adams161 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2019 6:39 amYou mentioned you might do chess and/or checkers. Bear in mind i don't except you'd taken on both, if you did that, necessarily immediately i understand the need to schedule over time and take breaks etc.
Adding support for checkers is on my to-do list for sure!
I definitely wish for checkers too But i know this must have been a longer project and after a big project we don't sometimes need just a week or two break but have life demands and even other demands for our apps and its a question of another season. I know it hits me after periods of time hey why not get on that it be nice I think there's be a lot more work introducing the code into checkers but also when you do get to get to it i think you can still borrow your chess code to some degree. Checkers on icc is style 12 with pawns and kings for pieces. But i can see how connect to icc on chess for android is much simpler with the existing code for fics. And Charles over at ICC is a bit of an expert on joint FICS / ICC clients i suspect having perhaps worked with other developers in the past and would be able to steer you to adapting the one to the other with little new works as you described it would be my guess. I focused on the free play guests aspect, as so many typical android users don't have the specific accounts, but it's also great for members and the DGT board support might be simpler on android with blue tooth than dealing with drivers on computers. I've actually been thinking now about getting a DGT board. any recommendations? lower cost but also quality is good. It might be something to program support for long term in my apps but it would never happen if i never got one Thanks a lot for doing this. Really looking forward now to seeing it come online whenever that is but i can see it be soon as you say as ICS clients are often very similar on both servers.
gbtami wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2019 5:50 pmThe only problem(?) that DGT usage on lichess have to use BOT API, so you can't play with your normal account if you use it.
The reason given for being restrictive towards alternative clients is that part of the cheat detection for lichess resides in the lichess client itself. Completely understandable, of course, but that makes writing a client for lichess less interesting to me....
My lantern client got written with datagrams before i got much interested in style 12. So it's ICC only. But if i do in Pulsar connect to ICC i may do FICS as well and keep it all style 12 and ICS. I've preferred to support only FICS and ICC for two reasons primarily. One if they have always been open protocol. I"v been able to make bots on both FICS and ICC. And the same has always gone for clients. The other is what a friend called the focus on the visual in chess.com and lichess over communication. Neither chess.com or lichess has any communication systems built in other than talk to the opponent, who typically i don't need to talk to So my interest is to help keep the ICS style servers alive with chat and open protocols not have all chess move to web pages with no chat and closed protocols on lichess and chess.com However I realize you as the chess for android author may have different priorities yet we both realize open protocol is rather important for doing fully functional clients Your own client is more game only and i think thats fine but over time you're not limited and can expand if you wish. Now I understand you can connect to li chess on a bot type account. But that's not really the same as having full access for members. ICC limits members to it's clients sometimes but it's fairly rare and most never notice, for example prize tournaments. But actually in this case they limit them to computer clients and the restriction also applies same to their mobile apps.
PeterO wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2019 9:13 pmBut - how many boards do you own?
Thanks. Four at the moment (Millennium BLE, Certabo USB, an older DGT RS232, and a DGT Smartboard USB).
A DGT bluetooth with LEDs (I believe that is only the Revelation II) would give me 100% testing coverage
PeterO wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2019 10:39 pmWow, do you know the Square Off Board?
Yes, I have seen this one in action on their website. The self moving part is cool of course (provided it keeps working; I used to have the self-moving Excalibur Mirage, which was a lot of fun except for having to fix the internals rather frequently). I am not sure if the Square Off encourages third party app support, though, do you? If so, I would not mind adding such support to Chess for Android.
I am a proud owner of a Square Off Board - it works very well - playing with human players on chess.com. (Even friends that are completely uninterested in chess are fascinated/amused by the selfmoving pieces).
The engine they use is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly bad. So working together witch Chess for Android would be a REAL win/win situation!!
I know that they work together with Analyse This. You can play a game on the „Square Off App“ - after the game you can open the game in the „Analyse This“ app and analyse the game. -The „Analyse This“-Man is also part of the Square Off-Team.
Version 6.1.5 of Chess for Android is gradually rolling out which now provides the choice between FICS or ICC. I still have tons of ideas for making improvements (and other ideas are welcome too of course), but I wanted to make sure everyone has a choice between the two servers now. This is also a step toward supporting 8x8 checkers on ICC.
But i know this must have been a longer project and after a big project we don't sometimes need just a week or two break but have life demands and even other demands for our apps and its a question of another season. I know it hits me after periods of time hey why not get on that it be nice 
