[Bug-XBoard] [bug #27751] Negative holding counts displayed?

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #27751 (project xboard):

When you load a bughouse game with "smoves" the ICS does not tell you what
you were holding on every move. When XBoard grabs the game from the move list,
it reconstucts the positions from the (known) initial setup of bughouse by
playing the moves from the move list. But, unlike crazyhouse, a capture in
bughouse does not put the captured piece in your own holdings. These holdings
can only be filled by what is handed to you by your partner, and this info is
not included in the "smoves" list. So the reconstruction of the game by XBoard
from the moves list will in general contain wrong holdings. And this is what
you step through using the arrows after smoves.

When you are examining the game, it is the ICS that reconstructs the game
positions, and it sends a board + holdings for every position you step
through.

I don't know how to fix the basic problem of the holdings being invalid in a
re-loaded bughouse game; it does not seem you can request this info from the
ICS. The particular problem of negative counts can of course be fixed by not
flagging drop moves in an ICS bughouse game as illegal when the piece is not
in the holding, but suppress the decrementing to negative holding counts in
that case. (Currently I think drop moves are not tested for legality at all in
XBoard, except that dropping Pawns on the 1st / 8th rank is considered
illegal.) WinBoard must already do this, as I did not see the effect you
mention there. As long as the negative counts do not crash XBoard, this is
merely a cosmetic change; the holdings will still be crap in this situation
even after I would fix this.

I will have a look why this happens in XBoard, and not in WinBoard, though.
Code preventing the counts to become negative belongs in the back-end, not in
the front-end!

H.G. Muller

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