I’ve got a basic version of player icons working in the Poker Copilot HUD:
It’s pretty cool watching the various icons appear next to each player. In the screenshot the icon you see is a place-holder icon until I get some real icons. It is 16×16 – hopefully I can keep them this small but I may need to go to 32×32 to allow more detail.
There is a new HUD preference that allows you to turn on/off the player icons. It defaults to on.
The rules for what icons to use are currently hard-coded. I hope to create a “rules editor” in the next day or two, based on the mockups I showed yesterday.
I hope to add player icons to the next update of Poker Copilot. A set of rules will decide whether a player is a rock, a fish, a whale, an eagle, a calling station, etc. The icon will be available to show in the HUD and the “Player Summary”. There will be default rules. You can edit the rules, either for all tables, or for specific table types and sizes, such as “No Limit Hold’em 6-max”.
Here’s a mockup of the player icons rules editor:
The icons in this mockup are placeholders – they will of course actually look like rocks, fish, etc.
I envisage editing a rule to be somewhat similar to editing formulas in Apple’s “Numbers” app (although without the cumbersome syntax):
Best program I’ve ever owned. Thanks for all the killer updates. It’s because of guys like you that I was Check-raising Chris Moneymaker at the NAPT LA last night!
I think I would be very nervous check-raising Chris Moneymaker. Or calling. Or raising. I could probably just about manage a fold. Of all the well-known poker pros, he is the one who I would least like to play. Due to his demeanour.
I aim to learn the computer language Python while in Beirut for the winter. What Mac OS X Python IDE do you recommend? I am using the new IDE called PyCharm which I like because it works almost exactly like IntelliJ IDEA, my favourite Java IDE. But I want to make sure this is as good as it gets.
What book or resource do you recommend for learning? I’m using the free Python tutorial. Which is okay but I prefer dead trees for this type of thing.
Sounds like a bot right? PokerStars sent a human to verify that it was really a human playing 120 tables at once, or roughly two hands per second A fascinating read.
The latest PokerStars update added some nice new functionality. An unfortunate side-effect is that BlazingStars, the free, open-source poker auto-hotkey program for Mac OS X broke. I’d like to do what I can to fix it but I’d be overcommitting myself. Can you help? You’ll be doing the Mac OS X poker community a favour. You’ll need to know a bit of Objective-C.
I suspect fixing the problem involves simply working out the new co-ordinates of buttons on the screen.
Loyal Poker Copilot customer Randy informed me that PokerStars is now automatically saving tournament summaries. Thank goodness! This makes one of the most common Poker Copilot improvement requests possible.
Here’s what you need to do to activate this:
In PokerStars, from the Menu select “Options” -> “Tournament Summary Options…”.
Check the checkbox labelled “Save My Tournament Summaries”
Change “Keep Tournament Summaries for … Days” to 365
Ensure Language is set to English
Unfortunately Poker Copilot needs a small alteration to be able to read these files. That’s because – at least on my computer – the tournament summaries have a strange hidden character (ASCII #16) at the beginning of the first line.
The next Poker Copilot update will work with these files.
Frequent updates, each containing only a couple of updates? Or infrequent updates with lots of changes? These are the choices I have for Poker Copilot updates.
Frequent Updates
Updating frequently is safer. When an update has a problem, it is easy to track down the problem. I can fully resolve issues from customer feedback before progressing. It keeps the software running well. But it puts a burden on the users of Poker Copilot. They have to update often, which can be somewhat annoying. Sometimes when you start up a piece of software you simply want to use it. Not to go through the update process first.
Frequent updates lead to a new class of support problems: not everybody updates. So I end up with customers running many different updates at once. Before I can analyse any problem I need to ascertain what update the person with the problem is using.
Infrequent Updates
Infrequent updates reduce the burden on the customer. They have to update less frequently. When they do get the chance to update, it is usually worthwhile because there are many improvements. But many changes at once in the software make new problems difficult to diagnose. The changes can magnify problems through combinations of bugs that eluded testing. This is a bad result for everybody: me as the Poker Copilot developer, and customers.
Summary
Neither situation is ideal. I’ve weighed up the advantages and disadvantages. I’m leaning towards continuing with small and frequent updates.
