Monday, May 07, 2007

GGZ

It got to 3pm today and I decided I just couldn't be bothered battling Java all afternoon when I'd really prefer to be working on glChess. So I just went home and did that (I love being a contractor!).

So glChess is getting closer to having GGZ support...



Oh, and it really is wonderful to work on a well designed protocol like GGZ. ICS is OK if you're a human but a nightmare for a computer!
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3 comments:

Thomas DA said...

How many online active users does GGZ have in average? Fics normally has something like 300..

9:09 am
Robert Ancell said...

Based on my testing? About two (and they're both me).

Yes, ICS is a more logical place for playing chess but:
a) It is complex, both in protocol and UI. I got some support working but it doesn't feel in the spirit of the "just works" gnome philosophy.
b) By having GGZ support in Gnome the number of users (should?) increase. (There are floods of bug reports coming in from Ubuntu users)
c) I plan to add (at least some) ICS support later. In the mean-time I would recommend users install pychess :)

We may find that casual users prefer GGZ and more serious players prefer ICS. I don't think multiple communities is necessary a bad thing.

I think it would be a good idea to at some later point create a Python libchess so that we can share work (so you can easily add GGZ support if you want and I can get your ICS support). At the moment due to limited time the collaboration overhead would be detrimental to progress. And combining the best of two implementations should lead to a more useful library for other users.

12:29 pm
Thomas DA said...

Uh, libchess sounds very interesting. But yes, we can look into that sometime later.

4:10 am

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