WinBoard-TM installer with Swiss pairing engine

[hgm]

I now included a Swiss pairing engine with the WinBoard-TM install. I pre-installed the engine with the use of the new option /pairingEngine="swiss.exe" in the master settings file. This should allow playing of Swiss tournaments with WinBoard. I added a checkbox in the Tournament Options dialog that you can tick to use the engine (and consequentally play Swiss). The number of rounds has to be given in the 'Tourney Cycles' field in this case, and the number of games per pairing will be ignored (i.e. it will be forced to 1). Stepping through positions or opening lines will also not work (because every game in a Swiss tourney is by definition the first game between the current players, and would thus use the first opening line or position). So basically the only thing you have to enter (next to the tourney file, of course), is participants, number of cycles, and tick Swiss.

The included pairing engine is a bit peculiar, because I wrote it myself, with only little knowledge of how Swiss is supposed to work, and a putting in some desires of my own. So is, for instance, the bye awarded to a player in the middle of the ranking, and earns him not a full point, but only a draw. (Awarding a 1-point bye at the tail of the list is very disruptive to a fair ranking there, and I consider the tail of the list ust as important as the top, for deciding on demotions.) The playing order is such that the most exciting games, both at the top and the tail of the list, are saved forlast. The pairing engine is also hardly tested, and was a 1.5-day hack job.

The idea is of course that in the future there will be other (better?) pairing engines, precisely implementing the Swiss systems described in the FIDE handbook,written by people more expert than I. And that the user then can select the one that he likes best. Because the pairing engines are separate entities from WinBoard, they could also be used by other GUIs.

[hgm]

I have still not received any answer to the main question I had about this installer:

Does clicking a tournament file automatically launch a WinBoard instance that starts playing it?

[hgm]

The installer should have associated the .trn file type with WinBoard (in match mode), like it should have associated .pgn and .fen with WinBoard in game-viewer mode (at least, if you did not untick those options). Problem is that for me, none of that works. (In all cases, it brings up WinBoard 4.2.7, which somehow seems to have monopolized my registry.) Does the PGN / FEN association work for you?

In fact the only thing I'd wish for is a sort function for the tournament participant's list.

I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean by this, but when you want to make small changes by hand in the order you initially selected the engines in, before you OK the Tournament dialog, this is possible through normal edit functions of cuttting lines in the participants field, and pasting them elsewhere. Automatic sorting of the entire list (e.g. alphabetically) seems of little general use.

[hgm]

I am not sure if it should end up in the list. But there definitely seems something wrong with the instaler. Yet I seem to recall that in the past the associations worked. OK, I will look into it.

[TonyJH]

The installer should have associated the .trn file type with WinBoard (in match mode), like it should have associated .pgn and .fen with WinBoard in game-viewer mode (at least, if you did not untick those options). Problem is that for me, none of that works. (In all cases, it brings up WinBoard 4.2.7, which somehow seems to have monopolized my registry.)

Your registry problem sounds very similar to the problem I had with an old WinBoard still being associated with .pgn files. This solution fixed it for me. Maybe it will differ depending on the Windows version.

In regedit: Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications and find your .exe name.
Navigate under its name to shell>open>command. In the Default change its location to the actual location of the executable, hit okay and then try and reassociate the file type as you normally would.

For me, the registry location is here:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\winboard.exe\shell\open\command

[hgm]

OK, thanks, I will have a look at it. Currently I am traveling, and have no access to the computer where the problems occurred. I did install the WinBoard-4.5TM package on another laptop, though, and there it works without problems. (Both are Win XP.) When I click a FEN or PGN file, it brings up WinBoard in game-viewer mode, when I click a TRN file, it brings up WB in match mode, playing the tourney.

Only inconvenience is that PGN files and TRN files get the same icon. I already have designed another icon for tourney files, but I have no drawing program at hand that can save in .ico format. I also forgot to bring the install compiler and its script with me, so I could not redefine the displayed icon for TRN files anyway.

Nevertheless, I can run and compile WinBoard, and I noticed the latest installer version (supporting Swiss) suffered from some regressions of bugs I already fixed once, while I stumbled on some other bugs during testing. So I prepared a new .exe, which can be downloaded from

http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-TM.zip

Alas, no installer, but I included a master settings file and a new tourney.ini file with it (defining useful defaults for some newly added options). Compared to the last installer version, it has
*) A new option -defaultTourneyName, which controls the suggestion of names for the tourney file when you open the Tournament options dialog. The master ini file sets it to "Tourney_%y%M%d_%h%m.trn", where %y will be replaced by the current year, %M the month, etc.
*) It seems a bug in generating the schedule for round-robins regressed (and I was not sure that the old fix would work with an odd nr of players anyway). I fixed it again, and tested with tourneys of 6 and 5 participants, which now worked flawlessly.
*) Logos display is now always updated after you load an engine, even when it is a second engine, not really loaded before you use Two Machines mode.
*) Old logos no longer keep hanging when the newly required logo was not defined; in stead the logo area for that engine is filled with white (or the layout switches to a logo-free format when both engines have no logo).
*) There was a problem with logo display: for engine directories specified relative to the WinBoard folder, the logo could not be found after using the file browse dialog (because the latter changed the current directory). Now all logos filenames are interpreted w.r.t. the WinBoard install folder, like the engine exe files already were.
*) Swiss tourneys had a problem with concurrent play, when a new round could not be paired because a game being played by another WinBoard instance had not yet finished. This has been fixed now.

This new version is somewhat better tested than the previous ones, and seems to work quite well.

[MrEdCollins]

I've been testing it for about half an hour. It all looks good. Nice job!

Two things. The date of the exe file is 5/28/11, proving I do have the current version, but the "name" in the "About WinBoard" box says "WinBoard master-20110507".

That darn command-line glitch is still there. (When running an engine match from a batch file, and using command-line parameters, the /mg switch on the command line is ignored... and the number in the ini file, the /defaultMatchGames number, is used instead.)

[MrEdCollins]

Whoops. Another small 'glitch' I found. (Sorry!)

When playing on FICS, my dummy.bmp logo and my freechess.org.bmp logos no longer appear.

Long ago, I changed the dummy.bmp logo to a pic of me, and changed the freechess.org.bmp logo to a pic of a "silhouette" to represent all of my opponents. Both of these logos are located in my logos folder.

With my WinBoard 4.5.2 version and the previous "beta" version (20110521), these logos appear at the top of the board when I play on FICS, whether I sign on as a guest or whether I sign on with my own handle. (Nice feature, by the way.)

Now when I play on FICS, these logos aren't appearing at all.

[hgm]

Two things. The date of the exe file is 5/28/11, proving I do have the current version, but the "name" in the "About WinBoard" box says "WinBoard master-20110507".

That darn command-line glitch is still there. (When running an engine match from a batch file, and using command-line parameters, the /mg switch on the command line is ignored... and the number in the ini file, the /defaultMatchGames number, is used instead.)

Ah yes, I have to change that date every time by hand...

Both issues should be fixed now.

[hgm]

Whoops. Another small 'glitch' I found. (Sorry!)

When playing on FICS, my dummy.bmp logo and my freechess.org.bmp logos no longer appear.

I see, I had broken the ICS part when I made WinBoard first switch back to its install folder before interpreting the logo.bmp filenames. I had no internet acces at the time I fixed that, so I could not test the ICS part. The user logo was simply never fixed at all, so it was still suffering from the original problem that it it could not be found after WinBoard had changed to another folder.

Both problems should be fixed now. (If not, let me know!)

In fact there still is a more elaborate ICS logo feature on my to-do list: I want to allow the user to create sub-folders in the logos folder fo each ICS, so he could make files like logos/freechess.org/HANDLE.bmp, where WinBoard would look for a logo for your actual opponent when you start a game. If there is none, an option -autoExchangeLogos could cause the logos to be exchanged encoded in tell messages, when both players are using WinBoard and have the option switched on.