Bughouse handling feature request

[Dave Gomboc]

I noticed that both Winboard and Arena fail to show both boards when one is logged into an ICS and attempts to observe a game that's part of a bughouse match. Do ICSes fail to provide enough information to let the GUI client know which other game is associated with the current one? If they do provide the information, shouldn't the GUI handle observing the other game for me and putting both boards and all four clocks up on-screen for me automatically?

Dave

[MattieShoes]

Other clients do show both boards when you observe either 1 (thief, for example). There are pfollow and pobserve commands i believe.

Just about every bughouse player I know uses thief. It has buttons for communication with partner, also tracks lag, will log games as bpgn (extension to pgn for bughouse games), has the extended board for bughouse, and so forth.
http://www.thief-interface.com/index.html
It's reasonably similar to winboard, except you can have many boards on screen at once.

[hgm]

We are currently considering this for XBoard / WinBoard. Most likely by popping up a second WinBoard instance in a slave mode, being fed from the one communicating with the ICS. (This is assuming that the ICS allows you to observe your partner's game concurrently to playing your own. I never really tried if this is possible.)

[bob]

We are currently considering this for XBoard / WinBoard. Most likely by popping up a second WinBoard instance in a slave mode, being fed from the one communicating with the ICS. (This is assuming that the ICS allows you to observe your partner's game concurrently to playing your own. I never really tried if this is possible.)

Can't imagine not being able to see what is going on over there, so that you can see what he can take without out losing, and you can see what you can sacrifice without killing your partner.

[hgm]

I guess the original idea was that you would log in a second time with a new XBoard, and give an observe command for your partner's game there. But at some point ICC started making it difficult to have a second account, or login as a guest. That broke the original design.

[MattieShoes]

I know you can observe and play a game simultaneously on FICS, 99% sure on ICC, don't know about others. Other interfaces do this already and without requiring a second login.

I think when you initially observe a game, it pops up some game information which contains variant. In the case of bughouse, i think the client issues a second command, "pobserve <name>" to see the second one. The style 12 strings specify game number and the client routes the updates the the proper board.

To be honest, I think the ideal solution would be to allow winboard to pop up multiple boards independent of bughouse, so one could be watching multiple relayed games at once, etc. I haven't looked at winboard source so that might be a PITA though.

Thief is a sourceforge project so you could dig through source to see what it does.

[MattieShoes]

Bughouse online is so fast it's tough to keep track of partner's board even when it's on your screen! I think most players just hold up and look when they notice somebody has stopped moving on the other board (likely they're sitting for a piece to attack with) or when they're about to trade queens.

You want to have more time than your partner's opponent, so the amount of time on your clock isn't really important, it's yourtime minus partner_opponent_time, and partner_time minus opponent_time that matters (and lag can do all sorts of weird things to those numbers). It makes for an odd situation programming-wise, where your best move when you're up on time could be a terrible move when you're down on time. And a fast, shallow move might be better than a slow, deep move simply because it gains time compared to partner's opponent.