Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 21:11:52 01/07/04
Go up one level in this thread
On January 07, 2004 at 23:10:20, Ed Trice wrote: >Well, I now have a 4th person who licensed it for that expensive $1 fee :) Who said it was expensive? It is the principle of the matter that will dissuade people from getting involved. The reality may be that there is nothing to worry about, and that it is not expensive, and that there is really very little hastle involved, but people don't see it that way. If chess and gothic chess were equally good games, then chess would continue to be much more popular simply because of intertia and the hundreds of years of popularity. Sure, things do change, but for every major change to the game of chess, how many have failed to be adopted over the years? If you have droves of people programming gothic chess, and they are all happy with paying a small licensing fee, there will probably be no drop off in the number of people writing gothic chess programs. However, you are not going to cause a great shift by requiring people to obtain a license (even if it was free). If you were really interested in increasing the population of gothic chess programmers you would do things to make it easier for them to become gothic chess programmers, such as create easy to use communication protocols for the engines, a decent user interface that supports the protocol, as well as standards for things like positions, games, moves, and so on (and all of these would be freely available to everyone, without having to obtain a license). If you did that, and promoted the game well, you might get more programmers interested. That is one of the major reasons why computer chess is so popular today, and other games are not. In the past I was very interested in the game of amazons, and I wrote a few programs that played the game, but I lost interest quickly because the amazons community does not have the standards and tools available that the computer chess community has. With my chess program I can play against other programs on my computer, or over the internet, and I can use it in any number of very nice looking and feature rich GUIs, and I don't have to write a single line of code regarding interprocess communication, network code, or graphics code. I can store positions in a standard format and load them into a database program if I want. There are lots of very nice things I can do very easily. In amazons, and gothic chess, and many other games, I cannot do these things without a great deal of work, so I (like many others) stick to computer chess as their playground. If you want gothic chess to be successfull, look at the efforts that people like Tim Mann and Steven Edwards (and gobs of others I'm not going to mention, for fear of crashing the CCC server with such a large post), and follow their leads. Make great tools, create great protocols, give them away for free, and people will take notice at the seeds you have planted and follow your lead. Instead of making headaches go away, you cause them by forcing people to obtain a license. That's the issue. It doesn't matter if you charge nothing or a dollar or a thousand dollars, you are causing a headache to the potential programmer, no matter how small the headache may seem to you. If you apply force in the wrong direction, no matter how small the force, you will never overcome inertia and start moving in the right direction. >Gothic Chess is not easy to program, your decision is probably a wise one for a >different reason. It would take me no longer than one afternoon to write a gothic chess perft calculator from scratch, if I had any desire to do so anymore. Gothic chess is no more difficult to program than chess. You account for a few new piece types (probably under ten lines of code added here), and any changes in how castling works (a few lines of code), and is that about it? Or am I forgetting another ten lines of code that need to be added? If you want to get into optimizing it to be very efficient, and to play a good game, that will take longer of course, but a perft calculator is a piece of cake.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.