Re: [XBoard-devel] bughouse extensions to xboard

[Tim Mann]

On Mon, 01 Dec 2003 15:24:35 -0800, Arun Persaud <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> are there any bughouse extensions around for xboard? 

Nothing like you discuss below has been done so far.

> If not, I wouldn't 
> mind working on some, not sure when the best time for adding more 
> bughouse support would be though... especially since you are thinking of 
> changing to gtk+, etc.

Yes, so much is starting to happen right now that it's hard to see how
folks will avoid stepping on each other's toes.  It's kind of exciting,
though.

> At the moment, for example, I have my xboard at home opening a second 
> window whenever I get a bughouse partner (and closing it, when I end the 
> partnership) and the second xboard is automatically following my 
> partners games... It's just a small thing, but it makes starting a 
> bughouse session already easier and needs only about 20 lines of code;)

If your extension is only 20 lines of code, I'm guessing that it starts
up another xboard process and logs it in as a guest to observe the other
games, right?  That's kind of a nice hack.  I suppose it would port to
WinBoard too without much difficulty.  In the long term I'd like to have
xboard/WinBoard able to deal with more than one game and one window at a
time in the same process, but that's a very sweeping change and will
take a lot longer.

> other ideas would be: whenever you are playing bughouse/crazyhouse add a 
> visible jail for the pieces to the board instead of displaying them in 
> the title bar and use drag and drop from there to the board...

I started to work on that once but didn't get very far.  It would be
nice to have.  Hmm, Dan might want to give a thought to where an
optional "jail" could fit into the 3D board he's working on.

> also some 
> extra buttons for ptell (tells to your partner) would be great... I'm 
> not sure, but I guess, if xboard switches to gtk+ it should be fairly 
> easy to turn those features on and off only when you are in 
> bughouse-mode, so that normal games would still have the same interface 
> and once you start playing bughouse your window expands a bit...

Yes, that would be the way to do it.  Even in Xaw that part's not *too*
hard, but if we are really going to switch to GTK+ (I hope so), it is
definitely hard to motivate oneself to hack much on the Xaw code...

> My only problem would be, that I only can test on linux and only have a 
> FICS account, so I'm not familiar on which ICS commands to trigger for 
> example...

I think most of the ICC responses you need to recognize are already
there in zippy.c, because Zippy has a feature where it will tell the
chess engine when it gains/loses a bughouse partner.  Also, you could
test on an ICC guest account.

> I also wouldn't mind working on other small projects (in case someone 
> needs help) or do beta-testing on linux/FICS...
> 
> Arun
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/