Winboard Forum

A special pre-release of WinBoard 4.4.3 is now available, which fixes all known bugs. The binary can be downloaded from http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-CCT12.zip .

Note that for people that want to login to view the tourney from a separate account, the development version of WinBoard would be a very serious option. I don't believe this version to be unreliable; it is just that it does not exist long enough for all the new features to undergo serious testing, so we cannot be 100% sure. So I an imagine that for running your engine, you would prefer a version that has been less changed and longer tested.

But the latest development version (4.20100216 at http://hgm.nubati.net/seekgraph.zip ) has improved chat features that could make it really attractive for the less critical purpose of observing games and chatting:

In addition to the ICS console window, you can now have upto 5 Chat Windows open, each dedicated to a single person (handle), a channel, shouts (collecting all messages from shouts, c-shouts, t-shouts and the it command (-->)) and whispers. (Use 'shouts' or 'whispers' as Chat-partner names to get the latter.) You can open a new Chat Windows by simply right-clicking on a handle in the console window. (Provided you have added the item "Open Chat Box (name),chat,1,0" to your ICS menu, which is in the factory settings, but these are not used if you use a pre-existing ini file!)

The Chat Windows now have buttons in them that can bring any other Chat Window to the foreground, like having a tabbed window in case you leave them al stacked. But you can also unstack them, or some of them, to have the most important chats always in view. The color of the buttons (white / grey) warns you in which channels there has been activity.

By running with the -autoKibitz option (even though you are not in zippy mode, and no engine is loaded), you can use the Engine-Output window to capture the kibitz of the engines in the game you are observing. And, doing that, you will have the engine depth/score info included in the PGN file you would save.

So every reason to try it out. One warning: you should NOT put the executable in the same folder as WinBoard 4.4.CCT12 or 4.4.2 (unless you are ready to abandon the latter), as the winboard.ini files are not compatible. (There are new options there, which the older versions do not understand.)

Thanks Mr. Muller.

This sounds very interesting...will be testing tonite after work.

Best regards,

matematiko

The chat boxes should always be availble (i.e. you do not need to use special comamnd-line option to swicth the on). The new upload function for games is also always available, in the Action menu. There is a new option -chatBoxes, though, that you could use to make WinBoard start up with some opened Chat Boxes. E.g.

winboard -chatBoxes "shouts;50"

would open two chat boxes at startup; one for all shouts, the other for channel 50.

The other new features would have to be switched on by options before you would notice them. (But these are persistent options, so next time you would not have to use them again; they will go into the ini file.) For the Seek Graph:

winboard -sg -autoRefresh true

For the smart-move:

winboard -oneClickMove true

Of course these are of little use for people merely wanting to watch CCT, so you might as well leave them off.

H.G.Muller wrote:Note that for people that want to login to view the tourney from a separate account

Do you know off the top of your head what would need to be typed in to access this tournament as an observer - to make sure the tournament is actually what is being viewed? And is logging on necessary just to be an observer of this tournament? Yea, I know registration is of no charge.

If you don''t know these things off the top of your head forget about it. Of no real importance.

I think on FICS you will not have any trouble to see the games as a guest. And guests can pick any name that is not yet in use by registered accounts or other guest. So just go to FICS with the command

winboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -autoKibitz

and then type "CharlesBrown" at the login: prompt, and then an empty line, and you will be in.

The latest version of WinBoard at http://hgm.nubati.net/seekgraph.zip has now sounds also for tells and shouts that go to a Chat Box, and allows the use of the Up/Down arrow keys to access the command history (shared by all wiindows).

Of course you might want to have an engine loaded to analyze the games you are observing on the fly. In that case something like

winboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -zp -fcp fruit21.exe -fd ../Fruit -fUCI

would be what you need.

Curious fact. All you really need to do is add the command /zp to the launch ICS line and winboard will automatically use whatever engine is selected as the first chessprogram in the Opening Dialogue. I don't know if it was exactly intended to work that way, but it saves a little typing.

Darklord42 wrote:Curious fact. All you really need to do is add the command /zp to the launch ICS line and winboard will automatically use whatever engine is selected as the first chessprogram in the Opening Dialogue. I don't know if it was exactly intended to work that way, but it saves a little typing.

Yes it is, /zp is a must for engine playing in ICS mode.

If you know of any other way to make an engine play in ICS mode I am all ears.

Cheers,

matematiko

Well, as oppose to typing the same engine information immediately after the command, which is what most people do.

e.g.

H.G. Muller wrote:winboard -ics -icshost freechess.org -zp {-fcp fruit21.exe -fd ../Fruit -fUCI}

I am saying that the /zp command is all that is needed and winboard uses what is already selected in the First Chess Program line.
It's flexible, because you can choose whatever engine you want with a click of a mouse rather than retyping a couple of commands.

What I did
1)select "Play with eEngine" section of the Startup Dialogue.
2)choose first engine
3)Select "Play with ICS" mode
4) add /zp somewhere in the ICS launching commandline
5)Hit ok

This seems intended. If the zippy option is already in force before the startup dialog pops up, the combobox for the second engine will be disabled, while engine #1 and the ICS comboboxes are enabled.

I have thought about adding a fourth radiobutton, next to game-viewer, engine and ICS mode, for zippy mode, so that you would not even have to give the zippy argument. In fact I already did that, but in a side branch of my source repository that is not available on-line. This is the branch in which I am working on eliminating the startup dialog altogether. I.e., it would become a normal menu dialog, called up from the File -> New Engine menu. This works, and I can actually use it to change engine. But it lleads to all kinds of problems we already discussed in another thread, which can only be fixed the hard way. So this is something like a long-term project. Not at all like displaying two boards side by side, which required onle a dozen code lines or so to be added, which I did between 9 and 10 this morning. And then I spent 4 more hours to come to the conclusion that there is no way XBoard is going to let itself be told whhere to display the clocks. It either does it where you don;t want them, and if you really drive it in a corner from which there is no escaping, it just does't display them at all...