Re: [XBoard-devel] Xboard 4.9 status?

[H.G. Muller]

Op 1/27/2016 om 6:35 AM schreef Joshua Pettus:
> Another thing I’m starting to notice with your development version, the GUI 
> opening book function doesn’t seem to override the engine like I expect,  and 
> appears rather broken.   I tried various opening books and had the same result. 
>  I go to common engine, check Use GUI Book,  select a book, and uncheck Engine 
> 1 and 2 have opening books.  The engines then move as if there were no book.  
> 4.8.0 this worked fine.
Good catch. Early March last year I added a patch to assign hash keys to 
the pieces beyond 22 (the 'chu-promoted series'). But I forgot that the 
King is always the last piece, and would thus also be considered part of 
that series. So it assigned a new key to the Kings, with as a result 
that none of the positions in the book would match the key anymore, as 
there always are Kings.

I pushed a fix for that now. Unfortunately Colin Adams has been using 
the version from after the patch to create Chu Shogi books (which was in 
fact the motivation for making these patches), and these are now all 
based on the wrong King key. He won't be happy... I guess his books 
could be repared by applying the change in King keys to each hash key 
for the total position in it, and then resorting the entries. Assuming 
he did not book any positions without King, which in Chu is a 
theoretical possibility...
> I know I mentioned this before,  I still kinda like to see common engine moved 
> to the engine menu with first and second engine settings.  To me, it seems less 
> confusing, at least from a practical standpoint.  In my eyes its less of an 
> xboard settings menu and more directly effects how engines behave.  Or maybe 
> move engine 1 and 2 settings menus to options as they are really options menus. 
>  Either way, some consistency is needed, as those three menus go together.
>
> What do you think?
I think it is indeed best to move the Common Engine dialog to the Engine 
menu, and rename it "Common Settings".