Winboard Crazyhouse alpha testers wanted!

[Ovyron]

With the font you would only have to redesign the character, and it would automatically work for all board sizes. To change back you simply select the old font.

Aha! But how are characters redesigned? For bitmaps, I would only need to open MSPaint and it's pretty easy, but I don't know how to edit fonts.

Other programs allow you to point the GUI to bitmaps that are outside the program and it just uses them without needing to compile or decompile anything, and bitmaps are automatically resized to fit the boards' squares (Or some steps on how to edit fonts would be useful).

As for Winboard Alpha, I'm very happy with the new GUI friendly features that allow to change variants from the menus, I'd wish to be able to import engines and other things that require editing of text files, from inside the menus (I've known people that use Arena instead of Winboard just because it's more user friendly).

Also, Winboard alpha still allows pawns to be dropped on the first and last ranks, and those are illegal moves.

[hgm]

I deferred drop-legality testing until I had a better idea how exactly I would implement Shogi, where that problem occurs in a slightly more complicated way. But I am working on that now.

I really don't know much about bitmaps, but for some reason the current implementation has them all stored in the executable, one set for every board size, and you need to recompile to change or add any bitmap. As I have no expertise in this area, I am not going to change anything there that cannot be done by copy-paste cloning of what is already there (which I used to add the symbols for the fairy pieces).

The New-Variant menu feature still contais a bug; it ignores variant-specific changes in the bitmap piece symbols if one did not change board-size as well. (In Shogi and Xangqi I used Queen for Cannon, and in Crazyhouse Dragon King (roofed Rook) for Chancellor (Star)). Next version will have fixed that.

WinBoard is not meant to be a tournament manager. I think it would be a mistake to implement functions that make it look like a crippled one. For installing and managing engines, and organizing tournaments with WinBoard, PSWBTM is recommended. That already contains all the functions in this area one could wish for.