New Live Comp-Comp Website!

[pedrox]

Hi H.G.

If you want people who are watching your games online can chat, then you can give the following address:

http://gabbly.com/80.100.28.169/gothic/battle.html

Pedro

[Matthias Gemuh]

Sorry for messing up the tournament with a very buggy BigLion80

Matthias

[hgm]

I hadn't looked at any games, but from the standings BigLion seemed to score below my expectation. It seems I also have an old version of Chancellor, which does illegal moves or false claims (I remember there was a castling bug, which went unobserved for a long time, as Fairy-Max had a bug which prevented it from castling completely...).

Never mind; the current tourney is just for testing, I probably won't even keep the games. So you have every chance to fix the bugs before a real tournament starts. The viewer is not really meany for blitz anyway: it only polls for new moves every 10 seconds, and then plays the bunch at 1/sec, which gives a very intermittent behavior.

I made a separate home page for the tournament now, on my regular website. On it there is a link to the viewer, so that you don't have to bother with the silly IP address anymore!

Goto http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/battlehome.html

[hgm]

I now made the representation of Archbishop and Chancellor in my live viewer user-selectable: besides the standard WinBoard bitmaps, there now also is a Smirf-like Archbishop, and a Vortex-like Chancellor.

[Ovyron]

besides the standard WinBoard bitmaps, there now also is a Smirf-like Archbishop, and a Vortex-like Chancellor.

Thanks, in my opinion these new alternatives look better.

[smrf]

Well, Harm, so there is a new SMIRF bonus-engine ...

[hgm]

Miniature view works too now. The name of the engines, clocks and depths/scores are all displayed in the title bar of the window then, and the window only contains a board in smaller format.

Now the only thing that rests is to make a smoother transition from one game to the next (without missing any moves).

[TonyJH]

It looks like the test tourney finished. I downloaded the pgn file and noticed Joker80 forfeited one game:

{Error: first chess program ("./joker8014kopie.exe" ) exited unexpectedly} 0-1

Other than that, Joker80 played very well.

[hgm]

OK, I started a new tourney (TT2). This time at 40/5', which should agree better with Smirf. I did not have time to downlaod the new Smirf version yet. Classical time controls will behave a bit odd, as a variable-length part of the game is fed to the engines from the initial-position PGN file (2 to 14 moves). WinBoard will count these moves in determining when to award new time quota (and, hopefully, the engines too).

But they are not visible (or counted) in the viewer, so you see the time on the clocks jump up at strange move numbers. And the engines will have much more time for the moves in the first time-control session. But I suppose this is not unusual if you play with book.

I changed a few things:
* On the server side, WinBoard_F now waits 15 seconds before clearing and overwriting an existing file wih moves. So all viewers will be able to see the final moves of the game, before the beginning of a new game is posted. I guess the time loss of 15 sec is bearable; the viewer is not meant for bullet games.
* Requesting the minimal-view window now shuts down the updating on the parent window. (Only the clocks keep running, but this is done locally and does not put a load on my server.)

[George Tsavdaris]

I play with WinBoard_F under PSWBTM. The 'trick' probably is that you have to tell WinBoard_F what variant it should play, in the winboard.ini.

And how exactly you do that?
Do you set a line inside Winboard.ini that says:
/variant="gothic"

or you just do it for every engine for example:
TJchess10x8 /boardWidth=10 /variant="capablanca"
joker80 /boardWidth=10 /variant="capablanca"
etc....

Or with another way?

I play from a PGN file, rather than FEN/EPD, because not all engines support setboard/edit position. Especially TSCP-Gothic is troublesome, since it is only WB by accident, and does not implement full protocol. All engines support 'force' mode, though.

And how do you force Winboard_F to play from a PGN? Or PSWBTM does the PGN management?
I guess the latter right?

I play /variant=capablanca, because not all engines support /variant=gothic....
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So does that mean that some engines(that don't support Gothic Chess) can't castle?