Dark Chess

[hgm]

The nice thing about deep black is that it is very sensitive to viewing angle on an LCD display. So depending on how you watch it, both types of darkened squares can look completely black, or the light squares can look a very light grey. While the other colors do not noticably change!

[George Tsavdaris]

Why do you think it is helpful to have it?

I think so out of practical experience I play dark-chess quite a lot at brainking. Do you play a lot?

I'm speaking out of personal experience too.

I played a lot in Brainking in the past not now.

If for example if you need to visualize long (obscured) diagonals or visualize the potential squares of a knight that just move out from sight, that is hard when obscured squares are a solid block.

I'm not speaking about a solid block but with the grid lines to be of a different color than the square, so to be able to differentiate between squares and the borders of each square to be visible. Then it is very easy to visualize everything.

In fact i don't even have a problem with the whole "dark" board be black, it's easy to think about every square. It's a matter of practice, if you can play blindfold Chess then it's easy. I can(in a primitive way for sure) so i think differently perhaps.

Or perhaps an even better example; you have captured you opponents dark-squared bishop you need to visualize the potential squares for his light-squared bishop.

Well for me the board i gave or anyway a board with all "dark" squares having the same color and that you can see the grid lines-i.e the borders of the squares-, it's much better than this light-lighter-dark-darker way, that i find very confusing.

I wonder what others believe....

[George Tsavdaris]

Only if George gives you his permission

LOL of course and my opinion is irrelevant, HGM should do as he wants.
As long as he gives us the code since i would like to change it a bit

But i like what he did. Not just a compromise but a superb compromise.

[George Tsavdaris]

OK, this should do as a compromise, then: light and dark black.

Since the brightness of the "dark" squares is very low it isn't so much confusing than the awful display of the other program. In fact i can say i like it.

Like I already remarked in the other thread: the user can now choose his display mode when he is not playing (e.g. TwoMachines mode, but also EditGame etc.) through Flip View (the F2 key). This cycles him through 4 states: two board orientations times 2 modes (dark / full). The dark side is always above.

WOW. Your work on Winboard(seeing the other thread too) is monstrous! You implementing new options and variants with bullet speed.


So do you have any new executable with this release(with the changes with the F2 key, etc....)? And what about your plans of a new official release with the source code? Any approximate date? I'm looking forward to the last one.

[hgm]

The latest binary is still downloadable from http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.5.beta.zip .

The official release of 4.5.0 is waiting on unification of the XBoard / WinBoard documentation, which I am not working on myself. (Well, that gives me time to play with weird board games like Checkers.... ) Apart from a few fixes for bugs stumbled in during all this stuff, the source code for it will pretty much be what I have at the hgm.nubati.net repository now in the hgm6 branch.

The source code of the mentioned binary is still not on line; I will make a new branch ' alien' for that in the same repository, as it is still too undeveloped and untested for inclusion in 4.5.0. If we ever want such non-Chess stuff in there.

[adamh]

WOW. Shocked Shocked Shocked Shocked Your work on Winboard(seeing the other thread too) is monstrous! You implementing new options and variants with bullet speed.

Yes impressing indeed! HGM don't you have a day job?

[George Tsavdaris]

WOW. Shocked Shocked Shocked Shocked Your work on Winboard(seeing the other thread too) is monstrous! You implementing new options and variants with bullet speed.

Yes impressing indeed! HGM don't you have a day job?

I suspect he is not a human.

[hgm]

Yes impressing indeed! HGM don't you have a day job?

Actually, I don't. I retired from it, because this stuff is so much more fun. And most of it was done over the weekend anyway, because my wife was away for a course, so I had not much distraction.

But, (even on a working day!):

I uploaded a new version, which now fully implements communication with a Drak-Chess engine. And the zip download now also contains a test engine, dark.exe. This is not really a serious engine; it has no real search, and makes no attempt to integrate information from the past. It just moves (by simple heuristic eval after a 1-ply search) based on the current position. (So it is comparable to my normal-Chess engine NEG 0.1d.) As a consequence, it would move instantly, but I let it sleep for 1 second before printing its move. This to give the user the opportunity to view the board after his own move, before the reply. (Otherwise he would have to recall that every time with the arrows: as moves are also not animated for a dark opponent, there would really be no viewing time at all on an instant reply. Perhaps I should make WinBoard automatically sleep for the duration of a move animation when printing a board for which animation is blacked out; then at least you would see flash up what you see anew after your own move, but not anymore after the reply.)

Please tell me what you think about it (other than that the engine plays like cr*p).

http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.5.beta.zip

[George Tsavdaris]

I uploaded a new version, which now fully implements communication with a Drak-Chess engine.

I can't seem to make it work and show a Dark Chess board.

First a question: I guess you didn't include the Dark variant in the variants menu right?
But even when i start winboard with options -variant dark or -variant dark chess it doesn't show a board with dark squares or something.

The Dark engine seems to work fine but i just see all the board and not any dark squares.
I suspect it's because i use as a font the WinboardF font but i can't understand why this is an issue. What should i use or do to see the dark chess board and play against dark engine?

Note also that i created a shortcut of this newer Winboard.exe containing @dark.ini as command line parameter, and inside i had:
/firstChessProgramNames={dark}
/variant=dark
/saveSettingsOnExit=false

But the shortcut doesn't even load(i have tried without /variant=dark but still the same).
Any guess why?

[hgm]

What do you mean by "does not even load"? You get an error message? Something should happen when you click a shortcut...

/variant=dark is correct. I have installed the engine as

dark /fd=..\Fairy-Max /variant=dark

(I have put it in the Fairy-Max folder), and this worked for me, some versions ago. (I might have broken something since then, but I cannot test that now, as I am running Linux to sort out the sources.) I don't think the font could have anything to do with it. The darkening should start as soon as you start playing. (Not in the opening position after "New Game", as it does not know which side you will be playing yet.) If you are not playing you should be able to use F2 to cycle through the various flipped and darkened positions.

I will double-check as soon as I go back to Windows.