Re: 3d chessboard representation?

[Simon Waters]

Karl Berry wrote:
> 
>     Are you offering to do the integration?
> 
> No, I'm just the evaluator.  Hopefully the cinag author will be willing
> to do it.  I'll report back to him and rms.
> 
>     Fyi -- cinag crashes consistently on move #2 on my system.
> 
> Interesting, I'll tell the author that too.  It didn't crash for me, I
> got to about move 4.  Did it consume 100% of the cpu on your system?
> (And what is the system?)

Hi Karl,

I haven't braved running CINAG yet, but the board does look very
funky (the snapshot on the website doesn't look very easy to
play with, I'm more a Staunton Chess piece man myself - I have a
very attractive wooden set in the living room).

Most of the chess world has now separated engine (chess brain)
from display, and at least three standards exist for
communication between display and engine.

Xboard/Winboard has grown long in the tooth, and whilst Tim does
a superb job maintaining it, he isn't actively developing it,
and freely admits it's inadequacies. But then cross platform GUI
design is a lot easier these days, and there is a lot more CPU
around for scaling pieces and board to the size the user wants
etc.

So my suggestion to anyone implementing a chess board for free
software would be support the winboard protocol, then you have a
choice of dozens of backend chess programs (free or proprietary,
or "nearly free" like Crafty) including GNU Chess.

Other free software projects supporting winboard protocol would
include SCID, and eBoard. SCID is functional, but not really
designed as a Winboard replacement but rather as a
database/analysis tool, eBoard offers prettier graphics than
Xboard and very similar functionality (i.e. include playing on
Internet chess servers and engines) but hasn't yet replaced
Xboard on my desktop.

You should probably take a look at eBoard as well, I've only
looked at the beta version in Debian stable.

I believe GNOME Chess supports the winboard protocol but it is
rather crude, at least in the versions I have looked at.

 Simon