hgm wrote:
But unfortunately Sjaak does not indicate promotion possibilities in the color FEN it sends with the highlight, (magenta), which appears to even suppress promotions of pieces on the last rank, despite the fact that they have a promoted partner indicated as + in the piecetoCharTable. (The highlight overrules XBoard's native idea of when promotions are allowed also in the negative sense, and I guess this is the correct design, e.g. to support the (once erroneously assumed) Chu-Shogi rule that you could not promote with a non-capture the turn after you deferred).
Ah, I think the code for the highlight command pre-dates it being documented in the protocol spec, so it's based on a description of how it was supposed to work in a forum post, probably for the alien edition. It's not surprising it's a bit incomplete.
Anyway, fixed now.
Another request: because for the time being it is likely that there will be a limit to the number of engine-defined variants that XBoard can display in its menus, would it be possible to let Sjaak print the variants from the external variant-definition file before the internally defined ones, so that they have a better chance to appear in the menu?
Yes. I assume it makes no difference to variants that XBoard knows about if they are listed much later?
Evert wrote:Yes. I assume it makes no difference to variants that XBoard knows about if they are listed much later?
Indeed. To know if the engine supports a requested variant XBoard just checks if it appears in the variants-feature string, which works for any string length. The problem is just in assigning the buttons so you can select them, but the buttons for standard variants are always present in the dialog, even when the engine does not support them. (This just greys them out.) New buttons are assigned for non-standard variants in order of appearance.
The source archive will provide a basic man-page (Linux/OS X)!
I have now also included a description of the variants.txt file on the webpage: http://www.eglebbk.dds.nl/program/chess-variants.html
This is the same information as at the top of that file, but it may be easier to read this way.
As always, please let me know about bugs and issues, the more the better (well… you know what I mean)!
Weird: I get the message "An error occurred while extracting files" from the archive manager, when I want to extract the SjaakII directory. But it does extract files, and I could build a working executable from those.
I immediately run into a problem with Omega Chess, however. The color FENs in the highlight commad have only 10 ranks, making the highlights appear one square too hight, so that I cannot enter the legal moves. And it does not seem to recognize Omicron Chess.
hgm wrote:
I immediately run into a problem with Omega Chess, however. The color FENs in the highlight commad have only 10 ranks, making the highlights appear one square too hight, so that I cannot enter the legal moves. And it does not seem to recognize Omicron Chess.
Oh, snap. That's because it's building the colour-FEN off its internal board representation assuming a 1-to-1 correspondence between squares and bits, so it's not taking into account that the board is really 12x12 rather than 12x10.
It appears to work correctly if highlighting is switched off though, which is probably why I never noticed the problem here.
Omicron Chess is defined in the variants.txt file; it should be configured to load that automatically from its install location, but you can also load it manually through the engine options.
Evert wrote:Oh, snap. That's because it's building the colour-FEN off its internal board representation assuming a 1-to-1 correspondence between squares and bits, so it's not taking into account that the board is really 12x12 rather than 12x10.
I thought as much.
It appears to work correctly if highlighting is switched off though, which is probably why I never noticed the problem here.
But then promotions would not work anymore. (Unless you type them.)
Omicron Chess is defined in the variants.txt file; it should be configured to load that automatically from its install location, but you can also load it manually through the engine options.
OK, great! This one works. I could castle. It does not implement 'guarding'?
XBoard still seems to have a problem with promotions: it does trigger the procedure, but it fails to attache the chosen suffix to the move it sends to the engine, Will fix that this weekend.
