I need a name for a chess gui application

[hgm]

I have no name, but a few remarks:

1) As you plan to add 10x8 support, you might also want to add support for games with piece drops, like crazyhouse. I noted that crazyhouse is by far the most played variant on ICC. And adding a holdings display from which you can drag and drop pieces as an afterthought to an existing interface is not so easy, as I experienced when doing this for WinBoard. It would probably be much easier if you designed it in from the start.

2) If you implement WinBoard protocol, be sure not to leave out the new features for setting number of CPUs of SMP engines, memory limit and egtb path.

3) If you have ideas for other GUI features that would not work on WB engines for lack of a suitable command in WB protocol, consider yourself invited for the ongoing discussions at WB forum to extend and invigorate this protocol.

[Guenther]

Hi Ilari.

And why not CB protokol also, and if you can, we can call it ALL GUI

Does the Chessbase (I assume that's what CB stands for) protocol have open specification somewhere on the Net? If it has enough similarity with WB and UCI I could consider it.

I guess that their GUI protocol is copyrighted so one has to have their´s
permission to use it.
I don´t think that should be much of a problem.

Of course it is. They will never allow it being used outside their own
commercial applications.

Guenther

[GenoM]

MirrorGui or ChessFrame; or ChessLab

[mcostalba]

What GUI library do you use? GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, something else?

Just a curiosity.

Thanks
Marco

C++ and Qt 4.4. We also use Doxygen for API documentation, and Git for version control.

Excellent choice !

In case you need a git viewer this is mine:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qgit

Or you can pull from the public git repo directly:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/qgit/qgit4.git

QGit is of course built with Qt4 itself (hence the name).


Have fun with your project!
Marco

[ilari]

Thank you guys for the name suggestions and the reasoning behind them. We have a lot of excellent candidates now.

[ilari]

I have no name, but a few remarks:

1) As you plan to add 10x8 support, you might also want to add support for games with piece drops, like crazyhouse. I noted that crazyhouse is by far the most played variant on ICC. And adding a holdings display from which you can drag and drop pieces as an afterthought to an existing interface is not so easy, as I experienced when doing this for WinBoard. It would probably be much easier if you designed it in from the start.

We'll have to consider it. Our GUI model is flexible enough for any kind of variant with a rectangle-shape board, but the internals would have to be heavily modified to support Crazyhouse. Maybe in version 2.0, if we ever get that far. Capablanca Chess was a no-brainer because it has the same logic as standard chess.

2) If you implement WinBoard protocol, be sure not to leave out the new features for setting number of CPUs of SMP engines, memory limit and egtb path.

I'm planning on doing the full WB 2 implementation first. Then I will take a closer look at the extensions of the protocol. I'm most interested in features that are in both WB and UCI protocols.

3) If you have ideas for other GUI features that would not work on WB engines for lack of a suitable command in WB protocol, consider yourself invited for the ongoing discussions at WB forum to extend and invigorate this protocol.

Thanks, I'll do that.

[swami]

I need a name for a chess gui application

I could think of one fantastic name for a GUI:

Battle Royale.

or

Chess Battle Royale.

.....The place where Engines fight each other to death, scoring points!

[ilari]

Of course it is. They will never allow it being used outside their own commercial applications.

Guenther

I was a afraid that would be the case. And while getting an explicit permission to use copyrighted material is often fine for closed source projects, it doesn't work for GPL projects. That's why using Nalimov tablebases is out of the question for us, unless it's a separate library with a more restrictive license.

[Guenther]

Of course it is. They will never allow it being used outside their own commercial applications.

Guenther

I was a afraid that would be the case. And while getting an explicit permission to use copyrighted material is often fine for closed source projects, it doesn't work for GPL projects. That's why using Nalimov tablebases is out of the question for us, unless it's a separate library with a more restrictive license.

OTH it is quite negligible, because there is only one program left which uses the CB protocol solely ;-)

Guenther

[ilari]

Excellent choice !

Thanks. At first I used wxWidgets, got really annoyed with it, and decided to switch to Qt. Then the other developer, Arto, joined the project and we started from scratch. We used Subversion for version control, but Arto wanted to switch to Git. A wise decision it was.

In case you need a git viewer this is mine:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qgit

Or you can pull from the public git repo directly:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/qgit/qgit4.git

QGit is of course built with Qt4 itself (hence the name).


Have fun with your project!
Marco

Hey, I know that project! Great job. Currently I prefer to use the gitweb interface for viewing commits, but everything else I do from the command line. We try to keep our public stuff in one branch, but I often have a crazy amount of local branches. Maybe a good gui could help me manage them.