TalkChess.com

[Daniel Shawul]

No doubt Winboard. For one UCI is _old_ despite what many tell you here. Winboard is continuously being researched and you can play almost any board game you like with it. That should be the goal. Supporting the winboard alien protocol will give you a very powerful GUI without even knowing what type of game is being played. Take a look at a link in my signature for a Java GUI that can support winboard and also uci engines through polyglot. My engine Nebiyu can play 50 or more types of games and all can be played smoothly.
The key here is:

a) The only requirement on the engine's side is that it sends a FEN after each move. Actually this is a requirement only for the referee engine so one in a thousand. If you are up for it you can write an engine like Nebiyu to act as referee (basically part of the GUI) to completely remove this requirement. But the point is to give complete freedom to the enigne designerto do whatever the hell it wants to do with it so this is not necessary.

b) Don't try to recongnize move formats. "#4sfrws" can be a MOVE if the engines understand it. This means a move indicator like "usermove" is necessary.

(Not part of protocol discussion)

c) Design your GUI to accept different types of players : Winboard engines (Basic), Using adapters (polyglot and others), Java engines, remote engines (tcp), remote process AND Humans. Yes humans are also installed and it is the most troublesome for me because input from the GUI is meant for them.

d) Aim for a console and GUI interface, and multi-threaded as well. The console mode is very important when you want to use it as a game server. My ICS sever allows thousands of games to be played simultaneously so there is no need to use a GUI there but it still can do it.
The GUI class simply overrides the console mode and offers better functionality such as painting separate windows for each game I love my My GUI does so much stuff with little effort. I will post some pictures later.
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https://sites.google.com/site/dshawul/
https://github.com/dshawul