Re: [gnugo-devel] How to build debugboard? / view.pike

[Gunnar Farneback]

Dan wrote:
> What is view.pike?

It's a further development of the debugboard idea. It differs
significantly though, primarily by using a graphical board and by
being a GTP application.

It's not finished but it has reached a state where the main obstacle
to being useful is the lack of documentation. I added it to CVS in
order to get some early testing from people who I were discussing it
with on NNGS.

So, what do you need to do to run it?

1. You need to have Pike 7.4 (or later) installed. This must also have
been built with GTK support. Either get it from your distribution or
download binaries or source from http://pike.ida.liu.se and
install/build it yourself. Pike 7.2 or earlier do not work.

2. You also need some kind of scalable fonts. By default it searches
for files with suffix .ttf or .pfb in subdirectories to
/usr/share/fonts. If you have such files elsewhere or you want it to
use a specific font (rather than one it chooses among the found ones),
you can set the environment variable GNUGO_FONT to point to it.

3. Make view.pike executable (chmod a+x). I missed to do that before
adding it to CVS and I don't know whether this can be fixed now.

4. To run it you need to be in the regression directory and do
"./view.pike strategy:44" to view test case strategy:44. If you want
to view a position in an sgf file which is not a testcase, do e.g.
"./view.pike games/strategy11.sgf:79".

Once started you should get three windows. One with the graphical
board, one control panel, and one where various information is
written. Play around with the buttons in the control panel and click
on the board to see what information is available. I hope most of it
(but probably not everything) should be self-explaining for anyone who
is sufficiently familiar with the GNU Go internals to do
debugging/tuning by other means.

/Gunnar