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After having slept on it I realize there is a problem. General configurable variant engines will usually be configurable to play CwDA, but they will have been designed without the peculiarity of army selection in mind, and thus have no special features for it. The only way for such engines to play CwDA is by adding each flavor as a separate variant. If a GUI would not support this method, it would thus become incompatable with most engines that can play CwDA, as there will be very few dedicated CwDA engines. The partial naming I proposed in my previous posting requires engine support that they would not provide.

So it seems impossible to prevent variant proliferation in the engine's variant feature of WB protocol. But that shouldn't stop a GUI from keeping this proliferation out of its variant-selection dialog. So I want to propose a naming convention that would give special treatment to variant names of the form A~B(C) (e.g. FIDE~Nutters(CwDA) ). These should be considered as belonging to the "variant group" C, which should be enabled on par with primary variants. The GUI would collect lists of all A and all B occurring with that C in the engine's variants feature, and offer a separate selection method (e.g. a combobox) to select an A and a B.

This would give rise to rather long variant names, which would be clipped in the display of some existing GUIs; this is why I put the least-informative part at the end, rather than having something like CwDA:FIDE~Nutters. In addition, GUIs that do not support this convention would display a very long variant list, which they might also truncate. (This problem exists already with WinBoard + Sjaak II without the help of CwDA, and the latter provides a work-around for it through an engine-defined option defining the meaning of wild-card variant 'fairy'. In engine-engine tourneys selection through a WinBoard command-line parameter is always possible, though.) But newer GUIs would reduce the entire group to just a single item in their primary selection menu no matter how many flavors the engine reports, and provide additional methods for sub-selection of a flavor. (E.g. comboboxes behind the radio button that selects the item, or a separate dialog that pops up after the item gets selected through the primary dialog.) Engines don't have to know anything about this 'streamlining' of the variant selection.

P.S. due to construction of a new kitchen in my home I probably won't have much opportunity to think about these things or post here in the upcoming week.