XBoard/Cutechess-cli question

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bhlangonijr
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XBoard/Cutechess-cli question

Post by bhlangonijr »

Regarding engine vs engine matches, is there an option in either Xboard or Cutechess-cli in which I could update the save game file at every move made, instead of saving the game data only at the end of each match?

The reason is that, just for fun, I want to broadcast live some test tournaments of my chess engine, using the handy tool pgn4web. XBoard and Cutechess-cli only flushes the game data at the end of each game, and I need the PGN file to be updated at every move.

Obs.: I am a Linux user. :)

Thanks,
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hgm
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Re: XBoard/Cutechess-cli question

Post by hgm »

WinBoard has the undocumented option

-serverMoves FILENAME

which flushes athe game to the given file after every move. I guess that should also work for XBoard, although I never tried it. Problem is that it is not in PGN format, though, but in a format understood by my ChessLive! viewer (currently active at http://80.100.28.169/spartan/spartan.html ). This viewer is rather dumb, and cannot understand SAN (which would require keeping track of board information and knowledge of the rules), so it needs long-algebraic. And the format also contains clock time and engine score/depth after every move.
bhlangonijr
Posts: 482
Joined: Thu Oct 16, 2008 4:23 am
Location: Milky Way

Re: XBoard/Cutechess-cli question

Post by bhlangonijr »

hgm wrote:WinBoard has the undocumented option

-serverMoves FILENAME

which flushes athe game to the given file after every move. I guess that should also work for XBoard, although I never tried it. Problem is that it is not in PGN format, though, but in a format understood by my ChessLive! viewer (currently active at http://80.100.28.169/spartan/spartan.html ). This viewer is rather dumb, and cannot understand SAN (which would require keeping track of board information and knowledge of the rules), so it needs long-algebraic. And the format also contains clock time and engine score/depth after every move.
Thanks HGM.

I would like to see such option in Xboard. You could choose saving the game periodically or after each move made, for example.
Is there any other alternative to achieve that?

Regards,
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hgm
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Re: XBoard/Cutechess-cli question

Post by hgm »

Currently there is no way to do that.