Dann Corbit wrote: ↑Fri Apr 26, 2019 10:25 am
So winboard.INI has been done away with? Providing the same information on the command line does not count. Don't get me wrong. I think winboard is fabulous and I use it a lot. And configurations are broadly improved. But his complaint makes sense to me unless I have missed new developments (not unlikely).
Of course winboard.ini has not done away with. You cannot have persistent settings without saving them on disk. Any GUI that is not totally amnesic has such a file, and hackers will always be able to modify it behind the GUIs back (with a good chance to wreck things).
The point is that it for legitimate use one should never ever touch such files, and preferably not even be aware they exist.
In WinBoard this is not a 'new' development; it has been true for at least 5 years that all settings relevant for what I consider 'normal' use are controlled through the GUI menus. (An example of something that I would consider to go beyond normal use would be to configure WinBoard so that default variant becomes mini-Shogi rather than Chess, and that it would use a special USI mini-Shogi adapter instead of Polyglot. This still requires preparation of a dedicated winboard.ini file for system settings by the one creating the software package.)
- THINGS THAT ARE ANNOYING TO AVOID
- don't lag and don't cause losses on time, like Arena does
- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does
- exit gracefully, killing the engine processes (problems with Arena again)
This is pure and malicious libel. WinBoard doesn't force the user to work on text files or type engine paths at all. GUIs like Shredder and Fritz do that.
Which includes the comment verbatim about winboard. It is not my personal opinion, but someone in this thread did find it mildly pesky. Because the nature of this thread is to ask for elements of a more perfect gui, it is also asking on how to improve from existing guis. If anything, be proud that winboard is actually mentioned. It means people are using it because there are many that are not.
The reason I do not use winboard, is because I am on macOS, and while I could use it through wine, I find it easier to pursue alternatives. But this is also the same reason I avoid Tarrasch and Arena. Which says nothing about the quality of either gui, but rather their portability.
No, that is completely insane. One should not be 'proud to be mentioned' if newspapers print you are a child molester.
It was already pointed out by me in the thread you refer to that WinBoard doesn't "force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does". I am not accusing you of making it up (just of careless reading), but no matter who made it up, it still is malicious libel, you propagate it, and its nature should be revealed to all no matter where it appears.
If someone finds things that do not occur in real life 'mildly pesky', he just qualifies as an idiot, and there is no reason to address the non-existent problem.
BTW, WinBoard is available for Mac, as XBoard. It is even released as an OSX App.
WinBoard/XBoard support time odds as well, of course. Just not different TC modes. Not because it would be difficult to program, but because it seems completely useless, or even worth discouraging.
hgm wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:45 pm
WinBoard/XBoard support time odds as well, of course. Just not different TC modes. Not because it would be difficult to program, but because it seems completely useless, or even worth discouraging.
It's interesting to test with different TCs.
Even if it has no real use. Just different numbers.
It's like "playing" an idle clicker game. Total waste of time and electricity but sometimes you just have that urge to know what kind of time advantage Igel needs to beat Stockfish.
hgm wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:45 pm
WinBoard/XBoard support time odds as well, of course. Just not different TC modes. Not because it would be difficult to program, but because it seems completely useless, or even worth discouraging.
It's interesting to test with different TCs.
Even if it has no real use. Just different numbers.
It's like "playing" an idle clicker game. Total waste of time and electricity but sometimes you just have that urge to know what kind of time advantage Igel needs to beat Stockfish.
Note that HGM spoke off different TC 'modes' not plain time odds like you seem to suggest for your tests.
I have to admit though that I ran into some problems with time odds in WB.
For clarity, 'TC mode' means classical (M minutes per session of N moves), incremental/sudden death (M minutes + S sec/move) or fixed time per move. I don't see any legitimate use case for playing, say, 40 moves/min vs 2 sec/move. Or even 40 moves/min vs 30 moves/45sec.
As I said, normal time odds (= same mode, but all times multiplied by a factor for one of the players) is supported by WinBoard, and is what you would use to measure how much more time Igel needs than Stockfish to become equally strong. I am not aware of any problems with it; in the past I used it often (e.g. to fill the gaps in a rating list for a variant that only a handful of engines of wildly different strength could play).
hgm wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 6:30 pmI am not aware of any problems with it; in the past I used it often (e.g. to fill the gaps in a rating list for a variant that only a handful of engines of wildly different strength could play).
Guenther wrote: ↑Sat Aug 05, 2017 4:39 pm
There still seems to be a bug in TimeOdds?
I wanted to create a little tournament about how balanced/drawish usual start positions are regarding time odds,
but in that tournament the time odds did not follow a player but a specific colour.
(To make this visible I marked the side with 8* more time to play in my example pgn bold + blue)
May be it was not intended for what I did, namely playing each start position twice with colours reversed in a tournament with more than 2 players?
This was the WB 01/2017 release.
I also noticed that time odds does not divide the inc, but only the main base time is divided, thus I started again with a smaller inc.
(May be I should try fixed time per move for this test though)
(There were other obstacles too, but mostly engine related - Andscacs e.g. had a 'too clever time management' for this kind of test and would
give unreliable results, because it uses already most of its time in the first 20 moves.
If the other engine survives the position until there with a non-decisive score it even remains with more time instead by factor x less)
Umm, it seems I never noticed your last post in that thread.
The problem you encounter there is because of wrong use of the time-odds feature. When you want the time odds to follow an engine in a tournament, you have to install that engine with 'Extra WinBoard options' (in the Load Engine dialog) /firstTimeOdds=N . The time odds entries in the Time Control Options dialog are for first and second engine, but in a tournament (or simple match) you would never know for a given pairing which engine is first and which is second, and there might also be games in the tourney between engines that have no time odds at all.
This pretty much holds for every GUI setting that must follow the engine. E.g. whether it should use GUI book. If you would use the 'First/Second Engine has Own Book' checkboxes in the Common Engine Settings, they would not follow the engine, so you have to put the /firstXBook option with the engine in the engine list. Except that this was expected to be such a common desire that I provided a dedicated checkbox 'Must not use GUI Book' for it in the Load Engine dialogs, which adds the option automatically (if unticked), rather than having to type it as 'Extra WinBoard option'.
