[mgoetze]

Went to a table, looked at someone's Full Disclosure file, tried to save it... the end.

Screenshot: http://bridge.mgoetz...fer-overrun.png

[fred]

Here is what happened:

The author of the FD file in question manually edited the file (ie using a text editor instead of the FD editor) and made the description of this bidding system longer than the 500 characters that I allocate for this purpose. The FD program (bidedit.exe) was not sufficiently paranoid about checking to make sure that such limits are being respected.

This will be fixed in the next version. Thanks for reporting this problem.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[bdleitner]

I'm having a problem not with bidedit itself but with loading my FD file while Online. The file is on the larger side, about 1.65 MB (it uses fairly large relays over 1♣... the full file with relays all the way to Q asks is even bigger).

The problem is this: my partner and I log in and sit at a table, either partnership bidding or a normal playing table. If I go to "work convention card," select this file, and say "use" then I gett he message "NS are using a new Convention card," but my partner gets this message AND "Error loading NS convention card." The FD features then work for me and not him. If he loads the CC, the exact same thing happens in reverse, and he can use the card but I can't.

I've made sure that we're using identical files. I had thought that maybe this was caused by the extra conventions in "Manage conventions" as I wrote a file "convention_overcallstructure.bss" for overcall structure and we both had that file and selected it, but then we tried with a "clean" file, making no references to any additional conventions, and it still gives us the same error.

Does anyone out there know what's wrong and how to fix it? After trying all sorts of different things trying to get this to work, I'm about to go totally nuts.

If you need the file, you can download it here.

And one final thought that came to me as I was writing this. I think I read somewhere that users can't create convention files. Could the fact that I have extra convention files in that folder be causing this? I don't really see how, since the newest version of my CC doesn't reference any conventions, but I have no other ideas left.

[fred]

Sorry but we have had to impose a limit on the size of FD files that can be used within BBO. The problem you are having is a result of your file being "too big".

I am not exactly sure what this limit is. Uday would know. Probably he will read this and comment.

The time may come that we increase or remove this limit, but it probably is not going to happen soon. At this point in time the limit is a practical necessity as very big FD files will cause various problems for our service.

You are correct that, if you create your own convention files, that you will not be able to use FD files that use such conventions when playing on BBO.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Echognome]

bdleitner, on Jun 27 2006, 07:11 PM, said:

I'm having a problem not with bidedit itself but with loading my FD file while Online. The file is on the larger side, about 1.65 MB (it uses fairly large relays over 1♣... the full file with relays all the way to Q asks is even bigger).

Can I just say that 1.65mb is wow! That seems an impressive amount of work, even using a text editor.

[uday]

There is a somewhat arbitrary limit of 1 Megabyte in place at the moment. FD cards are sent to each spec at the table so I don't want to be too cavalier about increasing this limit. We'll come up with something.

[bdleitner]

Quote

Can I just say that 1.65mb is wow! That seems an impressive amount of work, even using a text editor.

The full version, including K and Q asks, is a whopping 25 mb. I didn't do it by hand though, I wrote a little program to generate the sequences.

Quote

There is a somewhat arbitrary limit of 1 Megabyte in place at the moment. FD cards are sent to each spec at the table so I don't want to be too cavalier about increasing this limit. We'll come up with something.

Ok, I can make the file even smaller by removing the relays-with-interference parts. That'll get it below 1 mb.

I haven't read everything on all the FD forums, but the size thing does seem to be a concern. There's a lot of wasted space when bids like 4NT have to be entered on every sequence to make it work, or if you want to handle interference and need separate sequences for each possible overcall. The relays are the worst, though, as the relay tree's size is exponential in the number of questions asked and answered.

Has there been any thought or discussion about creating a system that would allow for a more efficient use of space? I'd be happy (eager even) to lend my programming skills to the task.

Finally, since I did write an overcall structure convention file, I thought I remembered seeing somewhere that we can submit these for use on BBO, but I don't remember where I read it or who posted it, so as long as I'm posting here, I'll ask what to do regarding that. I also wrote conventions for Soloway Jump Shifts and XYZ (the last being not all that complete though).

[fred]

Anyone is welcome to submit FD files representing systems and/or conventions. You can send such files to me as e-mail attachements (fred@bridgebase.com). I can't guarantee that we will use all files that are submitted since things like size, usefulness, and quality must be considered.

Thanks also for your offer to help make the file format more efficient, but this is not a good time for me to get involved in this (and do to the nature of the source code I would have to have at least some involvement in such a project).

Most likely our first attempt to allow bigger FD files will involve some sort of compression. I suspect that will make it possible for us to support FD files that contain at least twice as much information as what is now the limit.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com