[Kde-games-devel] kbackgammon

[Josef Spillner]

Am Freitag, 8. Dezember 2006 22:29 schrieb Daren:
> As for the computer opponent: it turns out that on upgrading kubuntu
> dapper->edgy I got version 14.3 of gnubg. Now it is possible to play
> against gnubg within kbackgammon, making my computer engine somewhat
> redundant. Do people think I should leave in a self-contained computer
> engine? Pro, there's no need to have a recent version of gnubg. Con,
> it's not nearly as good a player (or maybe this is a 'pro').

Is your engine a modified gnubg engine? I looked into the source but there 
seem to be several engines.

> Mathieu, yes kbackgammon already supports network playing through fibs.
> I see there's nothing on ggz for backgammon yet--if you had something,
> it might be best to use the fibs syntax. That way it would be relatively
> easy to add ggz to kbackgammon and other backgammon games. I'm not sure
> I have the time to tackle a large project right now, but it might be
> easier once others have implemented ggz into their games.

One thing I didn't like about FIBS is that it includes the player management, 
and username/password are sent in the clear over the network. While FIBS and 
other such telnet-based protocols are highly popular, I wish we can move away 
from them eventually.
Maybe it is possible to specify a sensible subset of FIBS for running on GGZ, 
and if that gets popular other games might adopt it, as I think it would be 
possible without much additional implementation work.

GGZ does have wrappers for other GNU engines already (gnuchess, gnugo and 
gnushogi) as well as engines from other sources (velena for connectx/win4, 
and my self-written chess AI). To be really useful the engines need to be 
supported by the game server, but some are also (or only) implemented for the 
clients right now, mostly for GGZBoard.
We have a concept of user-selectable AIs as a general GGZ feature, so all 
games which provide multiple AIs let the user select them during the game 
configuration phase. Having several AIs especially for the classics games is 
very much appreciated.

I'm not sure if I ever did play against gnubg directly. There's some code for 
a backgammon module in GGZBoard SVN but it doesn't seem to work yet and while 
I do remember messing around with gnubg on the command line I don't think I 
ever came around implementing it.
For the server, either such an implementation or a modified FIBS server might 
do the job, but I cannot yet say when I'll find the time for that.
Games which already have an equivalent server in GGZ are certainly easier to 
support than games without.

Josef