h.g. muller wrote:
True, but I expect there is a large group of users that will want to
analyze
games with the strongest engines they can lay their hand on, which means
they will want to use Crafty (WB) ,Toga (UCI) or Glaurung (UCI) if
they want
a free engine, and Rybka (UCI) if they are willing to pay for it. Not
providing
automatic UCI support will greatly reduce the appreciation fo our
product.
But it's still great to also have a "gold pack" with everything you
need to get started doing more complicated things. I think that could
either be a separate installer package, or (if the person working on
the installer wants to do it), it would be cool to have one installer
that has an options screen that lets you check more things to
download.
This is more or less the idea. Jaap told me this was not very difficult.
I think bandwidth is a valid concern, though. I would not want every
install
to start with a 100MB download, out of which only 1MB is used then for
people selecting the minimal install.
But we should see things in perspective, and below a certain size, I
don't
think we should worry. E.g. some (uncompressed) file sizes:
1.153 KB winboard.exe
860 KB wcrafty.exe
428 KB GNUChes5.exe
101 KB GNUChess.exe
3.624 KB book.dat (GNU Chess book distributed with 4.2.7b)
28 KB polyglot.exe
18 KB fairymax.exe
C:\chess\WinBoard>objdump -p gnuches5.exe | grep DLL
vma: Hint Time Forward DLL First
DLL Name: cygwin1.dll
DLL Name: cygreadline5.dll
DLL Name: KERNEL32.dll
From my chess utils path:
08/10/2003 04:17 PM 151,552 cygreadline5.dll
06/12/2008 11:35 AM 1,872,884 cygwin1.dll
Polyglot may also depend on cygwin1.dll, depending where you got it.
There is a version that doesn't depend on it though. I'm not sure I'd
recommend that one, however.
I have a .REG file that I use to set up the PGN file type to invoke
winboard in analysis mode. This has fcp as polyglot, and then I just
hand-modify the INI file for whatever engine I want to analyze with.
That process could be fine-tuned and automated to make it easy on end
users to select the analysis engine. I don't ever use WB engines
though, so I'm not sure what else might be necessary to support crafty
in that process.
For analysis, there's no need for a book. People may want some kind of
endgame bases though-- MUCH larger than a book. heh.
(Forgive the duplicate message, I'm not mailing list savvy and replied
to HGM originally.
