Shogi now operational on Variant ICS

[hgm]

Upto now Shogi was not correctly implemented on my ICS, simply because I never got to implementing the piece promotions. This is now fixed, and largely debugged. In implementing this, I choose for a strateg smlar to that the ICS already uses to implement Bughouse / Crazyhouse: promoted pieces are shown as the piece they become, without anything reminding you of the piece they once were, and will revert to it on capture. In Crazyhose this means that the ICS does not show you the difference between a primordial Queen and a Queen that is merely a promoted Pawn. In Shogi it means that promoted Pawns, Knights, Lances and Silver Generals all look like a (primordial) Gold General.

As a normal Shogi piece set (unlike a Bughouse piece set) does show the difference between all flavors of Gold General, I made WinBoard smart enough to fill in the missing info, by looking to the previous board (in both Crazyhouse and Shogi), so that playing these games on an ICS now gives you the same info as you could already have in local play.

The WinBoard binary in the Shogi package http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-SG.zip now has this feature. I could play several games with Shokidoki in zippy mode on the server, without errors.

[tano-urayoan]

Excuse my ignorance but how do i use this to play either against either the engine or on your server?

If i try to play against the engine I have a fatal error message: "startup failure on sdk09m, the system cannot find the file specified"

If i try to play in your server I just get a normal chessboard and after a couple of seconds the connection is closed by ICS.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[hgm]

Oh, I am sorry. The fault is mine. At some point I upgraded Shokidoki to a new version, which had a different name for the executable (sdk09x in stead of sdk09m), and overlooked some places in the WinBoard settings to update the name.

The problem with the server seems to be that the '8' of 28 in the IP address was omitted. (I cannot test on my own external IP address, only on the internal address on my LAN, which is the secnd choice in the combobox. But that again does not work from the outside.)

So what happened was that WB tried to establish a connection with a server on a wrong address, and gave up after some time when it got no response. That the board is initially 8x8 is normal: it only will switch to 9x9 with holdings and oriental pieces after the ICS tells it a Shogi game has started. You can start a (10 min + 2 sec/move) shogi game by typing the command "match OPPONENT 10 2 shogi". You are unlikely to find an opponent there, though...

I now posted a new WinBoad-SG.zip which has a still newer Shokidoki version (0.9s), where all this should be corrected.