PANDA-gGo

PANDA-gGo is a Go board, SGF editor, client for the Internet Go Server and an interface for playing with GNU Go. gGo is written in Java and available for Linux, OS X, OS/2 and Windows. gGo is distributed free of charge.
Go is an ancient boardgame, very common in Japan, China and Korea.

The latest version is 1.0

News

gGo version 1.0 is released.

This release offers support for vote in observed games, a new feature on IGS-PandaNet. gGo changed its name to PANDA-gGo and is now an official client brought to you by PandaNet Inc.

For details of changes please see the Changelog.

glGo, the port of gGo to a native Windows and Linux application, is making rapid progress. It still lacks some of the features gGo offers, but should be ready for daily IGS usage now.
If you are interested, please have a look at the glGo webpage.

Features

• SGF editor

  gGo is a full featured SGF editor allowing you to view and edit games. It supports reading and writing SGF 4 standard, and reading of UGF and XML game files.

  gGo supports the FF[4] SGF format by default, but is able to load some older files. The old long Smart-Go format like used by the FMGT files can also be read. Support for older formats than FF[4] is not complete, for a more reliable transformation I recommend using mgt.

  Encodings given in the CA property are read, so gGo can load and display SGF files with asian characters if Java was configured to display these fonts.

  gGo is able to load and display Kogo's Joseki Dictionary properly.

  Games in the UGF format used by PandaEgg can be loaded.

  gGo supports reading of games in the XML format as specified in Jago.

  gGo can load Ishi format games.

  gGo supports Drag and Drop on Windows. You can drag a SGF file over the board to load the game.

• Client for IGS PandaNet

  With gGo comes a client for IGS PandaNet.

  Features of the IGS client:
  • Observe games
  • Play games
  • Teach and review games
  • Chat with players, channels and shouts in a separate window
  • Automatch support
  • Friends and bozo list
  • Support for asian encodings
  
  
• GNU Go client

  gGo can be used as client for GNU Go or any AI that supports GTP to play against the computer. Previously saved games can be resumed.
  See here for more informations about GNU Go.

• Translations

  Thanks to the help of people who translated gGo in their language, gGo is available in english, french, german, spanish and romanian. If you want to add a translation, please let me know.
  Asian character display is supported for both the IGS client as the SGF editor.

• Skinnable interface

  gGo can be skinned. It uses the Skin Look And Feel which allows a Java application to be skinnable with KDE and Gtk themes. A couple of prepared themepacks are available at Javootoo.
  The gGo installation includes the default themepack. To get more skins please visit javootoo or use your KDE and Gtk skins. For further information please check the l2fprod webpage. gGo will run and switch back to the default look and feel if no skins are found.

• SGF viewer applet

  gGo can be embedded in any webpage as an applet to view SGF files.

• Reusable Java VM

  When you have an already running gGo and you open a new sgf file (for example from a webbrowser), the running Java instance will be reused instead of starting up a new VM. This makes gGo more performant, as starting up Java is pretty slow.

You can access a list of all changes in the ChangeLog.

Requirements

gGo will run on any platform that supports Java 1.3. Confirmed platforms are Linux, Solaris, OS X, OS/2 and Windows.

gGo requires Java 1.3 or later. Windows users please note that the preinstalled Microsoft Java Engine (and this includes the latest service packs for IE 6.0 and XP) are version 1.1 and not sufficient to run gGo. You need to get the JRE from Sun.

Java 1.4 is strongly recommended, as some gGo features are not available with Java 1.3
You can download it from Suns webpage.

Installation

• Java Web Start
• Download

Java Web Start

Click on this link to start gGo with Java Web Start.

You need Java Web Start installed. If you don't have it, you can download it from Sun.

Download

If you don't want to use Java Web Start, get one of the installer packages.
Current version is 1.0

Installation instructions

• Windows
  Simply double-click on the EXE file. For Windows you need the Windows version, the Linux installer will not work on Windows. This is obviously not clear to everybody out there according to the emails I receive. If you don't know which operating system you run, take the Windows installer.
• Linux
  Unpack the .tar.gz installer somewhere and run gGo.install. Start the JAR installer with java -jar ggo-1.0.jar or install the RPM with rpm -i ggo-1.0.rpm.
  If you use the .jar installer, you should copy [ggo-path]/bin/ggo to some directory in your PATH, like $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin, then you can start gGo with ggo.
  The RPM and tar.gz installers are started with ggo as well. No need to copy scripts with both, everything in place already.
  Basically it makes no difference which of the installers you use for Linux, except the JAR installer does not require root privileges, if this is of concern for you. The installed Java files are exactly the same.
• OS X
  Download the disk image, mount it in Finder and copy the gGo icon into your Applications folder.
• OS/2
  I have no idea, I did not use OS/2 since some time. But it was reported gGo runs well with the JAR installer.

There is some more detailed information available in the FAQ.

If you only want the gGo.jar file, get it here. This is an executable Jar file with the complete application, but it lacks the manual, the player database and the look and feel extensions.

Preview releases