--- /dev/null
+<!--#include virtual="/server/html5-header.html" -->
+<title>XBoard - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation - NEWS</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<!--#set var="article_name" value="/server/standards/boilerplate" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/gnun/initial-translations-list.html" -->
+
+<h2>What will be new in WinBoard / XBoard 4.7.0?</h2>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tbody><tr valign="top"><td>
+
+<h3>So far the development version has:</h3>
+
+<h3>Interactive Analysis</h3>
+<ul><li>
+<a href="#tag-A1">Excluding analysis moves</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A3">Keeping track of what was excluded</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A2">Assigning analysis scores by hand</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A6">Analyzing with two engines</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A7">Annotating an entire muti-game file</a>
+</li></ul>
+
+<h3>Other New Functionality</h3>
+<ul><li>
+<a href="#tag-A4">Displaying player logos in XBoard</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A5">Chat boxes for XBoard</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B9">Narrowing down a position search</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B8">Copying pieces when editing a position</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A8">Starting WinBoard through drag & drop</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-A9">Recalling configured engines and ICS from the command line</a>
+</li></ul>
+
+<h3>Interface Improvements</h3>
+<ul><li>
+<a href="#tag-B1">Scrolling listboxes</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B2">Tabbing through dialogs</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B6">List boxes for engine selection</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B7">Grouping engines</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B4">A separate board window for observing ICS games</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B3">Adding graphics to the repertoire of the dialog creator</a>
+</li><li>
+<a href="#tag-B5">A rejuvenated file browser</a>
+</li></ul>
+
+</td><td>
+
+<img src="../4.5.0/winboardF.png">
+ <p>
+ <a href="../4.7.0/index.html">Follow-up</a>
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ <a href="../4.6.2/index.html">Preceding (bugfix) release (4.6.2)</a>
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ <a href="../4.6.0/index.html">Preceding release (4.6.0)</a>
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ <a href="http://hgm.nubati.net/news.html">Experimental and future stuff</a>
+ </p>
+</td></tr></tbody></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-A1">Excluding moves from an analysis</a></h3>
+<p>
+Some engines allow the user to restrict the moves searched in the root position to a subset of all legal moves.
+XBoard now provides an interface for the user to indicate which moves should be excluded.
+The method used is to enter the move starting with a double-click on the piece.
+So either double-click from-square, and then click to-square,
+or grab the piece with a double-click,
+and then drag it to the to-square before you release for the second time.
+In the latter case there will be an visual cue to remind you that you are not really making the move,
+namely that the piece you start dragging will also remain on the from-square.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first time you make a move that way in analysis mode,
+it will be excluded from the analysis of the current position.
+A new command had to be added to WB protocol to make this possible,
+and that command ("exclude MOVE") will be sent to the engine.
+The move will be highlighted in premove highlight colors (normally red).
+When you enter an excluded move in the double-click way again,
+its exclusion is cancelled (through sending "include MOVE" to the engine),
+and the move will remain highlighted in the normal highlight color (yellow).
+</p>
+<p>
+
+You can currently also exclude all moves but the best at once by
+double-click dragging a piece (vertically) off board.
+This is not likely to stay;
+the final version of this feature will probaly provide another method for this.
+</p>
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="exclude.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A3">The 'exclude' header in the engine-output window</a></h3>
+During analysis there now is an extra header line in the engine Output window,
+which lists the moves that have been included from analysis, with a '-' sign in front of them.
+By right-clicking these moves, they get re-included, and the '-' changes into a '+'.
+They do stay listed, (as long as you remain in the position), so you can easily
+toggle their exclusion state this way.
+</p>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<img src="ExcluHeader.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<p>
+The exclude header always also contains the items 'none', and 'best',
+which you can right-click to completely reset the exclusion list,
+or exclude the current best move (i.e. the first move of the latest reported PV), respectively.
+Finally, a pseudo-move 'tail', representing all moves not listed explicitly in the header,
+is always shown as well.
+It excludes or includes all these remaining moves.
+a special case is when clicking it would result in no moves being included at all;
+in that case the current best move will remain included.
+<p>
+
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A2">Defining the score of a given position by hand</a></h3>
+<p>
+A new WB protocol command "setscore SCORE DEPTH" has been defined,
+which can be used to set the score an engine should use for a given position by hand.
+Currently XBoard does not use this yet,
+but the intention is to allow the user to use the Adjudicate items in the Action menu
+to define the current position as a win, loss or draw.
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A4">Displaying logos for the playing engines</a></h3>
+<p>
+Like WinBoard, XBoard now also has the possibility to display player logos next to the clocks.
+To enable this feature, an option -logoSize was added to XBoard.
+This specifies the width (in pixels) of the logo pixmaps.
+(The height is always assumed to be half the width.)
+When the value of this option differs from the default 0, and is not more than 1/4 of the board width,
+XBoard creates space for the logos, by displaying the clocks as two lines.
+Commonly used logo sizes are 100 x 50 or 130 x 65.
+</p>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<p>
+Like in WinBoard, a new boolean option -autoLogo causes XBoard to automatically look for logos corresponding
+to the playing engine, human player, or the ICS to which you are connected.
+Unlike WinBoard, you can specify a directory where XBoard looks for the logos, with the new -logoDir option.
+All these options are persistent.
+The name of the logo files must be the 'tidy name' of the engine (also used as mnemonic in the Load Engine dialog),
+or the domain name of the ICS, or user name of the human, suffixed by .xpm,
+for XBoard to recognize them under -autoLogo.
+The logos can also be specified explicitly (overruling the -autoLogo choice),
+with the volatile options -firstLogo, -secondLogo.
+</p>
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="Logos.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A5">Conducting chats in separate windows</a></h3>
+<p>
+XBoard now has chat facilities a bit similar to WinBoard's chat boxes.
+Only difference is that there is only a single window to contain all chats (upto 5),
+which cannot be 'unstacked' to see the chats side by side.
+You can only see the 'foreground chat',
+with the person (or channel) that is written in the chat-partner field at the upper left.
+The other chats are only represented by buttons in the top row.
+If there are messages in those chats you have not seen yet, the corresponding button turns orange.
+</p>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<img src="ChatBox.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<p>
+Clicking a button moves the handle (or channel) it mentioned to the chat-partner field,
+so that the corresponding chat becomes foreground, and rearranges the buttons.
+You can then type to that person or channel (or shout, or whisper) without having to prefix the messages with 'tell ...', 'shout' or whatever.
+XBoard will do this for you, depending on what is in the chat-partner field.
+At any time you can change the content of that field (terminated by <Enter>!),
+to change with who you are chatting.
+This is also the way to create new, simultaneous chats:
+initially all buttons are blank; just select one
+(so the chat-partner field gets cleared, and the old partner moves to one of the buttons),
+type a new handle there, and you can chat to that person.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20" valign="top"><tr><td>
+<h3><a name="tag-B1">Listboxes in XBoard dialogs</a></h3>
+<p>
+There were two XBoard dialogs that used listboxes:
+the game-list window, and the game-list options dialog.
+The first of those was more complex, because it could grow very big,
+and was thus mounted inside a 'viewport', enabling the user to scroll through it.
+</p><p>
+The code for viewport + listbox has now been incorporated into the generic popup,
+by creation of a new option type 'ListBox'.
+As a result, these windows can now be generated by this dialog creator too,
+meaning that they can also draw on all features this creator already supported.
+But, even more importantly, it makes it trivial for other dialogs to use listboxes as well.
+The code has been a bit augmented as well:
+a callback has been added to allow vertical scrolling of such generically generated listboxes with the mouse wheel.
+This scrolling can also be activated from the code,
+which is now used in the game list to always keep the selected item in view.
+</p>
+</td><td>
+<img src="NewerGameList.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-B9">Selecting games on multiple characteristics</a></h3>
+<p>
+There are three ways to select a subset from the game list:
+you can filter on a substring of the header lines (e.g. a player name),
+set thresholds for Elo and date in the Load Game dialog,
+or select on a position occurring in the game.
+All three methods can be used simultaneously.
+But sometimes you might want to select based on two positions.
+This can now be done with the new 'narrow' button in the game list:
+unlike 'find position', which starts a search with a clean slate
+(taking text and Elo/date filters into account),
+this only selects from games that were already selected in the list.
+This way you can select for position after position,
+e.g. games that started with 1.e4 (using 'exact match'),
+where white castled Q-side (in 'subset mode' with only Kc1 and Rd1 on the board),
+black castled K-side (again subset mode, with Kg8, Rf8 on an otherwise bare board),
+and ended in a Rook ending (in 'material range' mode with KRKR on the lower board half,
+and all Pawns on the upper board half).
+After using 'narrow' three times (after the initial 'fiind position',
+you are left with only the games that satisfied all these conditions.
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-B2">Jumping from text-edit to text-edit</a></h3>
+<p>
+Another improvement of the dialogs generated by the generic dialog creator
+is that text-edits now interpret a <Tab> character typed by the user as the command to transfer focus
+to the next text-edit of the dialog.
+This allows you to avoid the annoying switching between keyboard and mouse when completing the info of a large dialog,
+like Match Options.
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-B3">The Engine Output and Eval Graph redone by generic popup</a></h3>
+<p>
+The program code for the XBoard user interface has been extensively rewritten,
+so that all dialogs, including the main board, are now managed by a completely general
+'generic popup' routine, whih is entirely table driven.
+Many of the specific improvements listed here are a consequence of this,
+and the ease with which listboxes and graphical elements can be added to dialogs
+will no doubt enable many future improvements.
+In addition it should make it much easier to port XBoard to other platforms.
+</p>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-B6">Using listboxes for engine selection</a></h3>
+<img src="MatchList.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="LoadList.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+<p>
+The comboboxes for selecting engines in the Load Engine and Match Options dialogs have been replaced by listboxes.
+This allows faster selection of the engines, because you don't have to open the comboboxes first.
+The latter was especially annoying when you needed to select a number of consecutive items from a long list for a tourney:
+you would have to reposition to where you were for each engine you added.
+Now you simply double-click the engines, without the mouse pointer having to move elsewhere in between.
+There are now also separate dialogs for loading first and second engine,
+so the combobox to choose this could be removed,
+as you already make the choice by selecting the appropriate dialog from the menu, without extra mouse click.
+</p>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<img src="MatchGroup.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-B7">Structuring the engine list</a></h3>
+<p>
+Grouping of engines is now also possible in XBoard.
+The fact that the engines are presented in listboxes makes this extra handy.
+Just double-click a group to see it open, with its name displayed as header,
+and click on that header to close it again, and go back to the 'root' list.
+As with WinBoard, the engines in a group are dlimited by lines
+"# GROUP NAME" and "# end" in the engine list.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-B4">Observing another ICS game in a second window</a></h3>
+<p>
+The main window is rather complex, not so much because of its layout and the type of widgets it contains,
+but because the widgets have all kinds of activity on clicking.
+In particular there are the pull-down menus of the menu bar,
+and various pop-up context menus on clicking the board (piece menu, drop menu).
+The generic dialog creator already contained code to generate menus, though, for ComboBox options,
+and the control elements for those are nothing but a one-menu menu bar, with a text-string written in front of it.
+This code was easy to re-use to do the main menu bar, as well as for creating pop-up menus.
+A new level of organization makes it possible to 'box' the menu buttons (or other controls) into a menu bar
+(which is also used for the button bar).
+</p><p>
+The fact that the board can now be handled by XBoard's generic popup made it easy to add a second board window.
+So with the ICS options 'Background Observe' and 'Dual Board' both on,
+a game you are observing next to the game you are playing will now be displayed in a separate window,
+rather than side-by-side with your own game in a single, double-width window.
+The new window also contains its own clock and message field.
+(But no menus or button bar, and it will also not react to any clicking on it.)
+</p>
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="DualPopup.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<img src="NewBrowser.png">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-B5">The file browser rewritten</a></h3>
+<p>
+XBoard so far relied on a file browser borrowed from GhostView,
+which was of a bit peculiar design,
+while the adaptations made in it to interface it to XBoard had made it a bit flaky.
+The file browser therefore has been completely rewritten,
+using XBoard's generic dialog generator, and its newly supported list boxes.
+The new design has two (scrollable) list-boxes, one for the folders and the other for the files in the current directory.
+It also has a combobox to select the type of file we are browsing for.
+By this we can filter on the usual extensions for the various file types,
+such as .pgn for games, and .fen for positions.
+</p><p>
+Double-clicking on entries in the folder list enables you to navigate through the file system.
+Double-clicking on an entry in the file list will select the file.
+Depending on if you were browsing for actually accessing it
+(e.g from the Load Game menu)
+or just to get the name
+(as with the Browse buttons of another dialog),
+this will open the file, or put the name in the text-edit you were browsing for.
+</p><p>
+Of course you can still type the filename by hand
+(if you need a non-existing file, for saving on).
+In that case the the browser can still be helpful,
+because it prepends the path name of the currently selected folder to the filename you type.
+When browsing for a path, that is the only thing it will copy to the text-edit.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-B8">Copying pieces when editing a position</a></h3>
+<p>
+In Edit Position mode it has always been possible to move pieces from any square to any other square.
+New is that you can now also do this while keeping the Ctrl key pressed.
+This then moves the piece withot removing it from the original square,
+i.e. it becomes a 'copy' rather than a 'move' operation.
+This can be helpful for setting up a Pawn chain.
+</p>
+
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<h3><a name="tag-A6">Analysis with two engines at once</a></h3>
+<p>
+In Analysis mode, XBoard can now run two engines at once.
+Like when playing engines against each other, the Engine-Output window will then be split into two panes,
+and the output of the second engine will appear in the lower pane.
+Both engines will analyze the same position,
+following the game as the user browses through it by means of the stepping buttons,
+or by entering moves.
+They will also exclude the same moves from the analysis, so only the upper pane
+will have a move-exclusion header line.
+Each pane will have its own Multi-PV header line, however,
+(if the corresponding engine supports multi-PV),
+so that you can independently set the number of PVs coughed up by each engine.
+</p>
+<p>
+Normally analysis will start with only a single active engine, the first.
+Clicking the "Analysis Mode" menu item when already analyzing,
+this will toggle the second engine on and off.
+Of course the second engine will be switched off as soon as you leave analysis mode, just like the first.
+</p>
+</td><td valign="top">
+<img src="DuoAnalysis.png">
+</td></tr></table>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A7">Batch analysis of a PGN file</a></h3>
+<p>
+The Analyze Game menu item has acquired some new functionality.
+Used when a game is already loaded, it will start to auto-play the game,
+starting at the current position,
+and annotate it with scores and engine variations, like always.
+When reaching the end of the game, auto-play will stop,
+but the game stays loaded for you to add more comments,
+and save it by hand to a file of your choice.
+</p><p>
+But when you load a new game from a multi-game file
+(by selecting it from the Game List)
+while Analyze Game mode is already switched on,
+(or when the "Step through opening lines / positions" in the Tournament dialog has been selected),
+auto-play will no longer stop at the end of a game!
+In stead, it will automatically load the next game from the file,
+(forcing a save of the just annotated one, if you have set auto-save mode properly),
+and start auto-playing / analysing / annotating that.
+This will continue untill all games in the file have been treated,
+or you switch XBoard out of Analyze File mode by hand.
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A8">Starting WinBoard by dropping files on it</a></h3>
+<table cellpadding="20"><tr><td valign="top">
+<img src="DragDrop.jpg">
+</td><td valign="top">
+<p>
+In Windows and on Mac the OS will issue a command to start an application with that document.
+Up to now, WinBoard would always assume such a file was a game file, however, leading to error messages if it wasn't.
+This because the OS is not smart enough to know which command-line arguments to use to tell WinBoard what kind of file it is.
+Using the WinBoard installer would make the proper associations in the systems registry to load the files with WinBoard
+in the proper way, so that you can even just double click them.
+But for 'portable versions', it would be difficult to make such associations
+using the standard system menus "Open with" and "Always open this type of file with this application",
+because you could not specify a detailed command line for the "open" operation.
+</p>
+</td></tr></table>
+<p>
+This has now been solved by making WinBoard pay attention to the filename extension.
+When requested to perform an unspecified action on a file,
+WinBoard (and XBoard, but this is in general less useful) will examine the extension.
+Then for .fen or .epd it opens it as position file in viewer mode, and .trn as tourney file, to play the tourney.
+A .ini or .xop file, specifying settings as a list of command-line options they contain,
+will start WinBoard as if these options were typed on the command line (i.e. treat it as an indirection @file).
+This means you can now start WinBoard in any pre-configured mode, by simply dragging an .xop file on top of it
+(or double-clicking it once you made the association, as if they were shortcuts!).
+Files with unrecognized extensions are still treated as game files, opening WinBoard in viewer mode
+(if their name does not correspond to that of an installed ICS, see below).
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-A9">Start installed engines or ICS from the command line</a></h3>
+<p>
+WinBoard has a startup dialog where the user can select the engine or ICS he wants to use from a drop-down menu.
+Through this menu he can select a command line that does not only specify the engine (or ICS),
+but also all options that have to go with it.
+(Like whether the ICS should use timeseal or timestamp, or the engine is for a variant or should use the GUI book, etc.)
+In XBoard there was no such convenience, and you had not only to specify the engine (through the -fcp option) or ICS (through -icshost),
+but also type all options it needed, (e.g. -icshelper timeseal), and even that it should run in ICS mode in the first place (-ics).
+</p><p>
+A few new options now have been added to cure this.
+With -fe ENGINE or -se ENGINE you can now recall an 'engine profile' as was defined earlier through the Load Engine dialog,
+accessing the engine by its nickname (i.e. the possibly shortened name under which it appears
+in the list of engines from which you can select in the Load Engine or Tournament/Match Options dialog).
+This then not only defines the corresponding -fcp or -scp argument, but also all option settings that were defined with it.
+(Like whether the engine was UCI, needed to use book, plays only a certain variant,
+or whatever you added by hand through editing the -firstChessProgramNames option in the ~/.xboardrc user settings file.)
+A similar option -is ICSNAME works for selecting an ICS from the -icsNames option,
+which can only be manipulated by editing the user settings file,
+but is preconfigured to contain the the nicknames 'fics' and 'icc' for freechess.org and chessclub.com,
+which likely is all you will ever need.
+So "xboard -is fics" can now be used to connect to FICS with timeseal.
+</p><p>
+This can even abbreviated further:
+When XBoard encounters an argument not preceded by an option name,
+it normally assumes it is a game file, imagining the -lgf option for it.
+But an exception is now made for names that correspond to the (nick)name of an ICS.
+This would imply the -is option.
+So you can connectto FICS by simply typing "xboard fics".
+</p>
+
+<h3><a name="tag-B0">Fixed bugs</a></h3>
+<p>
+Some bugs were encountered and reported during the refactoring process,
+and they were corrected on the spot.
+In due time the fixes will find their way into the 4.6.x branch.
+We can mention:
+
+<ul>
+ <li>
+ When, during install of a new engine, XBoard split the path name into directory + engine command,
+ it forgot to prefix the latter with './', so it would refuse to execute.
+ </li><li>
+ When replacing an engine while not at the end of a game,
+ the engine would be positioned at the end of the game, rather than on the current position.
+ </li><li>
+ Crazyhouse was played like Loop Chess when legality testing is off.
+ </li><li>
+ Attempting to load a non-existing engine makes XBoard switch to -ncp mode,
+ but this did require a bit of patience, as XBoard would still wait out the feature time-out of the engine load procedure.
+ </li><li>
+ Dragging the main window when the option -stickWindows was on could make xboard's clocks stop.
+ </li><li>
+ A work-around was implmented for the FICS bug that it does not understand proper SAN notation for moves like Bxc6 and bxc6.
+ This bug was interfering with XBoard 'Upload to Examine' function, which uploads in SAN.
+ </li><li>
+ The validity of tourney participants is now checked before you can OK the Tournament / Match Options dialog,
+ as they could have been invalidated by hand editing, which led to very pathologic effects during the tourney.
+ </li>
+</ul>
+
+Some bugs disovered through scrutinous testing to insure the refactored code was still working as the original one,
+but not yet solved:
+
+<ul>
+ <li>
+ Marking target squares and the highlight arrow interfere with animate dragging,
+ when the dragged piece oveshoots its target square so that it partly covers a marking dot
+ or arrow of a previous move. These are then not erased when the piece is released.
+ </li><li>
+ Iconizing the board still seems to sometimes stop the clocks.
+ </li>
+</ul>
+
+</p>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org"><gnu@gnu.org></a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF.<br />
+Please send broken links and other corrections or suggestions to
+<a href="mailto:bug-xboard@gnu.org"><bug-xboard@gnu.org></a>.</p>
+
+<p>Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+
+<p>Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2012/10/02 02:09:54 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>
projects / xboard.git / commitdiff
