[Fwd: Re: [XBoard-devel] bughouse extensions to xboard]

[Arun Persaud]

Hi,

> [bughouse extension]
> 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.  

That's what it is doing at the moment... The only thing to make a nice
patch out of it, would be to add triggers for other chess server than
FICS and get a command line option for the size of the second board... I
guess at one point xboard will be resizeable and then one wouldn't need
that...

> > [Jail]  Hmm, Dan might want to give a thought to where an
> optional "jail" could fit into the 3D board he's working on.

3D board sounds interesting, although IMHO I think for playing games on
a server I would prefer the 2d interface... I also hope that porting it
to gtk+ doesn't change the look and feel of the board itself too much. I
tried eboard for a while on linux, which is gtk+ based and has for
example nicer bughouse support, but I have to say that I prefer xboard,
can't exactly tell you why though, but it's just better ;)

> > [ptell buttons]
>
> 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...

I tried to mess a bit with Xaw, but I have really no clue about coding
GUIs... I probably can't do it in gtk+ either though... I guess the best
thing to do is just wait until some more work has been done in this
direction. But when people start writing gtk+ they could perhaps keep
the idea of a jail, etc in mind...

> > 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.

didn't know that, I'll have a look at it...

cheers
        ARUN