Tag: SGF

Read UGF, NGF, and GIB files

SmartGo One can now read go games in file formats other than SGF: UGF, NGF, and GIB (with file extensions .ugi, .ngf, and .gib). UGF is popular in Japan, NGF is used by the Korean wBaduk server, and GIB is used by the Korean Tygem server.

SmartGo One will show thumbnails for these files, with the file extension indicated in the lower right corner.

Thumbnails of 4 games in different file formats

Support for these file formats is read-only. If you make changes to the game, it will be saved as SGF, overwriting the imported file. Paste SGF will also accept games in those formats.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the spec for any of these file formats, so the files are interpreted based on reverse engineering as well as comments at Sensei’s Library. I’d love to get more sample files so I can make sure my code handles all the corner cases. And if you run into files that are not handled as well as they could be, please send me a copy at support@smartgo.com. Thanks!

Also, please let me know if I should revive my old code for reading the Ishi (.go) file format. Is anybody still using that one?

SmartGo Books File Format

In SmartGo Books you can replay moves in diagrams, solve problems interactively, and export board positions. This means you need much more than just images of diagrams: you need a way to represent all the Go positions and moves as well as the text.

At first, I was using SGF with some extensions to specify book text and Go data. However, it soon became obvious that the tree structure of SGF and the linear structure of a book were not a good match. I ended up creating a new file format to simplify the creation, review, and display of digital Go books. It still takes a lot of work to convert printed Go books to digital form, but this format helps.

You can download the gobook format description (PDF). While this is work in progress, it has proven its value in over 70 Go books, representing a wide variety of challenges, from the Elementary Go Series to Invincible. I hope other people will find this format useful.

Tools for this file format are still pretty limited; for now, you can open files in this gobook format in the upcoming version of SmartGo Kifu. And the Mac version of SmartGo that I’m working on knows how to handle this file format, of course, but that’s for another time.