New XBoard / WinBoard News Page

[hgm]

On my personal XBoard website I have created a News Page, which lists the latest enhancements and additions to XBoard and WinBoard, either in the latest development version at the GNU website, or in the git repository on the website itself. Each new feature will have a short description there.

Eventually, these features will find their way in a new stable version (4.5.0).

[adams161]

on the subject of enhancing the ics experience ( allowing engine analysis on human accounts in non playing mode), a useful enhancement is customizing the color of each individual channnel 0-255 on fics 0-399 on icc for safety maybe 0-500.

when winboard was made there was a lot less people online, a lot less chat to follow, and having color was sort of all that was done back then on a few targeted channels like shouts and help channel. now someone logging onto a server with 2500 people online and 25 channels turned on can have a hard time following with limited color choices.

Maybe a dialouge to open up on hitting a button, in the normal dialouge for customizing to let you pick channels from a drop down list and select color. this can simply override whatever the standard historical choices are when a color has been defined for one channel. then saved to ini file. in the colorization routine maybe an over ride from whatever color is chosen to throw on the choice of color for specific channel held in say array 500. set to 0 if not customized.

Mike

[hgm]

It seems to me that what you want to do here (pick a specific conversation out of the chatter) is what the WinBoard chat windows are desiged to do. Letting the user do the filtering visually based on color is cumbersome at best, even when you would have absolute control over all colorization. It would, for instance, scroll out of view pretty fast.

With the chat windows you can tune in to a specific handle, game or channel, and have all conversation targeted at it appear in a separate dialog window. And it also makes it easier to reply to the right person when you are engaged in multiple conversations: you only have to type the message in the ppropriate chat box, and WinBoard takes care prefixing it with the tell command + handle.

[Carlos777]

Hi HGM,

Thanks for the info.

Kind of OT, but what chess variant is showed in the first image of the website? I don't recognize those pieces between the bishops and the knights.

Best,
Carlos

[hgm]

This is a very old picture, where I used font-based rendering with a font that supported 'fairy-pieces' as rotated versions of the normal piece symbols. This is actually Capablanca Chess, where I used an inverted Bishop and Rook for Archbishop and Chancellor.

I was not very happy with the result, so then I started making my own bitmaps...

[Carlos777]

I see. I know it is a matter of taste, but that inverted bishop looks kind of cool.

[hgm]

Well, WinBoard can still do that. You would just have to download the font from enpassant.dk, (unfortunally I forgot which font it was; only two of the fonts there support rotated pieces), and install it. Then you can use the /renderPiecesWithFont="FONTNAME" and /fontPieceToCharTable="???" to use it for the piece symbols. In the latter you would have to figure out which character corresponds to which piece.