OK, perhaps this is something that I'd better change in WB, as it is not suppsed to happen.Jim Ablett wrote:When playing variant fairy this command is sent only to black engine at start of game >Both Dabbaba and LimeNR choke on this, so I just disabled setboard using feature command (setboard=0) when variant fairy is used.Code: Select all
setboard oheqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/OHEQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1
Jim.
WB has an internal flag 'startingFromSetupPosition' that tells it if it should send a setboard to the engine at the beginning of the game, and print a FEN tag in the pgn. This file is set when you paste a FEN into WinBoard, or load a PGN with FEN tag, or use the 'edit position' menu. But it should be cleared when starting in the default setup of the selected variant. And the FEN you describe is the default setup I defined for variant fairy. This opening position was never really thought through, though. There is no known variant that uses this actual position, I just made it so it displays a few exotic pieces as soon as you select it. Perhaps it would be friendlier to engines that do not implement all fairy pieces to use an empty board, or a board with only 2 Kings on it as initial position, or even a normal FIDE opening. (But that might lead to problems for dedicated fairy engines that do not implement some of the othodox pieces.)
I am a bit surprised it works when you give feature setboard=0, bacause in that case WB should simply switch to using the edit command to send the position (and use unknown piece indicators there). But perhaps the edit command and all piece placements are all ignored without damage.
[edit] OK, I see that I erroneously set this setup flag when starting a new game in variant fairy. This still dates frrom when I first started modifying WB, before I really knew the logic of most of it. I will fix it.
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