CCT 15 - 72 hours left to register

[hgm]

And I personally would volunteer to broadcast every game Raptor plays in CCT on Playchess as well, via some sorts of a relay.

I think in it would be great to tap on to positives of both, since we actually can.

How would this be done, technically? I have no idea what ithe interface specs are for feeding game info to the PlayChess server, or how Graham does that. And the situation is a bit more distributed than Graham just playing a tourney on his local machine. Should the participants be responsible for feeding their games to PlayChess? (That seems a good recipe for chaos.) Should it be done from the ICS? (Well, fat chance that could be implemented, a highly risky patch two days before the event...) Or would there be special upload bots running to observe the games on ICS, and then feed them to PlayChess. (An intrinsically safe method, but who will run these bots, and does the software exist?

[Raptor]

After my chat with Albert, I have figured out that all we need is a PGN file which automatically updates itself real time (as and when the move is made)

After playchess has a feature to broadcast this PGN and it automatically picks up the changes made.

I think this is not too much of a task to achieve this.

[Modern Times]

Seems like it is too late in the day to implement something in playchess in parallel. Something for next year perhaps ?

[Raptor]

I think we shouldn't maybe touch critical areas such as the server, but we can work in parallel, like I spoke with Joshua Shriver today and we are looking into the possibility that his GameBot, which will be collecting all CCT games anyway, can produce such a PGN.

As I understand the original design of GameBot was exactly like that, though the new gamebot just collects movelist as the game ends, we can modify that into spitting out realtime PGN for each game and put it on ftp or something.

Its very easy to write a ftp script that will poll these pgns every n seconds, and setup playchess to broadcast these downloaded PGNs

[hgm]

Indeed, this would be a good tool to have: a bot that observes games on an ICS, and uploads the games real-time to a chosen destination.

And it is totally risk-less.

[CRoberson]

I think we shouldn't maybe touch critical areas such as the server, but we can work in parallel, like I spoke with Joshua Shriver today and we are looking into the possibility that his GameBot, which will be collecting all CCT games anyway, can produce such a PGN.

As I understand the original design of GameBot was exactly like that, though the new gamebot just collects movelist as the game ends, we can modify that into spitting out realtime PGN for each game and put it on ftp or something.

Its very easy to write a ftp script that will poll these pgns every n seconds, and setup playchess to broadcast these downloaded PGNs

Come on guys, don't reinvent the wheel. This has been done before. Some of the ACCA events on ICC were relayed to Playchess.com. I remember this was done on the 2008 Pan Am CC, because Pradu and Ted were watching it on playchess while Pradu's program was competing on ICC. They showed me the screen while we were in a room at UAB.

So, it has been done before and the tech already exists. It is a relay system. I don't know who did it, but somebody did and does know how.

[hgm]

Well, that doesn't do not much good, does it? What matters is if we can do it. And if we can do it within 48 hours...

[hgm]

Good news for CCT spectators

I just released WinBoard 4.7.0 (download), and added a few extras to make life easier for CCT spectators:

After installing there will be a special "CCT spectator" entry in the Windows Start menu. Clicking it will immediately connect you to the CCT server, with the necessary windows all opened, and the relevant communication channels switched on. All you have to do yourself is:

* Type your name and hit <Enter> two times (if you login as guest)
* Remember to right-click the text window to summon up the ICS menu
* Click the "Games" entry in it to see a list of games
* Right-click on the game in this list and select "Observe (name)" to start observing the game
* Right-click on the engine's PV to play it out on the board

You can't get it any easier than that!

[hgm]

This is how the new ICS menu looks:



Note I also added entries to switch on and off the reception of messages from unregistered players. (And deleted some stuff not relevant for spectators, to simplify things.)

The chat boxes for shouts, channel 49 and 64 open automatically. (Guests won't be able to shout, but they could still read what others shout there.)WinBoard takes care to 'tune in' to those chanels, so the chatter on them will appear in the chat boxes.

This is how the system Start menu looks after install:

[Richard Allbert]