Chess for Android: version 6.1.1

[mephisto]

Very nice story about your dad

[abik]

My dad is an ios user. I still dream he will like my Pulsar app like my OpeningTree. I post this in about openingtree in app on ios. My experience with my father and chess. http://www.lanternchess.com/fathers-che ... stmas.html

Thanks for sharing that story!

My father taught me chess too and he was thrilled that I soon was able to beat him. One of my proudest memories as a small kid was playing on an open air chess board with giant pieces (at least I remember them as such) against a grown-up on vacation in Switzerland while my father and the whole village were watching. To everyone's surprise, especially my opponent, who turned about to be a club player, I won the game. And although I can't say my chess career took off after that , it certainly sparked my life-long love for the game.

[adams161]

That is how i started computer chess.

From your website I see you play 8x8 checkers too. Just curious, can you beat my Checkers for Android app? The engine in my chess app (stripped down BikJump) is of course rather mediocre, especially in this forum, but hopefully compensated by the other features of this app. But the engine in my checkers app (called BikMove) came out surprisingly strong, especially since I combined it with some self-brewed built-in endgame tablebases for only a few pieces.

I got to play Checkers for Android. It beat me. Was default which was level 2 one second. Was still fun to play and I liked the UI on the board.

You know if you wanted to do an online mode for checkers like you've done for chess in Chess For Android, ICC offers checkers as wild 30. They allow guests and your connect can work the same way just put “guest” for user name. Now seek system is a little different. They don't have this concept of formula filtering seeks. But you can have them pick something to seek when they log in and add some simple seek to your UI. One benefit though of the ICC seek UI is ICC matches the second seek with the first if two people seek the same thing and starts a game. So if you had enough users all seeking 5 0 u w30 0-9999, then they would start challenging each other and starting games just by seeking.

ICC supports style12 boards like FICS. My Lantern on iOS is style 12. More on that here https://www.chessclub.com/help/style12 and i've got a copy of their formats.txt at my web site. http://www.lanternchess.com/formats.txt Outside the style 12 they offer level 2 datagrams they call it, which are just text formatted, and an example of how to turn text that comes under to a datagram in Java is at my Lantern Java computer code ( GPL) https://github.com/lanternbugs/lanterni ... gram1.java

Just a thought I haven't been playing much checkers since ICC removed the checkers pool and games went down. Be nice to see more online games.

[adams161]

That is how i started computer chess.

From your website I see you play 8x8 checkers too. Just curious, can you beat my Checkers for Android app? The engine in my chess app (stripped down BikJump) is of course rather mediocre, especially in this forum, but hopefully compensated by the other features of this app. But the engine in my checkers app (called BikMove) came out surprisingly strong, especially since I combined it with some self-brewed built-in endgame tablebases for only a few pieces.

If you were at al interested i thought i'd help if I could. I relicensed https://github.com/lanternbugs/lanterni ... gram1.java as LGPL. I don't much care if it's used by anyone making an ICC parser. It's just a utility file. Alex on Jin did all his utilities as LGPL i recall.

I doubt you'd need to turn on many datagrams to parse other than maybe seeks and perhaps who_am_i at login to know you logged in.

ICC has level one and level two parsing. of my 3 icc clients only one bothers to turn on Level 1. if not on that data comes as text. It's useful for an advanced multi console interface as it lets you tag say the finger command as coming from console 3 and put output there. Level 2 datagrams only need to be turned on as you need them. My first bot librarybot had a simple parser and only turned on three of them.

formats.txt talks about advanced things like nested datagrams but in practicality you'll never see them. In the help system as a helper there is this weird case were ICC lets you answer in the help channel and sends a message to an offline user that messes up Lantern, probably a nested datagram , and i don't see i messaged anyone, but that's the only case in 10 years i've ever seen this code fail. No user has reported since i created this file in 2010 any issues with the client running off it other than the help case.

cheers
Mike

[adams161]

https://github.com/lanternbugs/lanterni ... sbot4.java getICCData() is an example of a simple socket parser. basically grab data till it ends with i think ^Y end of datagram, then send to datagram parser, or it ends with /n, a line. its a little more advanced as i do level one two but that's the idea.

[adams161]

FICS and ICC are very similar in ways. Both emerged from the early ICS server and share many of the same commands and systems and both support style 12 boards. Both are getting heat from the new comers lichess and chess.com. I'd like to see them both survive. ICC has had a robust guest system like FICS most of its history other than a period at the end of the 00s when an unpopular CEO banned guests. Current people since 2012 have welcomed guests. I'd be happy to provide contact info with ICC if interested in doing checkers. I"m sure they can handle the load and if all your checkers users seeked similar they would match each other and start games not flood the seek graph

[adams161]

Sorry i know i'm getting carried away as you havent responded yet but i've got you cleared with icc.

I wouldn’t mind at all if he sent folks to play as guest on ICC. It would work fine if he uses style 12, but he might have to change a few things and we use timestamp instead of timeseal.

-Charles

You dont even need to use timetamp in version one and when i finger guests on FICS a bunch now dont set an interface and dont use timeseal.

Mike

[adams161]

I am gradually rolling out version 6.1.1 of Chess for Android to Google Play.
Besides some internal cleanup and refactoring, the major new features are

• simple FICS client (see details at Connecting Chess for Android with FICS)
• improved electronic chessboard support (DGT/Certabo/Millennium)
• rudimentary DGT chess clock support (shows moves)

The FICS interface is simple, in line with the design philosophy I have been following so far. Nevertheless, the client is fully functional, and I have started to enjoy playing over an actual chess board with people online myself.

A big thank you to my testers! Writing a client from scratch is a non-trivial task, and they were extremely helpful during the initial development. Any remaining bugs are mine, of course. Please send me the details if you find one.

It sounds like you have had a lot of support from the FICS user base. I can understand if you're a FICS loyalist as some are ICC loyalists and want to keep chess for android only on FICS. Be happy if we just got some checkers games going on ICC and FICS doesn't support checkers. And it would let you keep the same code base a style 12 board on both apps. It would benefit icc members to to have greater chances to play checkers. If we seek what your users seeks we will also be auto paired to your users. And some seeks may not fill as fast and members learning its easy to play checkers might start playing checkers offers. I mentioned the checkers pool got discontinued, ICC just couldn't get the critical mass to make it work. Its not a good pool if you got to shout common someone type checkers This might change the outlook of checkers on ICC more.

Its a funny story how ICC got checkers. Programmer just did it and turned it on. But the then management said we are not a chess and checkers server and turned it off. But now everyone says they never agreed with that and love the idea of chess and checkers that i know in management on icc. The current guys are much more flexible and just turned on the old code found it worked and left it on and made a checkers pool button which i mentioned didn't quite work out

[adams161]

I just want to add, as i start to tire and think about my own work and commitments not yet done, that i realize what you've done, adding fics support o chess for android, was considerable work. And unless your retired or on vacation you may not jump to start another major task next week. Mainly wanted to plant the idea that the style 12 fics support and for chess and what you could do with checkers are similar. I of course dont expect you to jump to commit to take on such a task over night.

[adams161]

Not just to you ablk but to all the app developers out there, to clarify Charles offer. Being knowledgeable of chessclub and their thinking i know the seek graph games have been struggling more on ICC. It's hard to get non pool games now. ICC would love anyone driving traffic to the seek graph even if its all guests and all checkers. So anyone interested i think feel free