Requesting options for xboard

[rigao]

First of all, I know that some ppl (AFAIK Muller, but maybe other ppl who I haven't noticed, this is why I use the some ) is working hard in this project w/o receiving anything more than the satisfaction of the good work (and many time this is not enough) and I'm not anyone to come here asking. I am very grateful to everyone who has ever made a single free and public code line. And I am even more grateful to those who has helped making what I actually use (Ubuntu, firefox, GNUOctave, and, of course xboard now) in an everyday basis.

All this said, I do think that Muller won't mind if I do some constructive criticism (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Let's begin:
a) Ok, the move history is a no brainer This will help a lot when analising games. Specially if it supports branching of variations and text comments.
b) When playing on FICS (if I ever get timeseal to work)
b1) it would be great if I could see the elo of my opponent in the board, not in the terminal.
b2) the input box to put commands on FICS didn't seem to work properly. I opened it, but whatever i wrote, all went to the terminal. I only tested it 5sec thought.
b3) the board settings dissapears in this settings. This is very bad, because in my old computer, which has only 600x800 resolution, the board doesnt fit, and there is no way I can change it when I'm logged in.
b4) and now a question: Is it possible to save the options for the next time you log? Because I want highlight moves on, sound, when possible, on, game saved on, autoqueen on....
b5) another question: xboard has premove? I suppose so, but couldn't find it.
b6) and now something i read in the manual, but didn't try. In the help of the blindfold, it tells that the board wont have pieces, and wont have highlight moves on. If this is so, how the hell I'm supposed to know if my opponent has moved and where? (remember there is no move history either!). If it automatically highlight last move, then it is all perfect and all was a misunderstanding.


About point b6, which is a very important point for me, but I didn't test it in xboard and maybe I'm speaking silliness, what i did in the jin GUI is load a set of pieces to play blindfold, but in a soft way, as in the fritz gui. Instead of eliminating all clue about the pieces, it just displays a very little dot of the color of the piece in the top left hand of the square. This way, if you have a good eye, you will know that there is a piece, but not which.

If possible, it would be great to have the two set of pieces. One for hard blindfold: no signs at all, and one for soft blindfold: little indications that a piece is there.

Many thanks for your time. Even the slightliest change in the code to meet any of my suggestion will be inmensely apreciated.

PS: sorry for my english, I think that I invented a couple of words in this post.

[H.G.Muller]

a) The history works now, doesn't it? Comments are accessible (and can be edited) in a separate window.
b1) Well, there is only a limited amount of information that could be put in the title bar. Currently it has player names, material count, time-control and variant, which pretty much fills it up or even overflows it on the small board sizes. Variable information like the material count seems more important to have there than static info like the ratings.
b2) We traced this to a wrong way of compiling now (it is crucial that the libraries -lXaw and -lXt come in that order, and not the other way around!), which also broke operation with Desktop Effects on. Now that we ordered the libs correctly in the make file, this problem has also disappeared. (The Debian package on my website now conains this corrected version.)
b3) No idea what you mean by this...
b4) XBoard does not have a .ini file to remember its settings like WinBoard (yet). This is on the to-do list. Until then the remedy is to start xboard from a shell script that contains the zillions of command options to tailor it for the specific task you want.
b5) Yes, premove is even in the options menu
b6) With blindfold you are supposed to know the move from what is printed in the message field. The semi-blindfold mode you want can be acheived in the same way as you describe: play with a specially designed set of pieces. XBoard allows loading of external bitmaps or pixmaps. You just have to specify the name of the directory where it has to look for them.

[rigao]

a) Ok, I see now, in the beta (¿?) it is corrected, not in the alpha8. Many thanks.
b1) Of course is not that important, but you always get curious about the strenght of your opponent. In other GUIs, this problem is adressed better, but I supose, more difficult to code.

They put the name of the players at a side of the clocks, and its elo between ( ). Something like this

rigao (1850) 03:21

the last one is the time left.

Anyways, I supose it will be a huge amount of work, which is not worth it.

b2) It works now correctly. Well done!
b3) My mistake. I thought the option you have in winboard called board settings (or something like this) was in xboard in normal mode, but in ICS mode it disapeared. I got myself lost in the multiple versions of this program I have for different purpouses.
b4) I'll wait until the ini file is made. Im far too lazy
b5) I was totally blind!
b6) You are right. I think this piece set must be included. If you give me the specifications I need to follow, I can make it and send it to you if needed.

[H.G.Muller]

Indeed, XBoard does not have a board that is resizable at run time, like WinBoard has. To implement that would require me to exactly know how XBoard works, so that I can judge which part of the initialitation code has to be redone, and which part has to be undone first. And this is probably not worth it, as we plan to port XBoard to a much more advanced interface package called GTK+ (in stead of the archaic Athena widgets on which it is based now). This package would allow automatic (and even continuous?) rescaling of everything by simply dragging the window corner, uch like in Windows.

Winboard now supports a more lively layout, with logos being displayed left and right of the clocks. This logo area could also be used to display player names (and rtings) if no logo for the player is available. But in XBoard I don't want to waste time on such changes before we ported to GTK+, as they would likely would have to be redone in a different way then. That also holds for the evaluation-graph window.

As to the pieces: it is our policy to stay away from all pieces other than the built-ins, and let the free market do its work there. Pixmaps are quit trivial to make: they are text files that look like low-resolution graphics. Open one of the files in the pixmaps source directory with a text editor and you will see what I mean. Just edit the text, and save it in another directory which you pass then as argument to the -pixmapDirectory option, and you will have your custom pieces. As you want all pieces to look the same, this will e quite easy: you can just make one pixmap and then ave tht under many different names.

[Eric Mullins]

Of course is not that important, but you always get curious about the strenght of your opponent. In other GUIs, this problem is adressed better, but I supose, more difficult to code.

They put the name of the players at a side of the clocks, and its elo between ( ). Something like this

rigao (1850) 03:21

the last one is the time left.

Xboard, unlike other GUIs places both clocks on a single line above the board. To facilitate this, it uses the strings "White" and "Black" instead of the player names because conserving space is important with small boards. Adding ELO information defeats this goal.

As an aside, this is one feature I really like about win/xboard. I think it's a fantastic space saving feature to put both clocks horizontally on a single line, and I can't figure out why other GUIs don't have any option of doing it that way. Others use lots of horizontal space for this purpose because they put the clocks on one side of the board or the other, and that leaves a rectangular area which is worthless. So they fill it with things like move history, material count icon representations, and the like, making the interface a lot more cluttered than xboard. I'm an ardent supporter of how xboard does it.

There are external tools that work with xboard to parse the telnet window and colorize various things differently to make them stand out. One such tool, which unfortunately I can't seem to find a link to for you, colorizes ELO text when the game starts, so it's clearly visible in the telnet window. Perhaps that would work for you.