Author: Reinhard Scharnagl
Date: 07:36:57 06/18/04
Go up one level in this thread
On June 18, 2004 at 10:00:15, Tord Romstad wrote: >On June 18, 2004 at 09:41:10, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote: > >>A better forum to place your ideas in Germany would be the Arena Support >>Forum [http://f22.parsimony.net/forum41668/]. Here both, German and English >>language is accepted and FRC a topic theme. May be you can start a thread >>to support 10x8 boards by a GUI, for what I see a need, too. > >There will probably be one before the end of the year, but unfortunately it >will probably only run in Mac OS X. Support for 5x5, 8x8, 10x8 and 91-"square" >hexagonal boards is planned. Straightforward generalizations of the FEN and >UCI standards will be used. > >>But still there >>is no matching GUI available, though I have made some suggestions to extend >>FEN compatibly and to cover FRC, GothicChess and CRC by a sort of UCI protocol. > >I'm working on the same, as you understand. One suggestion: On the 10x8 >board, use "startpos" to denote the Capablanca initial position, not the >Gothic chess initial position. For Gothic chess games, simply send the FEN >for the initial position instead. This is a nice solution to the patent >problem with Gothic chess. Technically the engines will be CRC engines, and >therefore avoid the Gothic Chess patent. But the engines will still be able >to play Gothic chess if the GUI sends them the right FEN. > >As a result, everybody can write Gothic chess capable engines without >paying any license. Only Gothic chess GUI authors need to pay. Well, the main intention for designing CRC has not been to undergo any patents, even when they seem not to be applicatable in Germany. But I would prefer to have a friendly and cooperative solution to that problem, where I still have no idea, how to write a CRC GUI prog covering Gothic Chess explicitly, without provoking (what I do not want) any problems with Ed Trice. I am still waiting for a licensing proposal which would allow me to create a solution, to which he could also agree. It would be only a very weak solution to delegate setting up a Gothic Chess starting position completly to the user, which surely would be allowed to arrange the pieces of Capablanca Chess as he wants to. I am sure, that the idea of Gothic Chess could profit from an explicitly built in support, because of popularisation of it and having its figure sequences at one's finger tips. But just this I am still avoiding because of unclear licensing problems. Those problems will only arise in connection with a GUI. An engine itself, which could handle all sorts of CRC positions should not be affected, because it is simply open for all piece combinations. Therefore it is the GUI, which is the discussion field to which licensing problems might appear. But before there solutions will be descripted, I think it would be fair, not to support Gothic Chess explicitly e.g. by using its name or starting position as a program supported feature of a GUI. And this, though it might be without any problem to ignore that patent in Germany (but I am not a lawyer, and I am sure that problems would arise, when any of such GUIs will be offered in USA without any licensing by Ed Trice). One possible solution to that dilemma could be, that Ed Trice himself would develop a GUI which could communicate with a family of chess variants I like to name FullChess, covering all combinations of normal 8x8 and Capablancas 10x8 figure sets with possible Fischer shufflings using the UCI protocol. Reinhard. >For hexagonal chess, Grzegorz and I have agreed to use a FEN variant >where the initial position is encoded like this: > >"1prnqb/2p2bk/3p1b1n/4p3r/5ppppp/11/PPPPP5/R3P4/N1B1P3/QB2P2/BKNRP1 w" > >Tord
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