XBoard tournament-manager mode

[H.G.Muller]

I have made a first attempt at equiping XBoard with a built-in tournament-manager function. The aim was to allow multiple instances of XBoard to cooperate on playing the games of a tourney. Of course a single instance will eventually also do the job, and this is in fact the only thing I tested so far. But that seems to work now, including restart of an interrupted tourney.

The source code of the alpha version that does this can be downloaded from the tourney branch of my hgm.nubati.net repository. (Use the latest snapshot.)

You are invited to test it!



To start up a tourney, you would first have to install the engines, either by editing the settings file in a winboard.ini-like manner (except that it is called ~/.xboardrc), or use the Load Engine dialog:

[Andres Valverde]

Looks a nice idea... could you provide an EXE ?. I can run some tests

[H.G.Muller]

There now also is a version of WinBoard that has tournament functionality, although it doesn't have the fancy menu dialogs yet to replace engines and set up a tourney. Butit has a Startup Dialog, and I made a quick hack to put in some tournament support there:

I equipped it with a button to add the engine selected by the second engine combobox to a list of tourney participants. This way you can populate the tourney with engines installed in the ini file. (The must be installed both for first and second engine, though!) The rest of the tourney description (in so far you are not satisfed with the defaults) must be put as 'Additional options', in particular you will have to write -mm -tf TOUERNEYFILE there to start match mode, directed by the mentioned TOURNEYFILE, which will be created wth the given participants if it did not exist. If you mention a -tf that did exist, you should not enter participants, (or any other parameters) as they will be taken from the existing file. Otherwise you can specify -tourneyCycles (if you are not happy with 1), -tourneyType (if you don't want a round-robin) and other stuff (starting positions, etc.). The option -defaultMatchGames (which can be set through the Common Engine Options dialog)

Of course you can put combinations of settings you use often in small XXX.ini files, and specify those as @XXX in the additional options field. Like Nunn.ini, containing

-matchMode
-tourneyType 1
-defaultMatchGames 20
-loadGameFile "starts\Nunn.pgn"
-loadGameIndex -2
-roundSync false

if you often play gauntlets (first engine of the participants list against all others) of Nunn matches.

It can be downloaded from http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-TM.zip (a bare winboard.exe).

[H.G.Muller]

I now equipped WinBoard with equivalent dialogs:










This should work more conveniently than specifying the tourney in the startup dialog. (Which I will remove again.) You can also change engine now during any time (even during games or analysis!).

[Josh Pettus]

Congrats! Will there be a similar menu for logging into a ICS?

[H.G.Muller]

You mean you want to switch ICS in the middle of a session?

I had not really planned that. The point with engines was that people wanted to switch it without lossing the game or position. There is no way you could do that with an ICS. So you might as well simply restart WinBoard.

[Josh Pettus]

Well I didn't know if you still wanted to nix the opening dialog box, people are going to have to select an ICS somewhere. And Xboard doesn't have anything like that. Besides, I can see some use in having prepared ICSs available for people to select from within Winboard/Xboard, as oppose to having to restart and clicking on some shortcut even if the board is reset. "Upload to examine" still works, if they really wanted to do something with their game on the ICS.

On another note, will switching engines for analyzing on an ICS or using with Zippy work?

[H.G.Muller]

For now I disabled the Load Engine menu in ICS mode, because I don't completely fathom all consequences of that yet. But eventually it should be possible to do that as well.