Thanks for your appreciation! As to your questions/remarks:
yolin wrote:- Is there support for a mutual crazyhouse book? If so in which format? Some engines come with a book, others don't so I would like to have that uniform.
WinBoard supports books in Polyglot format, and it has extended the calculation of hash keys and encoding of moves to other variants. Unfortunately, Polyglot can only make books for orthodox Chess. So it has probing code built in for the GUI book, but AFAIK no such books exist for variants (apart from a Xiangqi book that I made myself).
For now the only way to obtain such a book is use WinBoard Edit Book function to create the book by hand (typing moves and weights in each position). I am considering to equip WinBoard with a book-building function, where it would extract statistics from a loaded PGN file (only using the games currently displayed in the Game List, so you could filter by Elo, date, result etc.), and write it to a book in the required format.
- are the options 'file with start positions' and 'game file with opening lines' supported for crazyhouse?
Yes, this is a completely variant-independent feature. Of course they would have to be crazyhouse games. Note that in FEN WinBoard writes holdings between [] brackets behind the board, although I think that on reading it would understand bFEN (which writes the holdings as an extra rank) as well.
- at the end of the tournament, I got a couple (5) windows open saying "illegal first move by first program". Since I didnt watch all the games, I am not sure which program is in error. Perhaps the message could substitute "first program' with the name of the engine?
I guess this is in principle a good idea, but unfortunately not a good remedy against the problem at hand. Problems like this are quite common with engines that do not support the WB ping feature, and ignore all input when they are thinking. When such engines play against an opponent that plays a move before it resigns (another silly habit...), they have already started thinking on a reply before it becomes clear the game has ended. WinBoard informs them of the game end, and starts a new game. But the engine ignores that as it is thinking, and eventually produces a move. WinBoard has no way of knowing that this move actually was a 'leftover' from the previous game, and treats it like the first move of the newly started game. Where it most likely is illegal, and leads to a forfeit of that game even before the engine has started it!
In the PGN you might be able to see which engines suffer most from this problem, because the forfeits because of illegal move will be mentioned in the 'result details' comment. If you make sure the result comment is printed in the Game List header lines, you can even filter on the word 'forfeit' or 'illegal move' to select all games where it happened. (Games without moves would not be saved, though.)
One way to avoid it is to specify a longer 'match pause'. Another method could be to install troublesome engines with the /xreuse option, so WinBoard would kill the process of the previous game before it could produce the left-over move. Or select a tournament form where an engine would never have to play to consecutive games in the first place (do many cycles, and keep games-er-pairing (/defaultMatchGames) at 1).
- The same actually goes for "white" and "black" on top of the board, I never know who is what. Is there an option to have the players name on either side of the board (like in e.g.
http://www.thief-interface.com/target4.html). From the position of the players name it is immediately clear who is playing black and who is playing white.
WinBoard has the option to display engine logos next to the clock. This doesn't help much in case where the players are not engines, e.g. when observing a FICS game. (Both sides would then show the FICS logo.) But the players names are already written in the title bar, the white player mentioned first, so it would normally be above the white clock.
- Also regarding this black/white. I find this currently very confusing. So if it is white's turn, the word white is written in white on a black background, black is then simply black on a white background. But if it is black's turn, it is also written in white on a black background and white black on a white background. Although it is consistent, it is very confusing. It is like on those IQ tests, where you have to say which color a series of words are, and then the word green is coloured blue, yellow in red , etc.. Now, as I am running lightning games, you can imagine what this does to me, when I try to figure out who is playing white and who is playing black, and sides change every second. I also think thief-style is better, where the players name doesn't change colour, and just says the name of the player (only the clock changes from blink to no blink).
I admit this confused me very much too, when I first started using WinBoard. Once you learn that reverse-video highlighting is used to indicate the active clock, so that the black background indicates the side to move, your troubles are over, however, and now it never confuses me at all. The problem is really that the highlighted area really fills all available space, so that there is no unhighlighted area around it to contrast it. In XBoard, where there is white padding between the clock widgets, and only the widgets themselves are then highlighted in black (background), it is much more obvious that the highlighting is black.
- Is there an option to build a crosstable after/during the tournmaent. If not, does anyone know software which supports crazyhouse pgn to generate crosstables? I would like to post the results of my crazyhouse tournament
There are lots of PGN-to-cross-table converters, and I don't think they care about the variant at all. (They just look for player and result tags). I think I even included a simple one (making cross tables in ascii text) in the WinBoard install (hgtbl.exe). WinBoard has an /afterGame option, where you can give a text string to be executed as a command after every game. If you specify that as "hgtbl FILENAME" it would update cross-table and standings files from the mentioned PGN file automatically after every game.
