Communicating with FICS

[net]

I'm writing a simple chess GUI to connect to FICS. I'm pretty far on it except for the FICS part. I have it connecting to FICS and I can chat with people and issue commands. But I'm don't know what commands FICS will send me when I play a game. I'm having trouble finding the documentation of what FICS will send. Can you point me in the right direction for where that documentation is? Thanks

[H.G.Muller]

I don't think there really is any documentation, except for what you get from using the "help' command on the ICS. This should enable you to understand what commands you have to type to do the elementary things for playing a game when you would be logged on through an ascii terminal (e.g. the 'match' command and 'moves' command, perhaps 'seek'). An ICS client simply emulates that. Most clients set the board style to 11, because it contains a lot of info, and is easy to parse. WinBoard requests a move list when it receives a gboard from another game than the current, and uses the response for additional information (like the variant, which is not encoded in the board), and possibly move played before the received board (if you start observing an ongoing game).

[PulsarMike]

ICC and FICS can both use what ICC calls style 12 boards, i forget it FICS call that the same, and the icc documentation should basically work on FICS. I wrote for icc and got observing working on FICS. https://www.chessclub.com/help/style12

[H.G.Muller]

Ah, sorry, my bad. It was style 12, not 11.

[net]

thanks this is very helpful! I'm going to start working on this part now, thanks again!