Using my engine on ICC with Arena GUI

[Richard Allbert]

Hi,

I have programmed my own engine, and last night tried to play on ICC using Arena as a GUI. I could get the engine to seek ok (tellics seek 2 1 u), and a game would be played... however when the game was over (opponent resigned), Arena did not seem to send a command to the engine saying so... an so my engine starts another game and plays an illegal move straight away (thinking the game state is still that of the previous game).

Am I missing something????

Thanks for your help!

Richard

[Thomas Mayer]

Hi Richard,

as far as I know there exists still some problems with Arena and ICC... You may try with WinBoard, which is working very stable.

Greets, Thomas

[Pallav Nawani]

Hi,

Arena did not seem to send a command to the engine saying so... an so my engine starts another game and plays an illegal move straight away (thinking the game state is still that of the previous game).

Richard

Arena probably does not send a result command in some cases, but it will certainly send a 'new' command to your engine before starting a new game. Use that to reset your game state.

[Richard Allbert]

Sure enough.. winboard is much much better.

The only thing to do now is automate the seek after the game, and all is well.

Oh, and I need to work out how to get winboard to save games

[Volker Pittlik]

...
Oh, and I need to work out how to get winboard to save games

Add

Code: Select all

/saveGameFile="c:\chess\WinBoard\savegame.pgn"


to the winboard.ini. Adjust the path and filename to your needs of course.

Volker

[Richard Allbert]

Thanks!

Richard

[eric_oldre]

does anyone have a link to a tutorial/instructions about how to get Winboard to work with an ICS?

I'm sick of the time losses that Latista seems to get under arena. (hopefully fixed in the next arena release)

[Volker Pittlik]

does anyone have a link to a tutorial/instructions about how to get Winboard to work with an ICS?...

If you can read German I can offer:

http://volker-pittlik.name/winboard/texte/ics.htm.

If you don't get it I (or someone else) can translate the important parts tomorrow.

Volker

[Pallav Nawani]

does anyone have a link to a tutorial/instructions about how to get Winboard to work with an ICS?

I'm sick of the time losses that Latista seems to get under arena. (hopefully fixed in the next arena release)

Here you go:
http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/zippy.README

This paragraph is important for automatic seeking:

-zippyGameEnd string
At the end of each game, Zippy sends this string to ICS,
followed by a newline. If you do not set this option, the
string "gameend" is sent. This is not a legal ICS command,
but you can alias it to whatever you like, or you can leave
it undefined, which will cause ICS to print a harmless error
message after each game. If you want to send more than one
command at the end of the game, on ICC you can alias gameend
to a "multi" command (see the ICC help files), but on FICS that
does not work. Instead, use the -zippyGameEnd option to have
a string of several commands sent, with newlines in between.
For example, you could give WinBoard the command line option
-zippyGameEnd='say thanks\nseek 5 0\nseek 2 12\n'
You could give xboard the command line option
-xrm '*zippyGameEnd: say thanks\nseek 5 0\nseek 2 12\n'

Pallav.

[eric_oldre]

I was able to get it working after a bit of experimentation. I discovered a few bugs in how latista handles finished/new games that never popped up in arena, so I'll need to get those updated before letting it play online. If you want, keep an eye out for the "Murderhole(C)" account on FICS.

Thanks for your help!