no more ChessGUI

[hgm]

This is your code, right?

#define EP_STATUS CASTLING][(BOARD_FILES-2)
#define HOLDINGS_SET CASTLING][(BOARD_FILES-1)

I plead guilty!

I thought that was pretty neat & clever. Making a 2d array appear like it is a 1d array, writing board[EP_STATUS], or board[CASTLING].

The obvious way to design this from scratch would of course be to make the game state a struct with fields ep_status, castling_rights[4] and board[8][8], and define an array state[MOVE_NR] of those, but considering that the existing code had a boards[MOVE_NR][8][8] which it referred to in a zillion places it would have been a horrendous effort to replace it everywhere by the struct. Just hiding the e.p. and castling rights in some of the elements of the 2d aray took only a minute, with zero chances for introducing a bug.

[Modern Times]

Hello Folks,
I have retired from chess programming and have deleted the source code of my engines and of ChessGUI. I therefore do not recommend the further use of ChessGUI because no support would be available from me. I may delete the ChessGUI website soon.

Cheers,
Matthias.

A sad day for chess, but I understand your reasons.

ChessGUI has the fullest support for chess960 matches of all the GUIs - supporting both castling standards as well as UCI and WB natively supported. I'll continue to use it for my chess960 matches until something better comes along . That may well be never, but that is OK, it works just fine as it is.

[hgm]

Of course I don't agree with that claim, as Polyglot should be considered an integral part of the WinBoard back-end. So WinBoard transparantly supports both WB and UCI too,and it is not the user's business what goes uon 'under the hood'. You don't know how ChessGUI works internally either.

[MikeB]

Of course I don't agree with that claim, as Polyglot should be considered an integral part of the WinBoard back-end. So WinBoard transparantly supports both WB and UCI too,and it is not the user's business what goes uon 'under the hood'. You don't know how ChessGUI works internally either.

Sound good in theory -, in practice , not so much. A while back I asked about best way to handle engines without going underneath the hood -> this is what I get when I use the GUI



no uptown arrows, no delete button, just a place drop my cursor and edit to my hearts content font that I can barley even read - much easier going underneath the hood...you might notice you are seeing less than half of the engines - note the scroll bar on the right

[Alexander Schmidt]

Of course I don't agree with that claim, as Polyglot should be considered an integral part of the WinBoard back-end.

ChessGUI supports also the Arena approach to run UCI/Chess960 engines which polyglot/winboard don't. I know you don't like this approach but still some engines run under ChessGUI that don't run under Winboard.

[hgm]

I know you don't like this approach but still some engines run under ChessGUI that don't run under Winboard.

I am surprised to hear that, as no one ever complained about this before. On the contrary, even I was aware (although I never use Arena, and although I never play Chess960) that Chess960 support in Arena was broken, (most engines hanging as soon as the opponent castled), so that UCI engines could only be played through Polyglot as WB engine.

In any case this has absolutely nothing to do with whether the code for supporting UCI is located in the GUI or in Polyglot. The Polyglot code for communicating with the engine is ancient, and not a single bug has been reported against it for many years, so it is pretty much above suspicion. If an engine does not work with WinBoard + Polyglot it is therefore quite likely that this is just an engine bug...

[hgm]

Sound good in theory -, in practice , not so much. A while back I asked about best way to handle engines without going underneath the hood -> this is what I get when I use the GUI

...

no uptown arrows, no delete button, just a place drop my cursor and edit to my hearts content font that I can barley even read - much easier going underneath the hood...you might notice you are seeing less than half of the engines - note the scroll bar on the right

Note that the font is configurable, pretty much on a per-window basis. In this case one-time use the option -tagsFont "Sans 20" (or whatever other point side your like) would give you the desired font. (Most editing is done in the Edit Tags window, as the title bar of this window still shows. Perhaps I should rename the option to -editFont, as XBoard gets more and more dialogs to edit things.)

The goal, however, is that XBoard would be shipped with default settings for all fonts that are satisfactory, and in particular for the edit windows this should mean a font similar to what the standard NotePad-like editor would use. If that is not currently the case on Mac, it means the App should be differently configured. I cannot do that myself, however, as I don;t have a Mac and have no idea how things look.

I have no idea what "Uptown arrows" are, or where exactly you would want a delete button, and what it should delete. But perhaps we should not discuss that in this thread, because it gets very much off topic.

[Matthias Gemuh]

...
I am surprised to hear that, as no one ever complained about this before. On the contrary, even I was aware (although I never use Arena, and although I never play Chess960) that Chess960 support in Arena was broken, (most engines hanging as soon as the opponent castled), so that UCI engines could only be played through Polyglot as WB engine.

...

Chess960 support in Arena was broken ? No ! That approach was simply the standard before SMK appeared on the scene with his own new approach .

[hgm]

Chess960 support in Arena was broken ? No ! That approach was simply the standard before SMK appeared on the scene with his own new approach .

Well, call it what you like, fact is that most UCI engines would not work under Arena as UCI. So calling adapterless-GUI handling of WB/UCI engines for Chess960 the 'Arena approach' sounds like a joke! It would be much more justified to call it the ChessGUI approach.

Users have no interest in a quibble between GUI authors about who has the right to set or change the standard. It is an almost universally held opinion amongst UCI programmers that SMK 'owns' the UCI protocol, and it would be very unwise to make any extension to it that does not have his endorsement. (Of course for me this is one of the most compelling reasons to never use UCI...)

[JoshPettus]

I did fix the default fonts to be something a little nicer for next time around. I've been using my own config file for so long, I didn't realize the current defaults were so small..

Anyway I mentioned to hgm already about a new dialog box where the user can set them himself.