Re: [baby-devel] BabyChess comments

[Jerome Kunegis]

Hello,

First of all, it's nice to hear that people are using BabyChess.

On Mon, 10 May 2004 address@hidden wrote:

> - The ability to compile without Gnome (e.g. “./configure --no-gnome“)
> which was discussed here earlier would be great!

I think I can do that for version 16.

> - Ability to use BabyChess GUI with other (xboard compatible) chess
> engines would also be nice. There are lots of engines available which I
> would like to test, but not so many good GTK+ chess GUI's...
I have it more or less implemented.  I am testing it currently with
Phalanx, but I'm sure it must still be tested with many other engines to
be useful.

> - I would like to see working .configure script since plain make just
> doesn't work on all my machines.
I'd like to hear from this.  Could you provide the output of make ?  While
writing version 16 I stumbled upon functions that exist on Linux but not
Solaris, such as mremap() and strnlen().  Currently I have scripts which
test for the presence of these, but they are not really good.  I am
thinking of replacing them with Autoconf, but only after version 16.

> When are you planning to release version 16 and what new things will it
> include?
I think it'll take a while.  It will probably be released at the beginning
of august.  If you want, you can access the current development version at

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~kunegis/tmp/babychess-16.pre.2.tar.bz2

Here's a list of the new features that are already implemented:

New Features
============

-board:  click instead of drag to play a move.
-board: keyboard navigation
-better layout of dialogs. (for Human Interface Guidelines compliance)
-There's now an opening book.  The PGN is 96k of size.
-the name of the opening is displayed alongside the board.  (including
subvariation names)
-openings can be played by frequency of occurrence.  The frequencies are
taken from the opening book.
-partial support for descriptive notation
-The programs have changed names:
     baby_gui_game -> baby-game
     baby_chess_evaluator -> baby-evaluator
     baby_gui_ics -> baby-internet-chess
       etc...
-game archive editor:  game can be sorted by player names, result, date,
site, ...
-game editor:  play captures in reverse. e.g. after 1.e4 d5, you can drag
d5 to e4 to play exd5.
-new program:  baby-match.  This program is used to play a game against an
engine.  It works with the BabyChess engine and with XBoard compatible
engines.
-board:  dragging:  the piece is centered on the pointer.
-support for XBoard engines  (I have just tested Phalanx yet)
-use a tmp backup file when saving.
-There's a new binary book format which is used for the opening book.  I
plan to use it later for the communication with the chess engine.
---------------


To see what's planned for future versions, look at the file etc/TO-DO in
the development version.

BTW, if you want, you could translate the messages into Finnish.  Take the
file po/babychess.pot, rename it po/babychess.po, and translate all
messages.

Thank you,
        Jérôme KUNEGIS