Author: Dieter Buerssner
Date: 12:06:42 02/10/02
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On February 10, 2002 at 13:52:33, Uri Blass wrote: >I started to read tim mann page > >http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine-intf.html > >I see that tscp that is a winboard engine does not know about a lot of commands. I think, for full functionality all commands are needed. It is not totally clear, which commands the engine must be able to process while searching or pondering. If you are happy with playing games without ponder, not all commands will be needed. Obviously, you wont need to implement analyze/exit/"." then. Also, for "normal" local games, you would not need force mode (but force mode will be needed for adjourned games on ICSes). If you only play games from the start position, you won't need edit/setboard. And more examples can probably be found, but in general they will mean, that the full functionality is not available. Alos, it may depend very much on the GUI used. >I think that it may be better if the first thing that they describe there is >only the commands that are needed to play a game under winboard. You could try any reliable WB engine and start WB in debug mode. Then you will see in winboard.debug, which commands are needed for the features you want to work. If you do not implement "move now", under WB it would be advisable to implement at least ping/pong from the protocol version 2. Otherwise the engines can get out of sync in multiple game matches. >It is better to describe a game and the exact commands that winboard send the >engine and not to start by giving a lot of information that most of it is not >relevant for programmers who want only to tell their program to play under >winboard. I see this different. The engine-intf.html describes a communication protocol. WB itself implements this protocol. Other WB-compatible GUIs implement the protocol as well, but perhaps slightly different. As it is, it would be impossible for Tim Mann to document the exact order in which commands are sent, because other GUIs would be made non-conforming by this. One could argue, that in the first place, a more restrictive protocol documentation would have been preferable. But it did not happen, and hardly can be changed now. Uri, you know the Winboard forum. Perhaps you can get more thoughts on this, there. Good luck, Dieter
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