New Lishogi Update!

Hello. I'm here again with a new update. We have a lot of changes this time, some of them rather significant, so let's have a look.

Rating Categories

Before this update lishogi had five separate rating categories for standard real time shogi - ultrabullet, bullet, blitz, rapid and classical.

Having so many categories made it hard to obtain and maintain ratings in more than one or two of them, this led to less accurate matchmaking and discouraged player from trying other time controls.

Therefore from now on, there is only one rating category for real-time standard shogi - Shogi.

Your rating in the new category was calculated as a weighted average of the removed categories.

Other variants and correspondence rating categories remain unchanged.

This change was discussed and voted on here.

Ranks

Ranks have been a long-requested feature, and they’re finally here. You will receive a rank once your rating becomes stable, which usually takes around five games for new players.

Ranks are displayed in front of your username, with different colors for different ranks. You can see which ratings correspond to which rank here.

Flags

Another highly requested feature. Flags are now shown to the right of your username. You can set your country flag on the Edit your profile page.

All flags have also been updated with a cleaner design.

If you find flags distracting, there’s an option in Preferences to hide them.

Byoyomi Countdown Sounds

In the sound options, there is now a new tab for voice/sound sets for byoyomi countdown. The following sets are available:

- Mazawa Chisei (真澤千星) - Japanese

- Sakura Ajisai (紫陽花さくら) - Japanese

- Ordinary Male (一般男性) - by Ryuyu - Japanese

- Shogi Sage (将棋仙人) - by Ryuyu - Japanese

- Robot (JP) - Japanese

- English - English

- Robot (EN) - English

- System

The Japanese, English, and system sound sets behave slightly differently. The Japanese set uses a count-up, the English set uses a countdown, and the system set now only warns you during the last three seconds.

Currently, system is the default, but I plan to change this in the future.

Discussed here, thanks to Detegr.

Shoginet Rewrite

Shoginet is a distributed network responsible for computer play and providing analysis of games.

I decided to completely rewrite it in Typescript, to make it easier to add new feature and maintain it more easily. If you are running a shoginet client instance, you will need to update the instance and setup. Feel free to open an issue to ask for help with the setup. I will also be providing client keys on request.

The rewrite allowed us to do the following:

Checkshogi

It is now possible to play checkshogi against the computer.

Level Difficulty

The difficulty of computer levels was something brought up often. But making changes to the difficulty with the previous implementation was rather difficult, since every client would need to get updated. But the difficulty settings are now centralized, making fine-tuning much easier.

For now difficulties were changed to be more gradual. Two new levels were added: the new level 9 corresponds to the old level 8, Fairy-Stockfish is now responsible for the first 4 levels and YaneuraOu for the 6 higher levels.

New Puzzle Generation

Something I was promising for a long time is finally here. Therefore we will now have a relatively steady stream of new puzzles. This might take some time to get right, so hopefully the puzzles will be improving as time goes on.

On the topic of puzzles, you can now report bad puzzles - for example if the puzzle has multiple solutions.

Logo

Lishogi's got a new logo! Thanks to Coach Tomato for designing it and amdewitt for suggesting it. It's a left facing horse kanji (Hidari Uma), symbolizing good luck.

With new logo, we are also considering a new default color scheme for Lishogi. You can find these new themes in settings where you normally change background themes, give us a feedback here, if you want.

Study & Tournament Icons

To make studies and tournaments easier to identify at a glance, you can now set custom icons to them. You can find the option in study or tour settings.

Beta

Back when Lishogi launched we posted a list of features that we wanted to have ready before leaving beta. Over the years, I kept adding more items to the list, but with this update and most features I thought necessary being implemented, I think it's time to come out of beta.

So hooray! Most features should now be stable, but nothing really changes - there will be updates, there will be bugs (hopefully not many), there will be bug fixes and there will still be new features. Just no more hiding behind the beta tag.

Cheating

Recently there were more reports of cheating than usual, in this update I strengthened the internal reporting system and if necessary I will be enabling auto banning by the system. But of course, if you suspect (with good reasons) a player is cheating, please report them. I check reports at least once every day, so I definitely read them, sometimes I wait for more games to be analysed, to be more sure, so it might take a day or two to respond.

With more banning, more false positives will also appear, you can always appeal the decision here with some proof - official tournament placements, established accounts on other shogi/chess sites, videos or streams, etc.

Other Changes

• Sente/gote icons in dark mode are now flipped - now filled piece (☗) is always sente and outlined piece (☖) is always gote - discussed here
• Local analysis engines updated - both Fairy-Stockfish and YaneuraOu
• I received permission to use official doubutsu piece designs from Ms. Maiko Fujita, doubutsu pieces were updated with the official ones
• Since rating categories were merged, scheduled tournaments are now separated into "Shogi", "Fast shogi" and "Very fast shogi"
• Coach page fixed and enabled
• Profile page layout changes
• Auto promote rook and bishop in puzzles
• Default background theme is now system - light or dark based on your system settings
• Blurry backgrounds in 'Transparent' theme
• Option to translate forum posts and messages (currently supported only on latest desktop chrome browser). I might add it later to studies too, we have many good studies, but those studies are not accessible to users that do not speak the same language, this might somewhat help.
• You can now set acceptable rating range for presets in lobby
• Lobby now lists all games, even if you cannot join them, you can change this in lobby filter
• New piece set Hitomoji
• Blindfold pieces were removed from settings and you can now select either hidden piece set or invisible piece set in "Piece Set" settings
• More parts of the website were made translatable. Translations to other languages are done by you - thank you! If you find a translation, that is not the best, you can fix it, or just report it and I will look into it.
• Pro mode changes - king safety is still not taken into account, but piece move destinations are now limited to valid squares, with drops you still have to pay attention to nifu, pawn checkmates and dead drops.
• Fixed an edge case in games with pro mode, where a move would be declared illegal for no apparent reason
• Option to annul tournament matches in round-robin and organized tournaments by the organizer. After annulling a game, the scores will be subtracted from players and the game can be played again.
• Tournament fixes - more time controls, fix winner resolution on draws, fix tournament sorting
• Hundreds of smaller or larger UI tweaks
• Dozens of bug-fixes, and probably many more new bugs
• And probably a lot more I forgot about now

What's next?

I received permission from Ms. Madoka Kitao - author of Dobutsu Shogi - to add Dobutsu Shogi to lishogi. I plan to have that ready some time after the new year.

I'm also considering relocating the server to US West Coast, to get better speeds for Japanese users, if you think this should be done please comment here.

Other than that I would like to clear as many open issues on GitHub as possible. So if you find a bug or something you want implemented, please open a new issue.

But my main focus will be the mobile app. I believe that to be something with the most potential.

That's it for now!

Many thanks to everyone, lishogi is here another year thanks to you all.

I want to thank everyone who donated and supported lishogi financially, you keep the project and the servers running. I also want to thank the people who contributed with code changes, designs, ideas, bug reports or just a nice word. It all matters. Thank you!

A lot of time goes into these updates, so if you want to support lishogi and can afford to, please consider becoming a patron. It helps a lot.

But that's it from me - Happy New Year everyone!

Wanderer