[Kde-games-devel] kbackgammon

[Daren]

Hi Josef,

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

No, it's original. There are several several engines, defining the term
engine to include computer or network opponent, in the engines
directory. The gnubg engine calls gnubg --tty. My engine is
offline/kbgofflinecalc.

> 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.

Mostly I meant that if the command sytax was the same as with FIBS, it
would be easier to code a GGZ implementation. Telnet is pretty
old-fashioned. A web interface might get many more users (generally
there are only ~50 on FIBS at any time).

> 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.

My 2 bits worth: if you make it possible for two people to play against
each other, someone will add code for a bot. If the game syntax is the
same as gnubg or FIBS I could modify kbackgammon relatively easily.

Regards  --  Daren.