Re: [XBoard-devel] Bughouse Support

[Tim Mann]

Bughouse support is something I didn't work on because I was (and am)
convinced that it requires the ability to deal with multiple games at
once, each on its own board.  That needs a lot of work in the back end
to improve the data structures so that multiple games can be dealt
with, and work in the front end to support displaying multiple board
windows.  (Please, when you do that, don't just take the existing
crappy data structures and make all of them into individual global
arrays, so that -- for instance -- the move list is now a global
rectangular array. Ugh!)

Better bughouse players certainly do look at both boards a lot.
Bughouse players would hate an interface that shows only one board at a
time and makes you hit a key to toggle between them.  I'm not that
great a player, but I would glance at my partner's board a lot when
playing, both OTB and on the chess servers.  I knew players who could
easily play both boards at once.

        --Tim

On Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:04:44 +0100, "h.g. muller" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> >fics has a poberserve (or something similar) where you automatically
> >observer all you partner games...
> 
> OK, that makes life easy
> 
> >would be nice to save them together, because the save file of just your
> >game doesn't help much if you want to look at games later (which I never
> >do, but other people might ;))
> 
> OK, but that does not mean you have to collect the moves during the game.
> You coud have XBoard fetch the move list of the partner game after your own
> game has finished. But perhaps it is easier to store the entire game.
> 
> >That's the easiest to implement, but I don't think it would be usefull
> >in bughouse... you really want to see your partners game the whole time
> >and also his captures pieces...
> 
> Well, t does not seem so bad to me. (But of course I never played it on
> a server, so I should be careful.) You cannot look at two boards at once
> anyway, you would have to focus your attention on one at the time. It is
> not obvious to me that moving your eyes to and from the other board is
> very much faster than having your left index finger on the F1 key (say),
> and pressing or releasing it, while keeping your eyes fixed on the same
> point. I played this game OTB when I was a student, and then we hardly
> looked at each other's boards. (That just took to much time, and you would
> forfeit for sure...)
> 
> But as a start we should certainly do this, just to have an easy check that
> the back-end works.
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/