WinBoard 4.9.170105 and adding new variants

[Norbert Raimund Leisner]

Hello,

http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-AA.zip supports now normal chess + 32 pre-configurated chess variants.

Perhaps can contain the next release of WinBoard interface the following
games:

Ai-Wok, ChessGi, Embassy, King of the hill, Janggi, Los Alamos, Micro, Pocket Knight, Racing Kings, Shatar, Sittuyin

http://www.chessvariants.com/oriental.dir/burmese.html
http://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/embassy.html
http://www.chessvariants.com/oriental.d ... chess.html
https://de.lichess.org/variant/kingOfTheHill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minichess
http://play.chessvariants.com/erf/LosAlamo.html
http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/pocket.html
http://www.chessvariants.com/diffobject ... acing.html
http://www.chessvariants.com/oriental.dir/shatar.html

Best wishes,
Norbert

[hgm]

WinBoard 4.9 already supports all those variants. Provided that you have an engine loaded that plays them. Variants that are not supported by the first engine are not selectable anyway; their radio-buttons would be disabled, so they might as well not be there. I don't see what good it would do to have WinBoard support variants for which there are no engines.

For that reason I am more likely to remove some of the buttons for the 33 standard variants, than add new buttons. Some standard variants have no special features other then unorthodox but quite mundane pieces, or deviating board size. So they are not needed as 'parent variant' of engine-defined variants, and could just as well be engine-defined variants themselves.

There exist thousands and thousands of variants. Having a New Variant dialog with a thousand buttons would be about as useful as having one with no buttons at all,as it would take ages to find the button you need.

[Evert]

I still think a drop-down list is the best way to select variants from the New Variant dialog.

[hgm]

I experienced drop-down lists (e.g. for engine selection in the tournament dialog) as extremely cumbersome and annoying. This is why I added listboxes to the repertoire of the dialog generator. The WinBoard radio buttons suck too, because you have to select and then OK. In XBoard pressing a variant button closes the dialog immediately, which is much better.

But as far as I am concerned a listbox would be OK for selecting a variant. Perhaps the New Variant dialog should be remodelled after the Load Egine / Board Themes dialogs: a listbox with predefined variants (standard and engine-defined), and some other controls to define your own variant (files / ranks / holdings size spins, a text edit for entering start-position FEN and pieceToCharTable). It could even allow you to add these settings to the list as a variant of your own, just like you can add board themes. That would require a new persistent option -variantNames to define the content of the listbox.

By sharing the existing code for handling the listbox it would also allow grouping of the variants, to provide easy access if you have defined very many. And the dialog could contain a button to 'import' the current board position as FEN in the start-position entry.

[Evert]

I experienced drop-down lists (e.g. for engine selection in the tournament dialog) as extremely cumbersome and annoying. This is why I added listboxes to the repertoire of the dialog generator.

I don't have a strong opinion on either of those, one way or the other. They're pretty much the same to me.

The WinBoard radio buttons suck too, because you have to select and then OK. In XBoard pressing a variant button closes the dialog immediately, which is much better.

Indeed.
To be honest, I've never used WinBoard, so I'm pretty much ignorant of the differences with XBoard.

Perhaps the New Variant dialog should be remodelled after the Load Egine / Board Themes dialogs: a listbox with predefined variants (standard and engine-defined), and some other controls to define your own variant (files / ranks / holdings size spins, a text edit for entering start-position FEN and pieceToCharTable). It could even allow you to add these settings to the list as a variant of your own, just like you can add board themes.

Sounds sensible. Particularly so if you can set a board-theme per variant (so you could get traditional Asian representations for Shogi/Xiangqi automatically when selecting those variants).

By sharing the existing code for handling the listbox it would also allow grouping of the variants, to provide easy access if you have defined very many. And the dialog could contain a button to 'import' the current board position as FEN in the start-position entry.

It would be useful if you could group, say, Shogi variants together under a "Shogi" family header. I suspect this will not work so well in combination of engine-defined variants though because it puts you at the mercy of people defining the sorting option for variants implemented in their engine.

[hgm]

Well, the engine-defined variants would probably not be stored in the -variantNames option. They would just be appended to that option, before it is used to load the listbox. The user could copy them to his list, however, so that they can also be selected when running without engine. Pressing 'Save Variant' would put all settings normally provided by the 'setup' and 'piece' commands in the -variantNames option with the user-specified name.