New Vugraph Features

[Deanrover]

Please post your thoughts on the new vugraph features here.

[hrothgar]

Enjoying the VuGraph...

especially since the Aussies and Kiwi's are being featured (both have pairs playing something MOSCITO like)

 

would it be possible to get a description regarding the new features that have been provided? I can see the obvious and am enjoying, but fear that I might be missing something

[Erkson]

Automated vugraph archiving and comments inclusion are great.

 

Erkson

[nikos59]

Denis O Kane has already written in another thread.

The Vugraph coverage of Istanbul Olympiad suffers

in that it is not possible to store the complete results

of all the matches (scoreboards) for later perusal.

These (seem to) vanish shortly before the next round

begins. It is also not possible to see the lineups of

the teams.

 

The automatic logging seems not to be working. I

am still at the office, hence no connection to BBO proper,

but the URL where the unedited logs are stored only

shows 2 matches per round for the 4th and the 5th

round, which means that some matches may have

been lost.

 

nikos

[hrothgar]

Denis O Kane has already written in another thread.

The Vugraph coverage of Istanbul Olympiad suffers

in that it is not possible to store the complete results

of all the matches (scoreboards) for later perusal.

These (seem to) vanish shortly before the next round

begins. It is also not possible to see the lineups of

the teams.

 

The automatic logging seems not to be working. I

am still at the office, hence no connection to BBO proper,

but the URL where the unedited logs are stored only

shows 2 matches per round for the 4th and the 5th

round, which means that some matches may have

been lost.

 

nikos

on a related topic, does anyone have asaved copies of the match between USA and AUstralia?

[nikos59]

Yes, I know someone :)

 

If you go to my Vugraph Project site, at

 

www.sarantakos.com/bridge/vugraph.html

 

and follow the links to the 2004 Olympiad,

you'll see the data. Mind you, only one

room is available. Moreover, I heard somewhere

that the operator had got it wrong and

put the names the other way round, but I

am not sure.

 

n

[hrothgar]

Yes, I know someone :)

 

If you go to my Vugraph Project site, at

 

www.sarantakos.com/bridge/vugraph.html

 

and follow the links to the 2004 Olympiad,

you'll see the data. Mind you, only one

room is available. Moreover, I heard somewhere

that the operator had got it wrong and

put the names the other way round, but I

am not sure.

 

n

looks like something is messed up...

Neill-Klinger are playing something close to MOSCITO and trhe auctions don't match the hands...

[DenisO]

Please post your thoughts on the new vugraph features here.

This is a better thread for my comments than where I posted originally - apologies for duplication

 

Some comments now that the new features are up and running at the Olympiad

 

1. I can't access the new Results feature when I am kibbitzing a match - I have to leave the match and return to Vugraph theatre; is this the way it's supposed to work?

 

2. In standings I can only see the current round - it would be nice to be able to access earlier rounds and (more important) the latest positions on overall group standings - this will be more important as we get to the later stages of the event.

 

3. In Matches also, I can only access the current round and many matches are missing. Again I would like to be able to access matches from previous rounds - hopefully all matches

 

4. It would be great if we could save the match results to hard disk

 

5. The new features are a great step forward - however I think they fall well short of the RAMA results service which we got at the European Team Championships at Malmo - for me that is the sort of results service that BBO should strive to attain for these major WBF competitions.

 

Denis

[Erkson]

The automatic logging seems not to be working. I

am still at the office, hence no connection to BBO proper,

but the URL where the unedited logs are stored only

shows 2 matches per round for the 4th and the 5th

round, which means that some matches may have

been lost.

Some matches were announced but not broadcast for technical reasons.

 

Erkson

[Deanrover]

I am disappointed with the new feature.

 

i) It clearly seems to have been devised with a live audience in mind. The fact that the page moves forward every five seconds and gives a precis of the overall situation is nice if it is used on a screen in the Vugraph Theatre in Istanbul, however it falls short for home viewing.

 

ii) In a real life vugraph theatre there will be multiple screens so you can keep one eye on the bridge whilst perusing the standings. This can not be done on BBO, unless you have the ability to log in as two IDs concurrently.

 

iii) Unless I am missing something, the navigation is absolutely AWFUL. The only way to get to a specific screen is click "next" or "prev" multiple times. This is extremely tiresome. Why not have a main menu? Why not be able to click on the word "Argentina" as it appears in the "provisional rankings" page and have their team members, latest scores, group ranking etc. pop up?

 

iv) Lack of group standings. Really hope these will appear soon, very important concept.

 

v) This is only quasi-related but often I will be kibitzing match x and want to know what other games are available to watch. Clicking the "tables" tab should produce this information a la MBC, but it doesn't.

 

vi) Before entering a Vugraph Room I would appreciate knowing what language commentary is on. Perhaps Wald could be given the ability to add this information?

 

vii) Often I will want to go to a room because of a particular commentator (Fred, Scotty) however if you move your cursor over their ID all it says is "Fred is watching a live vugraph" NOT which room they are in. Hence one has to enter and exit rooms until you see which room they are in. This problem is compunded by the fact that Fred is often logged in as invisible making it impossible to know if he is commentating. IMHO when go into the V.T lobby and move your cursor over one of the match info green lines, as well as a list of players popping up (cool new feature), so should a listen of all commentators in that room. (n.b. seeing as all yellows are auto-ungagged this would involve the client differentiating between ordinary yellows and yellow commentators.)

 

viii) There is a big bug in it. Go to one of the screens where it list all current scores from a match. Click on one of these scores. A little movie box will pop up. Click the "x" in the top right to close it. You will now get a Windows "Netbridge vu has experienced an error yadda yadda yadda box" and BBO crashes. Am running Windows ME.

 

I hope that Fred and Uday do not take this post in too harsh a light. Generally I am a huge fan of yours and of course BBO is free blah blah blah. It is a nice feature but it needs a lot of development. I really don't see myself getting any benefit out of it this Olympiad.

[DenisO]

Hi Dean

 

Lots of very valid comment here - As you say the new features were probably developed with a live audience in mind but to date I think I've seen upwards of 2000 BBO specs - which will surely increase so it would be nice to cater for them too. It's early days for these new features and I hope Fred/Uday and the other programmers take all our comments as genuinely constructive to eventually make the BBO results service second to none at major events - just like the rest of BBO :P

 

Denis

[mrdct]

I think the revolving scoreboard feature is useful for onsite auditorium presentations where there is a 2nd screen off to the side with the relevant information cycling through the various pages. For the home viewer, however, it is virtually useless. The data doesn't seem to be all that timely either, but that probably isn't a BBO issue.

 

What would be much better is a website that links itself directly into the official scoring program and provides realtime results from matches in progress together with full cross-table analysis of every board of every round to date. Something like what we've seen in recent Norweigan and Danish events.

 

Using BBO for the onsite auditorium presentation raises a few issues as the optimal screen layout for both the vugraph presentation itself and the related "scoreboard" are quite different for a large room with a data projector compared to a single person looking at a computer monitor. It seems that there are trade-offs that are diminishing the viewer experience for both.

 

In an auditorium the commentary bar is invariably too low and too small to be of any benefit to viewers, who would probably be more interested in the live commentators onsite anyway. Also, the size and font of the bidding and match score need to be a little bit bigger for an auditorium presentation. The default colours are a bit problematic too - specifically black on a blue background is quite hard to read on a data projector and even worse on a down-converted TV screen when vugraph feeds are sent through a hotel's in-house system which we do in Australia at some events. It would be good to have more screen layout options to better configure the presentation to the size of the screen and size of the audience.

[Dwingo]

Automatic logging with embedded commentary is a great plus. Congratulations. We can now, download these files and analyse the bidding & play at our own convenient time

 

2. In standings I can only see the current round - it would be nice to be able to access earlier rounds and (more important) the latest positions on overall group standings - this will be more important as we get to the later stages of the event.

 

This is not correct. For a given Round X, I am able to see

 

Open Group A Provisional Rankings : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group B Provisional Rankings : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group C Provisional Rankings : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group D Provisional Rankings : Round X ( 1 page)

 

Women Group A Provisonal Rankings : Round X ( 2pages)

Women Group B Provisonal Rankings : Round X ( 2 pages)

 

Seniors Provisional Ranking : Round Y ( 2 pages)

 

Open Group A - Unofficial Scores : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group B - Unofficial Scores : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group C - Unofficial Scores : Round X ( 1 page)

Open Group D - Unofficial Scores : Round X ( 1 page)

 

Women Group A - Unofficial Results : Round X ( 2 pages)

Women Group B - Unofficial Results : Round X ( 2 pages)

 

Seniors - Unofficial Results - Round Y ( 2 pages )

 

Then comes the hand records/results of deals page for

Open Group ( 9 pages X 4 groups) = 36 pages

Women Group ( 11 pages x 2 groups ) = 22 pages

Seniors Group = 14 pages

 

 

The latest overall position for a particular group keeps changing dynamically.

At the start of the match, each team is creditted with 15 VP's and then overall total keeps fluctuating depending on the IMP difference as the match progresses. I find this actually very good

 

 

undi) It clearly seems to have been devised with a live audience in mind. The fact that the page moves forward every five seconds and gives a precis of the overall situation is nice if it is used on a screen in the Vugraph Theatre in Istanbul, however it falls short for home viewing

 

There is a Stop button there. I use this to home in on the Group or page that I am interested and sort of lock that page. I refresh the page after a while using the Go button. Atleast you know that the page of your interest in not more than a couple of clicks away, either Next or Prev.

 

Each page is a click and right now, there are 92 pages. Hence if you are lost in the maze, it will take quite a lot of clicks to find your way back to your region of Interest. Hence the Stop button is a vital button for the Home audience

 

unviii) There is a big bug in it. Go to one of the screens where it list all current scores from a match. Click on one of these scores. A little movie box will pop up. Click the "x" in the top right to close it. You will now get a Windows "Netbridge vu has experienced an error yadda yadda yadda box" and BBO crashes. Am running Windows ME.

 

I am on Win 98 and I also experience the same crash. This appears to be a bug.

 

1. I can't access the new Results feature when I am kibbitzing a match - I have to leave the match and return to Vugraph theatre; is this the way it's supposed to work?

 

I would love to see these Results in a separate sizable window so that I can watch Vugraph and at the same time keep a track of the updated results of other matches

 

 

Lot of people whom I talk to have no idea, that these features exist in the new version. As the Olmpiad is in progress, it makes sense to give a little publicity to this feature in the login Pop Up Screen that gives the latest BBO news. It should have instructions on how to get there Explore Bridge, Vugraph Theatre, Olympiad or something to that effect to make people aware of this functionality.

 

This is the period of time, when many members of other pay sites would visit BBO to watch the Vugraph. If advertised well and if they appreciate the services rendered by BBO, some may have a change of heart and start patronising BBO

 

Great way to Go . Fred , Sheri & Uday!!!!

[uday]

The new vugraph screens are intended for audience display at the tourney site. Since we had the ability to extract a copy of the data, we thought we'd throw it into the "real" BBO as well. The auditorium screens are not exactly the same as the related bbo screen.

 

I'm sure there are plenty of things that could be improved, but F/S are away at the Olympiad, so nothing can be done about it until they return. When they do, we'll make FG read this thread, and do as he sees fit.

 

In the meantime, the new screens are hungry for bandwidth, like the rest of this system, and I sometimes shut them down to conserve resources (for us, bandwidth is cheap up to a point, then it gets really expensive, and Istanbul is almost certainly going to drag us over that cliff ). So maybe I won't allow them to trouble you as much as you fear.

[Deanrover]

HI Uday,

 

thanks for your reply. Sorry if you thought I was disparaging towards your work - I did not mean it this way. As mentioned in my post, it seemed like the new Vugraph options were primarily intended towards the on site audience. However, 3.9.0 was hyped as being the "Cool new Vugraph" version and as a consequence perhaps I set my sites too high. Hopefully if the on site display is a success then Fred can find time to work on the BBO side of things, after all there are probably more people watching on BBO than on site.

 

Dean

[mrdct]

The auditorium screens are not exactly the same as the related bbo screen.

My local bridge club often puts BBO vugraph presentations on both a large projection screen in one of our playing rooms and on a big TV in the cafe area. It would be nice to be able to use the version of the BBO software better suited for that form of presentation. Is is available for download anywhere?

[uday]

there are some tricks that a vug show can use to disable all chat (for live vugraph). I think thats about it. THe auditorium stuff is new. If you want to followup, i suggest an email to fred@ after Istanbul

[ang]

I think Deanrover has hit on the crux of the issue.

The fact that exciting new features would appear online during the Olympiad was strongly advertised during recent Vugraph presentations. There was no suggestion that they were primarily intended for the onsite presentation in Istanbul and that an extracted copy would be thrown into the real BBO.

Expectations were set high, perhaps too high, and people are voicing their disappointment as those expectations have not been met

 

ang

[Erkson]

I think Deanrover has hit on the crux of the issue.

The fact that exciting new features would appear online during the Olympiad was strongly advertised during recent Vugraph presentations. There was no suggestion that they were primarily intended for the onsite presentation in Istanbul and that an extracted copy would be thrown into the real BBO.

Expectations were set high, perhaps too high, and people are voicing their disappointment as those expectations have not been met

 

So much improvement as are automated lin file archiving and comments embedding in a very short time is a great achievement.

 

Results are perfectible and will be. Let us give programmers time.

 

Erkson

[cherdano]

Hi uday,

 

one thing: I watched the results "movie", had clicked the control window away, and then a tourney started for which I had signed up. Well, the movie was still going on.

 

It didnt seem to me there was a way to stop the movie (didnt try long, just logged out and in again after excusing myself).

 

I guess the movie should stop automatically once the tourney starrts. Alternatively, it would be enough if it just stops when you click the control window away (by clicking on its "X" in the UR corner).

 

Arend

[Zmud99]

Hi Folks !!

 

Concerning the "new features" of the vugraph i want to give you some informations about how it works and why some features seems not good as you expected...

 

I'm in charge of the Vugraph in Istanbul and believe me , everybody on the site ( i speak about more than 140 bridge teams ) are impressed by the work that Fred and Uday did during these 2 last months to display such a lot of informations to the players...

 

you have to realize that there is 4 main screens in the theatre from BBO ( open room action , close room action + 2 screens displaying standings and scores updated boards by boards in real time )...

 

But i have to give you some precisions regarding some points that maybe help you to understand what's happenning

 

1) WBF and Organizers here didn't want to display standings for the 3 first day during the play that's why standings screens were not updated at the beginning of the event..now it's ok and you can have the standings of each groups updated boards by boards but you must wait 2 or 3 boards before get them because the play restart before we have time to entered them all...so have just to enter the "standings feature" after 5 or 10 minutes or simply get out and re-enter at some time and you will see them and after they will update without any problem...

 

for the first match of the day (we enter standings during the night ) there will be no delay and you can reach them immediately...for the second and third match sometimes they don't appear immediately but after 5 or 10 mns they will appear correctly...

 

the Seniors event is not schedule at the same time ( they play 4 round per day ) and they appear just after the start ...

 

2) Concerning the scoreboards :

 

the tournament director here decided that all tables will NOT play the same set of boards at the same time ( because they don't have so much set of boards ). so some tables start to play boards 1-10 and some tables start to play with board 11-20 ...

But , and i think that you can easily understand why , for obvious security reasons , WBF and Organizers of the Olympiads have STRICTLY FORBID US to display ANY scoreboards during the play !!

 

and , because all the screens we display here are also display on internet in the same time , Fred and Uday have changed this feature at the very last moment to answered the official request ....so there's no scoreboards for any matches in the Round Robin phase ( except sometimes at the end of each round ) and that's why we don't enter any line-up because scoreboards are not display anyway !

 

the "scoreboard" feature ( with complete line-ups ) will appear from the first board for every matches of the KO phase....and you will aprecciate it for sure

 

3) sometimes some scores stay to 0-0 and seems to be freeze : even if tables plays different set of boards ( 1-10 or 11-20 ) , tables from the same match normally play the same set of boards to get comparisons immediately : unfortunately a lot of caddies who are in charge of this have made a mistake and have put DIFFERENT set of boards at tables of a same match : so during half of the match we don't have any comparisons and the score stay to 0-0

 

4) i will just finish to help people who have difficulty to navigate throw the "features"...you can of course use "next" and "previous" or "stop" button but it seems more easy to use arrow key to move throw and the space bar to stop the scroll.....

 

If you have any questions about it , never hesitate i will answer you each day ;)

 

Hope you will keep enjoy our work

 

Regards

 

Hervé

[mrdct]

2) Concerning the scoreboards : the tournament director here decided that all tables will NOT play the same set of boards at the same time ( because they don't have so much set of boards ). so some tables start to play boards 1-10 and some tables start to play with board 11-20 ... But , and i think that you can easily understand why , for obvious security reasons , WBF and Organizers of the Olympiads have STRICTLY FORBID US to display ANY scoreboards during the play !!

Actually, I don't understand what the "obvious security reasons" are. The players are all meant to be completely quarantined from electronic, voice and physical communication during each match, so how can the display of scoreboards pose a security risk over and above the existing risk of hand data from boards 1 to X being widely available on the internet once a match has commenced. I assume players taking toilet breaks get escorted and are prevented from wandering in and out of the vugraph theatre. I think the WBF have got their priorities badly wrong. They need to realise that the online audience is many orders of magnitude greater than the onsite audience and ought to be directing their resources to providing a realtime results service on the web. I look forward to seeing the scoreboard functionality in the KO stage.

[ang]

I have 2 questions for Zmud99:

 

1. I note that the completed scoreboards facility will be available from the KO stages, but will only those from the current session of play be available or will it be possible to access earlier KO sessions as well.

2. The board review facility was not mentioned, but I understand that was also withdrawn for security reasons. Will that be reinstated for the KO stages? If so, will it be restricted to only the current session?

 

Note that people are drawing comparisons with what was provided by Swangames for Malmo and want to see historical data.

 

ang

[guggie]

Well, it is not perfect, but it is much quicker and up to date than the official site. I look at it a few times a day (Maybe also because The Netherlands is doing fine all over;-). Anyway it is an improvement.

[Zmud99]

Hi !

 

concerning 1) Uday can answer to it better than me...but i think that the previous scoreboards will be only reachable after the event when the database will be completed...

 

2) the boards facilities like the frequency of each deal and the result of that board in each match + the diagram will be ON during the KO stage...

 

to answer to mrdct...i totally agree with you but the WBF met a "big scandal" 4 years ago in Maastricht because some boards of the round robin have been displayed on internet and some players reached them ( even if players have been escorted to the toilets )...i spoke to Jose Damiani and he was clear , he said to me : " no boards on internet because they don't play the same board at the same time...i don't want to face the 'chaos crisis' i met four years ago !! " and finally i understand him...Olympiads are the biggest event in the world and security problem is a key point for the credibility of that event...

 

i will finish in saying that José Damiani is supporting a lot BBO in each wbf event and he allow us to be the 'official Vugraph' on site...thanks to him !

 

i know that it's frustating not to have all the features but i think that we have to proove that we are able to handle the security problem first...

 

regards

 

Hervé