Do you know where I can find the protocol specification. Using telnet I was able to see it uses a character stream not necessarily terminated by a line feed. It also seems to send the board literally I mean what I see is the board drawn with characters while I was expecting a FEN or so. Is that correct ? These things make parsing difficult and I want to see what the protocol says about it. I read that ICC uses a different protocol than FICS. But it seems I can not even invoke one worthwhile command as a guest on that server.
Thanks
Hi Daniel. I started playing on FICS in 1996, with just a telnet terminal and no graphic interface, so I kind of got used to it (it made playing blitzs impossible against people who had a graphic interface ^^). You have megabytes of help files in fics that you' ll probably have to read. Just type "help" in your telnet session and browse them
That seems much better. But what I get from observing from console is shown below. I thought I have to parse that. Is there a way to switch to the style12 format (for parsing) than the awkward default format (used at least for observing I think)
Ok great ! I suppose this is the format I will try to parse if I want to make an iterface. I hope it suppresses all fics output with no line feed so that i would use readline instead of read.
Thanks a lot.
Daniel Shawul wrote:Do you know where I can find the protocol specification. Using telnet I was able to see it uses a character stream not necessarily terminated by a line feed. It also seems to send the board literally I mean what I see is the board drawn with characters while I was expecting a FEN or so. Is that correct ? These things make parsing difficult and I want to see what the protocol says about it. I read that ICC uses a different protocol than FICS. But it seems I can not even invoke one worthwhile command as a guest on that server.
Thanks
Yes. Another problem is that fics sends formatted text which is cool to have for instance the FICS logo at startup. If I remove all the LF & CRs to parse the data (using readLine), I can't have the original formatted text. Also prompts such as login: , fics% etc ... will have to be typed blindfold since since they are displaced one command late due to lack of line terminators. My bot now does a read() not to loose format for displaying, then it splits by line terminators and parse data..
So I spent some time working on it and I have a working standalone java app. But my goal was to have an applet like the java interfaces at ICC. Problem is I am using sockets and it seems I can not use that in applets.. I can't open files, I can't add the user from System.property etc... How do the ICC interfaces connect to the server ? Newbie to java but I am lovin it
I mean what I see is the board drawn with characters while I was expecting a FEN or so. Is that correct ? These things make parsing difficult and I want to see what the protocol says about it. I read that ICC uses a different protocol than FICS. But it seems I can not even invoke one worthwhile command as a guest on that server.