<title>XBoard - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation - NEWS</title>
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<h2>What is new in WinBoard / XBoard 4.5.2?</h2>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr valign="top"><td>
- <p> Main new feature: </p>
- <ul>
- <li>Added many option dialogs and reworked some of the old ones </li>
- </ul>
-
- <p> Bugfixes, packaging and install: </p>
- <ul>
- <li>Fix nps bug</li>
- <li>Fix flipBlack option XBoard with board texture</li>
- <li>Fix two bugs in reading position diagram</li>
- <li>Fix parsing bug of FRC castling</li>
- <li>Fix bugs in FRC castling rights</li>
- <li>Fix display of promotion piece in ICS superchess</li>
- <li>Fix path browsing in WinBoard</li>
- <li>Fix use of game/position file in first match game</li>
- <li>Fix build on Mac OS X</li>
- <li> install bitmaps and sounds during "make install"</li>
- <li>some minor bug fixes</li>
- <li>code cleanup (e.g. 64 bit warnings, removed malloc.h)</li>
- </ul>
+<ul><li>
+<a href="#tag-A1">A universal dialog constructor</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A2">Re-organization of the Options menu</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A3">Installing sounds with XBoard</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A4">Starting an engine match from the menu</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-C3">Changing the board look during a session</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-C4">Sending instant ICS commands</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A5">Enhancing some existing menu dialogs</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A6">Browsing for file and path names</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A7">Filtering files by extension</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-C8">Operating scroll bars with the mouse wheel</a>
+</li></ul>
+</td><td>
+
+<img src="winboardF.jpg">
+<p>
+<a href="index.html">Home</a>
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td align="center">
+<p>
+<img src="LoadOpt.png">
+</p><p>
+<img src="SaveOpt.png">
+</p>
+</td><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-A1">New dialogs through a universal dialog constructor</a></h3>
+<p>
+XBoard did already have a 'universal' dialog constructor,
+for creating the Engine #N Settings popup based on the list of options sent by the engine.
+This constructor has been adapted a little to not send the user-specified settings to the engine,
+but set XBoard's internal options in stead.
+This means that dialogs now can be added with very little effort,
+by making a list of options containing the type (spin, check, string, combo, button),
+name (= text to appear with the control) and XBoard internal option it should set.
+</p><p>
+This dialog constructor has been used to add Save and Load-Options dialogs
+similar to those WinBoard already had to XBoard.
+Because it is now totally trivial to add a new option to an existing dialog
+(just add one line in the table specifying the options),
+the Save-Options dialog has also be made to include the -savePositionFile.
+</p>
+<h3><a name="tag-A6">A browse button with file or path-name options</a></h3>
+<p>
+Note that the dialog constructor now supports browse buttons next to text
+fields that are intended for entering a file or path name.
+Pressing this button summons up the file-selector dialog,
+and the name of the selected file will be copied to the text field
+on pressing OK there.
+There have been other small improvements in the operation of the dialogs as well,
+like checkboxes reacting to clicking on the accompanying text,
+positioning the cursor in clicked text edits, and such.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A2">Reorganiation of the XBoard Options menu</a></h3>
+<p>
+The XBoard 'Options' main menu used to hold all items to set options,
+where a checkmark indicated the current stateof the option.
+Apart from the fact that this obviously would not work for numeric or text options,
+the number of options was growing so large that this became a bit of a clutter.
+The univeral dialog constructor was used to group the actual items
+sets of dialogs, which are then summoned from the Options main menu.
+</p>
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<p>
+The existing items roughly came in two kinds:
+those that could always be used,
+and those that only affected behavior in ICS play.
+The latter were greyed-out from the menu in local modes.
+The generally useful options were all moved to a "General Options" dialog,
+except for "Ponder Next Move", which was really an engine-related option,
+and was already contained as a duplicat in the "Common Engine" dialog.
+The better capabilities of a dialog compared to a simple menu
+were used to allow better specification of the "Flash Moves" option:
+one can now actually enter the -flashRate and -flashCount settings through a spin control.
+</p><p>
+The ICS-related options were all moved to an "ICS Options" dialog,
+which is then greyed-out as a whole in the main Options menu.
+The new capabilities of the dialog were exploited for adding
+options to set intial black and white premove texts,
+the ICS Alarm setting,
+and the text colorization in the ICS console.
+</p>
+<img src="ICSOpt.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="GenOpt.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<img src="SoundOpt.png">
+</td><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-A3">Sounds and XBoard</a></h3>
+<p>
+The sounds in XBoards were a bit of a neglected feature.
+Binary distribtions (such as Debian, Ubuntu) often did not even contain any sounds,
+and a normal 'make install' from source left the sound files untouched in the source directory.
+Configuring XBoard to use the sounds was therefore cumbersome, through many command-line options
+not in the least because an external sound player is needed.
+</p><p>
+The new Sound Options dialog changes all that!
+For every event there is a combobox where you can select a standard sound
+(as supplied in the XBoard source package),
+or a user-specified file (in a text edit at the top of the dialog).
+A new option -soundDirectory has been added, which can also be set from the dialog,
+where all the standard sounds will be sought.
+(So if you just build XBoard and the binary is still sitting in the source directory,
+setting the sound directory to "sounds"makes all the WAV files with the standard sounds
+distributed in this subdirectory available.)
+</p><p>
+An extra combobox plus a 'Play' button for trying out a sound has been incorporated
+in the dialog as well.
+It still has to be decided if in the future sound files will be shipped with XBoard,
+and if so, which will be included in the standard package.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-A4">Conducting engine matches interactively</a></h3>
+<p>
+A menu item has been added in XBoard to start an engine match. (WinBoard already had this.)
+Formerly this was only possible by using the -mm (-matchMode) and -mg (-matchGames) on the comamand line,
+and after the match XBoard would terminate automatically (possibly with an Exit popup with the match result).
+When a match is started from the meu, you still will get this popup, but XBoard will not terminate.
+</p><p>
+To define the parameters for the match, XBoard now has a new "Match Options" dialog.
+Here you can set the number of games,
+the file to use for opening lines (-lgf = -loadGameFile) or start positions (-lpf = -loadPositionFile),
+and the number of game or position to use from this file (-lgi / -loadGameIndex or -lpi / -loadPositionIndex).
+As in the command-line option, a value of -1 for the index will specify it should increment after every game
+(always starting at 1), and -2 after every 2 games.
+The value at which the index should 'rewind' to 1 can also be given, all through spin controls.
+</p>
+</td><td>
+<img src="MatchOpt.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<img src="NewVar.png">
+</td><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-A5">Redesigning existing dialogs</a></h3>
+<p>
+Some of the existing dialogs (Common Engine, Adjudication Options, New Variant) have been redesigned,
+to simplify the XBoard code, and to make use of the new features offered by the universal dialog constructor.
+In this way the New Variant dialog has now be equipped with spin controls to set overrule the default board size
+of the selected variant,
+and operation has been made easier by using the variant selection button as menu items,
+rather than selection buttons that you have to OK afterwards.
+Clicking a variant now imemdiately selects it and closes the dialog.
+</p><p>
+The Common Engine settings and Adjudication Options dialogs now can use spin controls
+rather than simple text edits for the numeric values.
+</p>
+<pre>
+<img src="ComOpt.png"> <img src="AdjuOpt.png">
+</pre>
+</td></tr></table>
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-A7">Selecting files of a given type only</a></h3>
+<p>
+The file-selection dialog of XBoard now has the capability
+to filter the files it displays by extension.
+This is useful, as typically you are only interested in *.fen or *.epd
+files when you are browsing for the purpose of opening a position file.
+Without this feature the files you are looking for would easily drawn
+in the background of other files.
+</p><p>
+The file-selection dialog now has an extra text field where you can
+write one or more extensions (separated by spaces),
+and only filenames that contain one of these as a substring are displayed.
+(And directories; these are always displayed, in order to browse.)
+XBoard initializes this field according to what command invoked
+the file selector.
+E.g. Load Game will ask for *.pgn and *.game files,
+Load Position for *.fen, *.epd and *.pos files,
+Save Game for *.pgn or *.pos files
+(depending on if you have selected "old save style" or not), etc.
+</p><p>
+When the file selector is invoked through a browse buttonin another dialog,
+it selects those files with the same extenstion as what is currently
+in the field that you are selecting for.
+Of course you can change the extension field by erasing what is there,
+or typing your own extensions.
+To have such a change take effect, you should type <Enter> while in this field.
+</p>
+<h3><a name="tag-C8">Using the mouse wheel</a></h3>
+<p>
+An experimental feature in the file browser is the use of the mouse wheel.
+Because of the way scroll bars work in X-applications,
+they are rather hard to operate if you do not have a middle mouse button.
+Laptops nowadays often use the right edge of the mouse touch pad
+as mouse wheel, however.
+Therefore operaton of the mouse wheel in the area of the file lists
+or vertical scroll bars are made to scroll these lists.
+Other refinements of the file-browse dialog are that double-clicking a filename counts as if you pressed 'OK',
+as does typing <Enter> in the filename field.
+Typing <Esc> there is equivaent to pressing 'cancel'.
+</p>
+</td><td>
+<image src="Browse.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<img src="BoardOpt.png">
+</td><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-C3">Configuring the board look from the menu</a></h3>
+<p>
+There also has been created a new XBoard dialog for setting the Board Options,
+such as square and piece colors (in the View menu).
+This is still in an experimental stage, and probably not fully functional, or even buggy.
+This is not so much because the dialog does not work,
+but because the XBoard code is not really designed to change these during the session,
+as many preparatory steps are done at startup,
+which have to be redone with the new option settings for the latter to take effect,
+and I have not yet identified them all.
+But in any case changing the settings, quitting XBoard, and restarting it will work,
+because the option changes are persistent.
+</p><p>
+The color settings of the various board elements can be changed by retyping the RGB code,
+but it is also possible to slightly adjust the colors by spinlike buttons.
+Because colors form a 3-dimensional space, this cannot be done by simple '+' and '-' buttons,
+but requires four different adjustment directions:
+buttons to make the color redder, greener, bluer or whiter.
+</p><p>
+Text-edits are provided to specify filenames for board texture,
+and the directories with alternate piece images
+(corresponding to the -bitmapDirectory and -pixmapDirectory command-line options).
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<h4><a name="tag-C4">Sending prepared commands to an ICS</a></h3>
+<p>
+This is an attempt to equip XBoard with something similar to the
+WinBoard ICS context menu.
+The user can define a set of buttons and a set of commands
+to be send to the ICS when these buttons are pressed,
+through the -icsMenu option.
+The commands can be complete, such as "who" or "ptell I need a Queen!",
+in which case they are sent to the ICS immediately.
+But they can also contain the keyword $input,
+in which case they will be placed in the ICS Input Box,
+with the cursor at the place where the $input was
+(which is deleted).
+The user can then type something to complete the command,
+and press <Enter> to send it.
+E.g. "shout $input".
+</p><p>
+It is also possible to let the command contain something you select
+with the mouse elsewhere.
+Usually this is an ICS handle from the ICS console.
+This is done by having the command contain the keyword $name,
+e.g. "finger $name", or "tell $name $input".
+You can also specify a command should not replace what is in the Input Box,
+but rather append to it,
+by having it start with $add.
+This can be useful for bughouse players,
+to quickly ask for a list of pieces.
+</p>
+</td><td>
+<img src="TextMenu.png">
+</td></tr></table>
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