Protocol names of chess variants

[hgm]

Some chess variants are really collections of equivalent sub-variants, or even games that are variants in their own right. E.g. there are many forms of 10x8 chess that use BN and RN compounds as additional pieces. And Chess with Different Armies is really a collectionofvariants, each using a completely different set of pieces. The problem is that this leads to a proliferation of variants that makes selecting the variant through the GUI cumbersome. It would be nice if the GUI could combine such sub-variants to one item in its primary variant selection dialog, and offer some additional method to select the sub-variant. (E.g. a combobox or a second popup that appears after selection of the group.)

To make this possible, I want to propose the following standard: variant names can contain a special character ~, like A~(C) or A~B~(C), where one part of the name is in parentheses, and indicates the group. The GUI can then combine variants of the same group, collect all different A or B, and provide a secondary selection mechanism for those. E.g. if an engine supports variants

FIDE~Nutters~(CwDA)
FIDE~Rookies~(CwDA)
Clobberers~Nutters~(CwDA)
Clobberers~Rookies~(CwDA)

XBoard could put a button for CwDA in its New Variant dialog, with comboboxes featuring options FIDE / Clobberers and Nutters/Rookies, respectively.

[Ferdy]

Do you mean something like this?



CwDA = Chess with Different Armies

[hgm]

I was even thinking to have two comboboxes for this (so that if the engine supports 6 different armies you would not need 36 items in the combobox, but just 2 comboboxes with each 6. Like

Code: Select all

o normal
o FRC
o xiangqi
o shogi
o CwDA: [combo1] - [combo2]
         FIDE
         Clobberers
         Nutters
         Rookies
         Dragons
         Bozos