WinBoard-TM installer

[Michel]

There are many possibilities

The default name can be based on the starting time of the tourney (and perhaps some other characteristics like type etc). So it would be easily recognizable.

xboard can initially restrict its default selection to tournaments which are
still ongoing. Since I suspect a common use case is that there is only one ongoing tournament at a time the user would only see one filename.

Of course users which want to supply their own names should still have the option.

[hgm]

I forgot a tournament could be run in parallel. This is the first GUI to do so In that case yes it is asking for trouble. So when a user opens an existing trn file show the info from the trn file, but gray out all the controls except the cycle number. He can't delete participants list or anything... Also make sure that he can only increase the cycle not decrease it.

Well, at the moment, this is implemented by simply ignoring the contents of the dialog when the file exists. There is no visible cue to the user, however, that it will be ignored. One way of providing such a cue would be to gray out all other controls until it is established that the user is going to create a new tournament. But currently there is no other way to know that than trying to open the tourney file, to see if it exists. And the loss-of-focus is not a suitable signal for that, as when the rest is grayed out, there is nothing the filename text-edit could lose focus to...

Perhaps there should be an explicit button below the tourney-file field, 'Inspect Contents', that the user could click on after he entered a name. If the file did not exist this could activate the rest of the dialog, if it did exist it could copy its contents to the dialog, but leave it grayed out.

I think it is good to save the user from opening the trn file in notepad. Creating new trn file and editing exiting file (i.e incrementing cycle, and maybe other non-damaging changes too) should be done from the dialog box.

My usual policy is that I don't put things in dialogs to facilitate the user doing things I don't want him to do. It is bad enough he can do it by editing a file with NotePad, but if he completely messes things up by doing so, at least it is his own fault...

Tournament files are not intended for writing / changing by the user. They are only provided for clicking them, to resume an interrupted tourney or attach extra worker processes to a running tourney.

Perhaps I should put a text in the dialog, just below the tournament-file input field, informing the user that the rest of the inputs will be ignored if the file he specified already existed? Then the user knows where he stands...

I usually store my games in one pgn so it is better to initialize the contents of the dialoge box from previous values as you said.

I don't think this is a tenable practice. If you have games in the PGN that did not belong to the tourney, how would you ever know how the tourney ended? (E.g. cross table, final standings.)

[hgm]

There are many possibilities

The default name can be based on the starting time of the tourney (and perhaps some other characteristics like type etc). So it would be easily recognizable.

xboard can initially restrict its default selection to tournaments which are
still ongoing. Since I suspect a common use case is that there is only one ongoing tournament at a time the user would only see one filename.

Of course users which want to supply their own names should still have the option.

I definitely could have WinBoard suggest a filename when the dialog pops up. But the main dilemma would be: should it suggest a new filename or an existing one.

I guess the most common case would actually be that there is no ongoing tournament. But that doesn't mean there are no tourney files. Currently WinBoard does not delete a tourney file when the tourney completes. And I am not to keen on making it do so. It would, IMO, be a very valid wish of the user to add more games to a tourney. So there could be a lot of tourney files around; some in progress, some completed. An untidy user could have collected a lot of the latter. I don't want to inspect the contents of all such files to decide if there is a single one still in progress, which the user presumably wants to resume.

This suggests it would be best to always assume the user wants to start a new tournament. Which could very well be the case, as resuming an existing tournament is most efficiently done by simply clicking the tournament file before you even start WinBoard.

I could let WinBoard suggest the name <variant>Tourney<date>:<time>.trn, e.g.

XiangqiTourney11:05:18:14:28.trn

(where variant normal would be represented as "Chess").

[Giorgio Medeot]

I could let WinBoard suggest the name <variant>Tourney<date>:<time>.trn, e.g.

XiangqiTourney11:05:18:14:28.trn

(where variant normal would be represented as "Chess").

This seems nice to me, BTW colons are forbidden under Windows: maybe it could be something like:

Code: Select all

XiangqiTourney_110518_1428.trn

Cheers,

• Giorgio

[hgm]

I don't now. I think it is horrible. These are names I would never use, and they are loooong, so that each time I would have to erase a lot of characters before I can start typing my own...

Perhaps the name it will propose should be a configurable option, like

-defaultTourneyName %variant_Tourney_%date_%time.trn

[Michel]

so that each time I would have to erase a lot of characters before I can start typing my own...

^A^X

That's just two characters:-)

-defaultTourneyName %variant_Tourney_%date_%time.trn

Seems like a good idea. Provided the default template is sensible since few people will change it I think.

[hgm]

I uploaded a new version, which allows you to specify an already completed tourney for adding more games. If all games have been played, (no games in progress), the tournament file will be rewritten with the number of cycles increased by one, so that the tourney can be resumed anyway.

I did pop up a warning that this is going to happen, and there is a delay of 10 sec before the first game really starts, so that you still have ample opportunity to quit WinBoard if this was not your intention. So you can do extra games now by simply clicking the tourney file.

When there are still games in progress, you continue to get the message that there are no more games to play for this tourney, and nothing will happen.

The main thing that is not solved yet is to display something sensible in the window title bar, in stead of the nonsense (W-L-D) score we have now. To do head-to-head score there will reqire me to generate some sort of cross table (with WDL stats per cell), or invert the pairing algorithm so that I can calculate game numbers from players, in stead of the other way around.