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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Ok, good to know that I don't need to worry about that. I was wondering because I have been experiencing some stalls when running ChessV vs. Fairy-Max games in batch mode and it only happens when Fairy-Max declares a draw and then only sometimes. I don't think it's related to this issue though. So I'll have to keep digging.
Regarding playing CwDA through CECP, this game presents some interesting challenges, most notably army selection. Given the current state of affairs, there are two obvious approaches, but neither is great...
1. We could consider each army match-up to be a different variant - FIDEs vs. Rookies is one variant and Rookes vs. FIDEs is another. This is a little cheesy and leads to variant explosion. Essentially CwDA becomes two to the power of the number of armies different variants. That said, this is probably the easiest. I think ChessV can do this now with no modifications to the code at all. We could always start here and be up-and-running in no time and just back out these "dummy" variants later.
2. We can do what you are doing now - have engine paramters for army selection. This is arguably better, but I don't love this option either. We are adding engine-level settings for things that only apply to one game. This is somewhat cheesy, unintuitive, and doesn't scale well. What if we have a different variant that also has army selection but different armies for choices? What happens when we start adding configuration parameters to other variants? (ChessV already has configurable game-specific options for other things, such as the castling rule in effect in Capablanca variants.) I don't mind altering ChessV but when I add things I always try to add them in a general way. I'd rather not add code just to "hack" this one specific variant.
I think what we want - ultimately - is a new concept. ChessV has "game variables" which are configuration options that apply only to specific games. Conceptually, this is exactly what we are trying to accomplish. Ideally, CECP would be given a new feature which engines could declare support for. If an engine announces support for game variables, the GUI could then ask it, for any given game, what options it supports. But I realize that this requires significant changes to XBoard/WinBoard, and it is probably no small undertaking. But I think it's something worth striving for in the long term, and would pay dividends down the road.
Actually, we might be able to get there with the first step just being naming convention. If we make "cwda" to be the Chess with Different Armies variant, maybe the options could be named like "@cwda:White Army", for example. At first, WinBoard could just treat them like any engine options. But in future, it might parse the option name to understand that it only applies to variant "cwda". Just thinking out loud here ... haven't considered it deeply.