot of hassle) and it seems the jsPgnViewer WP plugin is just working fine. I also moved the domains (chesspastebin.com & pgnview.com). I used the mydomain.com URL forwarding feature before. It started to bug me that my pages were in frames and every time i tried to copy a link i would just get the domainname. No updates on features though. Stay tuned.

This is the current progress on the plugin:

• Comments, playable variations.
• Safari support. I tried installing Mac OS X under vmWare under Linux. No luck, only a sad mac. I’ll try a different version this weekend.
• Optimizations. With moves like Qe3 i have to look through diagonals, the horizontal line and vertical rank to find the queen. These can optimized for example by remembering all the queen positions. I was able to achieve 200ms gain with caching the location of kings in games with long endgames.
• Visuals. Showing the moves pane should not produce glitches in the layout of the board and game info anymore.
• New config options:
• moveFontSize
• moveFontColor
• moveFont
• flipBoard

I’ll make a release when everything is finished. If things go fine then in 2-3 weeks I’ll release 0.4. I might produce a 0.3.5 in the meantime. I’ll be updating the demo page and this blog with trunk versions every now and then.