headers
h.g. muller | 2 Apr 2011 20:55
Picon

XBoard dialogs

OK, I am sort of done with the XBoard dialogs. I condensed
the work (in the "popups" branch of the hgm.nubati.net repository)
into 17 commits, starting with "Make generic XBoard popup...",
which group the changes by dialog, in so far they are not infrastructural.

Now we have to decide what to do with them. I want to propose the
following:

The first nine can go into the v4.5.x branch. They implement seven
dialogs XBoard did not have before: Save Options, Load Options,
General Options, ICS Options, Board Options, Sound Options and
Match Options. Note that the last one is something even WinBoard
does not have, and that the others in general also are more elaborate
than their WinBoard counterparts. The General Options and ICS
Options were partly covered by the items that used to be directly
in the Options menu, but are not limited to Boolean options.

In addition these commits redesign three dialogs that already existed:
Common Engine Options, Adjudication Options and New Variant.
The gain here is obviously less, but especially the Common Engine
and New Variant dialogs contain a number of new options, and
also use the more 'flashy' controls the Engine Settings dialog offered
(+ and - 'spin' buttons on numeric inputs). The new New Variant dialog
works more smoothly than the old one, making the selection directly,
without the need to press an OK button. All in all I think that it is worth
it to include these new-style dialogs in the stable version as soon as
possible, also because this makes them trivial to expand (e.g. add
a new variant), where expanding the existing dialogs always was a pain.

This means "Make generic XB popup..." upto and including "Implement
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Arun Persaud | 3 Apr 2011 17:28
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: GTK port

Hi

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Bodia <bvk256 <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, just wanted to ask: what is the current status of Xboard GTK port. I see
> it was mentioned on this list some time ago, but haven't seen much activity
> around it since then.

the GTK version is not working at the moment. We started playing
around a bit with GTK and managed to get some basic things ported
(which you can find in the GTK branch on git), but you won't be able
to play games with it. At the moment the GTK branch is also a bit
outdated. Overall there is a lot that still needs to be done...

Are you interested in working on it? We are always looking for people
want to contribute ;)

Arun
Permalink | Reply | 20 comments |
headers
Bodia | 3 Apr 2011 13:09
Picon

GTK port

Hi, just wanted to ask: what is the current status of Xboard GTK port. I 
see it was mentioned on this list some time ago, but haven't seen much 
activity around it since then.

Bogdan
Permalink | Reply | 21 comments |
headers
Bodia | 3 Apr 2011 19:18
Picon

Re: GTK port

I have no knowledge of GTK, and my C experience is limited only to a 
university course. But I'll keep looking, maybe I would help in some time.

On 03.04.11 18:28, Arun Persaud wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Bodia<bvk256 <at> gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi, just wanted to ask: what is the current status of Xboard GTK port. I see
>> it was mentioned on this list some time ago, but haven't seen much activity
>> around it since then.
>
> the GTK version is not working at the moment. We started playing
> around a bit with GTK and managed to get some basic things ported
> (which you can find in the GTK branch on git), but you won't be able
> to play games with it. At the moment the GTK branch is also a bit
> outdated. Overall there is a lot that still needs to be done...
>
> Are you interested in working on it? We are always looking for people
> want to contribute ;)
>
> Arun
Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |
headers
Arun Persaud | 3 Apr 2011 22:12
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: GTK port

On 04/03/2011 10:18 AM, Bodia wrote:
> I have no knowledge of GTK, and my C experience is limited only to a
> university course. But I'll keep looking, maybe I would help in some time.

Sure no problem... feel free to give us feedback on the current version
or suggest new features or other improvements.

Arun
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
h.g. muller | 7 Apr 2011 01:25
Picon

Promotion and piece menus

Today I had a great idea to eliminate promotion popup and
piece menu in Edit Position mode:

After clicking the relevant square (the to-square of a click-click
promotion move, or the right-clicked square where you want to
put a piece in Edit Position), you don't pop up anything, but simply
display a piece in that square. As long as the mouse button stays
down, you can then move the mouse to alter the identity of that
piece. When you see the piece you want, you release the button,
and voila! XBoard either executes a promotion to that piece,
or creates it there.

I just pushed two patches to hgm.nubati.net, popups branch,
which implement this. (For XBoard; for now it might break WinBoard).
One for the piece menu, one for the promotion popup.
It can be tested through

xboard -sweepPromotions true -pieceMenu false

(The options are persistent, so you have to specify them once.)

Currently the promotion popup still appears when you do a
drag-drop move. Not sure how to do the same there, as the
to-square is determined by an up-click, so there is no mouse
button down that you could use to select the piece.
An alternative way to use this is to basically always run in
"alwaysPromoteToQueen" mode for the drag-drop moves,
but do this on click-click moves, so that the rare under-promotion
can still be done even in this mode. Of course the order in which
the pieces occur is such that it starts with Queen; if the second
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 17 comments |
headers
Arun Persaud | 7 Apr 2011 08:41
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: Promotion and piece menus

Hi

> Personally I think this works so well that it completely eliminates
> the need for the menus. But I am curious what other people
> think of it.
> 
> I think this works great

just tried it and I like it ;) But I think it needs a few more tweaks.
Here are my 2 cents:

* there is no indication on what to do, so it could be confusing to new
people, e.g. they would have to read the manual and it doesn't work out
of the box
* you need to keep the mouse pressed and it's probably easy to make a
slip and get the wrong piece... although it didn't happen to me when I
was trying it.

I think I would prefer the following:
- you move a pawn on the last row
- we show a queen (or some other preselected piece) on that field
(perhaps a smaller version or with a border or something, around the
queen we show the other pieces, in a circle around it, in a box or some
other way...
- if you keep the mouse pressed you can rotate the arrangement to
another piece by doing what you implemented now (if you do this and
change the piece we could skip the next step)
- you click on the piece you want, if you click somewhere else or wait N
seconds (e.g. ignore the promotion) you get the preselected piece.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 16 comments |
headers
Eric Mullins | 7 Apr 2011 17:54
Picon
Favicon

Re: Promotion and piece menus

On 4/7/2011 12:41 AM, Arun Persaud wrote:
> * you need to keep the mouse pressed and it's probably easy to make a
> slip and get the wrong piece... although it didn't happen to me when I
> was trying it.

This is my only concern.  As I have auto-queen set, I would be rather 
upset if I accidentally got something else.
Permalink | Reply | 15 comments |
headers
Arun Persaud | 7 Apr 2011 19:50
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: Promotion and piece menus

On 04/07/2011 08:54 AM, Eric Mullins wrote:
> On 4/7/2011 12:41 AM, Arun Persaud wrote:
>> * you need to keep the mouse pressed and it's probably easy to make a
>> slip and get the wrong piece... although it didn't happen to me when I
>> was trying it.
> 
> This is my only concern.  As I have auto-queen set, I would be rather
> upset if I accidentally got something else.

I think if you have auto-queen on, this feature would be/should be disabled?

Arun
Permalink | Reply | 14 comments |
headers
h.g. muller | 7 Apr 2011 23:09
Picon

Re: Promotion and piece menus


> > This is my only concern.  As I have auto-queen set, I would be rather
> > upset if I accidentally got something else.
>
>I think if you have auto-queen on, this feature would be/should be disabled?

The way I have currently implemeted it is that it is controlled by an 
independent
option. The new option only controls what happens when in the old situation 
there
was a popup. And that was never the case when auto-queen was on.

I am not sure this is optimal, though. I would also be rather upset when I had
auto-queen off, and I get a Queen when I wanted something else, and expected
to select it from the promotion popup, which did not come.

I imagine that the most convenient way for things to work would be to have
auto-queen on drag-drop moves, (because there the new method cannot work),
and use the sweep selection on click-click moves. You have to be very inept
in mouse handling to ever get something other than Queen if you did not
intend it, and this can be made even more unlikely, by requiring a larger 
amount
of mouse motion before the piece changes than I have now.
There already is something similar in the one-click moving: clicking a Pawn
with only one (promotion) move brings up the popup (or invokes the sweep),
clicking the empty square where only the Pawn can move to, it always promotes
to queen, even when auto-queen is off.

So I would not be against an implementation where switching on the new option
would overrule auto-queen on click-click and (all) one-click moves, and
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 13 comments |

Gmane