Re: [XBoard-devel] got some feedback from FICS

[h . g . muller]

> a) one person is running winboard with an engine as a robot on FICS and
> he wanted to know if it is possible to run winboard without opening any
> windows, so that he can run it as a daemon in the background

I added an option -noGUI to 4.4.0, which suppresses all display updates.
But it still opens a window. I figured this would be useful to still give
you access to the menus, e.g. to easily kill the process. Making the
window iconic is as good to me as having no window. There does not seem to
be an option though to make WinBoard iconic at startup.

> b) do we have documentation about the book-format for engines... never
> use engines, so I'm a bit clueless here ;)

WinBoard / XBoard uses books in Polyglot format. This is described in
detail on Michel van den Bergh's website:

http://alpha.uhasselt.be/Research/Algebra/Toga/book_format.html

(But only for Chess. How to encode positions and moves for other variants
is not described anywhere and would have to be read from the book.c source
file. But I guess no one really cares about that anyway, as fo most
variants opening theory is non-existent, or it must be xiangqi.)