WoodPusher and CSBoard

12 Responses to “WoodPusher and CSBoard”

1. 
   Eugenia
   August 16th, 2004 at 1:36 am

   Both.

2. 
   Jamin Gray
   August 16th, 2004 at 1:46 am

   Haha. I knew someone would say that. We’ll do our best.

3. 
   Ploum
   August 16th, 2004 at 1:51 am

   Since your request it, here my personnal opinion :

   - it must be tightly integrated with gnome ( HIG, Theme, icons, …)

   - it must be really easy to play against the computer (no need to start manually a bot or a server or anything)

   - it must be easy to play over the network against a friend. Simply start it, select “Allow other people to connect to this game” and give your IP adress to your friend..

   - A very very good idea will be a plugin for Gaim/Gossip/other Jabber client that allow you to “Invite for a chess play”

   - It must be easy to play on a server. I don’t know how are chess windows apps, but I just want that nobody says “I’m stuck with windows because I play a lot chess on this server with several friends and there’s no Linux app that allow me to do the same”

   - Crossplatform is perphaps always good, but I don’t think that it must be an important point here. Please favorise Gnome integration more than anything.

   Anyway, this is just MHO and I wish you good luck and enjoyable moments of coding…

4. 
   Eugenia
   August 16th, 2004 at 2:24 am

   BTW, what is this VistaClient we could see on the screenshot the other day? Is it available? (sorry for the OT)

5. 
   Jamin Gray
   August 16th, 2004 at 8:39 am

   VistaClient is just a protype web service client that I’m working on for work. My company is VistaWiz (http://www.vistawiz.com) Once we’re done, it’ll be available and it’s possible that it will be open source. But the idea is that we have a embedded Linux device: a firewall/router for which we offer a managed service. Many of these embedded Linux devices have a web frontend for configuring. Ours does too, at present. But we want to move away from a strict web interface and offer a set of common interfaces for configuring the device from anywhere (command line, web, native graphical client, etc.). So we’re looking at using SOAP/XML Web Services.

6. 
   Peter Lundqvist
   August 16th, 2004 at 11:36 am

   I’m not really I chessplayer, but I do play a lot of go (wich of course is far supperior to chess ;).
   I really think you should look into making the online playing as easy as possible. Actually, I think you should take a short look att cgoban2 (written in java) for inspiration. Cgoban2 could easily be ten times better, but it’s developed as closed source.

   cgoban2’s features are probably rather dependent on the server side (I’m particulary thinking of the room paradigm here), but I guess a lot of that could be done over, for instance, irc (if you don’t want to write a server).

   By the way, is there a similar service (like kgs) for chess somewhere - by that i mean that it is strongly comunity focused.

7. 
   Jamin Gray
   August 16th, 2004 at 12:03 pm

   Probably the equivalent of kgs is FICS which WoodPusher already supports.

8. 
   Mike Kestner
   August 16th, 2004 at 12:43 pm

   I vote for it to support a chess engine that I could actually beat. I currently use xboard to play gnuchess and it kicks my butt.

9. 
   Jamin Gray
   August 16th, 2004 at 12:47 pm

   That shouldn’t be too hard. Just let me write a chess engine. I’m sure anyone could beat it. I’ll call it “Deep Shit.”

10. 
    respite
    August 16th, 2004 at 3:12 pm

    My preferences:
    -Tight adherence to the HIG
    -online play with a server browser (not just host
     game and enter IP)
    -easy start of games against a bot at different
     levels, either fine control like 1-100 or just
     easy, medium, hard (whatever is supported by the
     bot engine you use)
    -save and load bot games
    
    I know these next two options are not going to be
    on top of most gnomer's list but they would
    complete the project into the ultimate chess app
    for me and they could be put on low priority
    
    - a windows gtk port
    - having 2d and 3d options as in apple's gnuchess
     app. The 2d mode in CSBoard is beautiful a 3d
     mode looking like this would be wonderful to me:
    http://www.4moreinfo.com/screenshot1.jpg
    

11. 
    CouldaBeenAContender
    October 24th, 2004 at 9:21 am

    Check out eboard.sf.net, it’s probably the best chess interface for unix out there. Good place to get ideas. For serious players an ICS backend is important.

    The most important thing is KEEP IT SIMPLE and FAST. I’ve contributed code to 3 chess programs and nothing is more annoying than a slow program with feature bloat in blitz/lightning. Also build in timeseal. There is an open source java implementation around somewhere that should hopefully be a cut and paste and a few wrappers.

    Don’t worry about tight gnome integration. Alot of that stuff (Orbit, Gconf, Gnome VFS etc) is braindead for reasons I won’t explain here.

    I can’t remember but I downloaded one of the two (woodpusher or CSBoard) within the last few weeks and

    Once you start getting code submissions, integrate the patches right away or send email explaining why they were rejected. I have waited 6 months to have a patch accepted with no explanation. - I lose interest. Also try to do an initial hacked up ‘ugly’ release of the combined program as soon as possible.

    Here is an error I get:

    Unhandled Exception: GConf.NoSuchKeyException: Key ‘/apps/csboard/session/width’ not found in GConf
    in GConf.Client:Get (string)
    in CsBoard.Session:SetupGeometry (Gtk.Window)
    in CsBoard.ChessWindow:.ctor (string)
    in CsBoard.App:Main (string[])

    eliminate the gconf dependency. Is this crashing because:
    1) I am running a different window manager?
    2) Because I didn’t type ‘make install’?
    3) Some other reason?

12. 
    CouldaBeenAContender
    October 24th, 2004 at 9:25 am

    This is a little more legible.

    Check out eboard.sf.net, it’s probably the best chess interface for unix out there. Good place to get ideas. For serious players an ICS backend is important.

    The most important thing is KEEP IT SIMPLE and FAST. I’ve contributed code to 3 chess programs and nothing is more annoying than a slow program with feature bloat in blitz/lightning. Also build in timeseal. There is an open source java implementation around somewhere that should hopefully be a cut and paste and a few wrappers.

    Don’t worry about tight gnome integration. Alot of that stuff (Orbit, Gconf, Gnome VFS etc) is braindead for reasons I won’t explain here.

    Once you start getting code submissions, integrate the patches right away or send email explaining why they were rejected. I have waited 6 months to have a patch accepted with no explanation. - I lose interest. Also try to do an initial hacked up ‘ugly’ release of the combined program as soon as possible.

    Here is an error I get:

    Unhandled Exception: GConf.NoSuchKeyException: Key ‘/apps/csboard/session/width’ not found in GConf
    in GConf.Client:Get (string)
    in CsBoard.Session:SetupGeometry (Gtk.Window)
    in CsBoard.ChessWindow:.ctor (string)
    in CsBoard.App:Main (string[])

    eliminate the gconf dependency. Is this crashing because:

    • 1) I am running a different window manager?
    • 2) Because I didn’t type ‘make install’?
    • 3) Some other reason?