"Drops" Download (Skin)

I have often used this image to show off Moyo Go's skinning capability, but now I realize that this skin never made it into the distribution! It can be downloaded here (Right-click and Save Link Target As).

Save it in C:\Program Files\Moyo Go Studio\Skins and it will become available as a board skin.

I would like to say something about the issue of ripping off a program's resources, like StoneBase did with my board texture, stones and Blake Habers' studio recorded stone sounds. I remember it took me an entire working day to make my board texture bitmap! It starts with finding the perfect texture. I ended up on wood websites looking for large, high-resolution images in non-compressed format. Those are extremely rare. Then I had to make sure the lines/cm and the hue were "just right", so I browsed the web for board samples of expensive Kaya gobans and others. I stretched/compressed the image and changed the RGB distribution to make it look like a nice golden Kaya.

But that was not all of it. I wanted to have the ability to use a small version for a board by using "tiling", but without apparent "seams". That is only possible when you do a trick: You have to flip & mirror the image three times so you get four images, put them together to form one large image, and then the left side merges seamlessly with the right side, and the top with the bottom.

Then I had to compress it just well. At the largest magnification, you should not see JPG artifacts, but neither should it be too large because it takes too long to load otherwise.

Finally, I encrypted the image and added it as a resource. A day of work. It was ripped not by decryption cracking, but by simply turning off board lines, hoshi points and indices, and copying the empty board at full screen size. Same with the encrypted sounds: They were played and recorded with a small utility that can record sounds that are played by "hooking" itself into the data that goes to the sound card. The stones (I draw them using OpenGL) were ripped by making screen captures of them. That became possible because they also stole the board itself, so the stones would blend in perfectly with the board, otherwise there would be an edge between the antialiased stone border and a board of different hue.

So indeed, the Go software world is dog-eat-dog. I wonder where that term came from ;-)