Okay, that documentation looks like exactly what I need. Great. It looks as if it *should* be pretty easy to interface with gnuchess once I get going.
Now I just need to learn PyGTK! I'm currently supposed to be studying for a Ph.d. and should really be working on that, and I've never programmed with GTK before, so I can't promise much. On the other hand, I've been aching to learn GTK for ages and it's fun. I am thinking of writing a simple frontend that lets you play chess against the computer. If I get that far I don't think I'll go any further immediately. I'll publish the source code though. I've mocked up a frontend in Glade. Stuff will have to be added to it, no doubt, but anyway: http://seanh.freeshell.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.PrawnChess Feedback appreciated. On 12/22/05, Simon Waters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Sean Hammond wrote: > > > > I haven't been able to find a particularly modern-looking GNOME frontend > for > > gnuchess, and am interested in programming one with GTK+. > > Agreed, > > GNOME Chess was a start. > > > A lot of people "keep coming back to Xboard" because it is just > sufficient, but it had oddities, and no one wants to play with those > widgets these days. > > > Specifically I > > would like to use PyGTK. Where can I find information about the > interface > > gnuchess 5 offers for frontends? Is it simply a case of looking through > the > > gnuchess source, and if so, can someone point to a good starting point? > > It is documented in the xboard/winboard source tar ball. > > http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine-intf.html > > When GNU Chess is started with "xboard" it is a trivial two pipe > communication with flushing of output (guaranteed), such as Perl > IPC::Open2 expects. > > > I noticed gnuchess itself has a text interface, I suppose I could > probably > > just write a program that communicates with gnuchess through that, but I > > would have to know what the commands are. > > Covered above. > > However I think the protocol may need extending to cover extras for a > really comprehensive program, as I think it make sense to use an engine > (GNU Chess) for most of the chess logic. Such as "what are the legal > moves here", and information from book etc. > > It is a difficult call as that might make an interface engine specific > (or alternatively it could use an instance of GNU Chess for its "logic", > without pondering, and use another Winboard engine as an opponent?). > -- Sean's mailing list bin _______________________________________________ Info-gnu-chess mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu-chess
