Plans for the Future

A lot of the site's members often ask me if I will be making such and such a feature and when will this and that be done. My answers are usually "I'm working on it now", or "Next time I'm off work for a week". Here I will list a few of my plans for the site, along with a very sketchy timeline (which is subject to a lot of change).

Tournaments
The biggest plans are for tournaments. I want the site to be able to host various types of tournament of any size. This will be a big project and will no doubt cause a lot of sweat, blood and tears while writing it, but it will worth it. I am hoping to have 4 or 5 days spare over Christmas this year and hope to write it then. However, these plans have been scuppered in the past but hopefully this time will be the one.

Recommended Opponents
I want there to be a section which gives you some recommended opponents. These will be players who have similar win percentages as you against similar opponents as you. This will be a very hard thing to determine and at the moment I can't even conceptually figure it out. What I do know is that once I get it working it will be very useful. Imagine, you look at this page and are shown people you haven't played before but weho have similar skills to you - you challenge them - you have a very good, enjoyable game. Splendid! The time scale for this? Maybe by the end of January 2006, but if it turns out to be extremely hard then it will be later.

More Player Statistics
Some people may think I'm obsessed with statistics, but they are very useful when used to analyse your opponents. Recently I added player statistics for each colour they play as, but I still want more. I want average thinking time, average time before logging on to actually make a move, and lot's more.

Site Themes
There's nothing wrong with the site's theme, but wouldn't it be great if players could choose from a range of themes? Not everyone will like blue as much as I do! The difficulty with implementing this will be that each CSS (cascading style sheet) file has be be rewritten for each style. This is not a trivial thing to do, but perhaps there is a PHP way of doing it? Store the colours for each theme in a database and just write them to the files as needed. It's worth thinking about...
The estimated timescale for this is, well, a few months maybe. It's not urgent that's for sure.

Faster Code
The code which runs every time a player makes a move is monstrous! It is a huge beast and took me many days to write. Since then my coding style has improved and I feel that whilst the exterior of the site has been overhauled and streamlined, the internal engine of the move validation remains the same. I can do better, I'm sure of it. The only problem is it's incredibly difficult to do. There are a lot of things to take into account, such as capturing, castling, promoting, check mating and so on. It took a long time to iron out all of the bugs and to rewrite it would risk reintroducing some new one. However, once I have the time it will give a great speed boost, but for now things are fine so I'll leave it. Estimated timescale: sometime next year :)



Ok, that's enough for now. Hopefully I've answered a few questions about what's in store. There is more, much more, but I'll write about them another time...