no more ChessGUI

[MikeB]

My point was that you , more or less , keep insisting that there is no reason for an xBoard user to go under the hood, and the truth is that it is much more efficient to go under the hood to use xBoard effectively. I don't mind at all , it's been that way for 20 years. I have not seen any other GUI for the Mac that can don what xBoard does - so I'm perfectly content. Just don't make it harder to go underneath the hood. Would like to see full Chess 960 support. Thanks !

[hgm]

Something different: When will you add Chess960 support to Fairy-Max?

Never.

That is not just because I think Chess960 is an unimaginative variant. Fairy-Max' move generator is just not suitable for Fischer castlings. It can do many kind of castlings, but these have to be configured as a King step of a given size in advance. And the largest step it can take while still respecting the requirement that all traversed squares are empty is 4. And the the castling partner is not explicitly encoded at all, so Fairy-Max always castles with the corner piece. (Note that the concept of 'Rook' doesn't mean anything to Fairy-Max. Any piece can be used as a castling partner, and in particular the left and right castling partners do not have to be the same. (And indeed, in Team-Mate Chess they are not.)

So Fairy can do WildCastle as shuffle variant, but not FRC. It could be configured to play a sub-set of the 960 positions, where both Rooks are in the corner, and the King not too far out of the center.

[hgm]

Of course I seriously mean that - if an engine author wants to use the Arena chess960 standard, why shouldn't they ?

Because it is BROKEN!

Sorry to be so loud, but you persistently keep ignoring this point. Some things do not work with the Arena standard. If both the GUI and the engine perfectly support the Arena standard, there still are some things that do not work correctly.

You would have a point if both methods handled the problem correctly. But the 'Arena standard' is crap. Even if it were the only standard in the world, without any competition, it would still be crap. Because it doesn't do the job it was designed to do. Its design was flawed from the beginning.

[hgm]

My point was that you , more or less , keep insisting that there is no reason for an xBoard user to go under the hood, and the truth is that it is much more efficient to go under the hood to use xBoard effectively. I don't mind at all , it's been that way for 20 years. I have not seen any other GUI for the Mac that can don what xBoard does - so I'm perfectly content. Just don't make it harder to go underneath the hood. Would like to see full Chess 960 support. Thanks !

What I am insisting is that there should be no reason to go under the hood. The fast majority of people does not have your technical knowledge, and would never dare to go under the hood (and would just break things if the did).

The Edit Engine List dialog is supplied for sorting the engines or deleting those you no longer need. It seemed a convenient way to do these things through general editing, as this allows you to do more (like changing the nick name, or altreing the directory path when you moved a particular engine elsewhere) than you could do by, say, adding 'Delete' and 'Up' buttons in the Load engine list that people could use to move an engine they selected by single-clicking in the listbox there.

If this turns out to be less convenient than editing the settings file with a general text editor because of a silly problem like pre-configuring with too small a font, I consider that a serious failure. Things that are that easily to fix should never be wrong!

To be enjoyed by more people than just a selected society of nerds, it is very imperative that it is never needed to go 'under the hood', and this will remain an important design goal. So I really appreciate it if people point out where the GUI works less smoothly than it could.

[Matthias Gemuh]

...
Because it is BROKEN!

Sorry to be so loud, but you persistently keep ignoring this point. Some things do not work with the Arena standard. If both the GUI and the engine perfectly support the Arena standard, there still are some things that do not work correctly.

...

Can you name one case that the Arena UCI/FRC standard cannot handle ?

[Evert]

...
Because it is BROKEN!

Sorry to be so loud, but you persistently keep ignoring this point. Some things do not work with the Arena standard. If both the GUI and the engine perfectly support the Arena standard, there still are some things that do not work correctly.

...

Can you name one case that the Arena UCI/FRC standard cannot handle ?

It works for initial positions, but breaks for positions after moves have been played and the rooks are on the same side of th king. See http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 147#666147

[hgm]

To digress a bit on the off-topic trail:

To make it a bit easier to change the fonts, XBoard 4.9.0 will be equiped with the following new dialog:



The button at the bottom invokes the standard GTK font-selector dialog, which shows you all fonts present on the system to pick from. Once you have done that you can assign the font to the various windows by pressing a * button. And possibly fine-tune its size with the +/- buttons, and switch the Bold or Italic qualifier on or off.

[Alexander Schmidt]

So Fairy can do WildCastle as shuffle variant, but not FRC. It could be configured to play a sub-set of the 960 positions, where both Rooks are in the corner, and the King not too far out of the center.

FRC is one of the most played chess variants. Don't you think without adapting these present-day reality would Fairy-Max (the variant engine) keep stucked in the stone age?

[JoshPettus]

He didn't put in bughouse, or anti chess either, and they are way more popular then FRC

[hgm]

FRC is one of the most played chess variants. Don't you think without adapting these present-day reality would Fairy-Max (the variant engine) keep stucked in the stone age?

Actually FRC is not even a distinct variant for orthodox Chess.

And your claim is perilously close to an April-fool joke. From the Chess servers I know the only one where FRC is the most played variant after orthodox Chess is a side where it is also the only variant they offer besides orthodox Chess.

But worst of all, your comparison makes no sense. Game rules cannot be compared to communication protocols. They are in fact exactly the opposite. Where everyone benefits when all engines communicate in a compatible way, so that every engine can be used with every GUI 'out of the box'. Making the rules of all games the same just makes all games but one totally redundant, and everyone would suffer from most games being no longer available. The more engines that play the same variant, the less valuable they are. Engines that only play orthodox Chess are like ordinary rocks: there are so many of them that they litter the ground, and you stumble over them. Some rocks have funny shapes, these are the Chess960 engines. But engines that play something really different are rare as gems, and engines like Sjaak II, which play virtually everything, are like diamonds...