Re: [XBoard-devel] gtk-branch

[h.g. muller]

The gtk branch is really progressing at an enormous rate!
Most things seem to work now, good job! I toyed a bit with it,
to see what worked, and what notor only partially. I will report
my findings below, in the hope this will be helpful.

The crash on switching variant after moving is now indeed cured.

The button for Spartan Chess in the new-variant dialog has mysteriously
grown a lot larger than the buttons for the other variants.

The animation of explosions in Atomic chess are not centered on the
capture square, and the piece that captured seems to jump back to
the from square before the explosion. The latter could be a general fault
of animate moving, which still does work erratically.

The piece menu does pop up in Edit Position (with -pieceMenu true),
but none of the items in it does anything. Sweep-selection of pieces
(with -pieceMenu false) does not work at all; the first middle click
produces a white Pawn, the right click a black Elephant (?!), which
then stay unchanged when you move the mouse. It seems that the
mose-move event is not yet connected to the corresponding handler
in the back-end.

Promotion menu works perfectly; in Suicide a King button appears,
in Gothic even Archbishop and Chancellor buttons. All buttons work here.
Chosing promotion the piece from holdings, as in Superchess, also works.
Sweep promotions ('Almost always promote to Queen') donot work at all,
however. The Pawn does change into a Queen when you pickit up,
but even when you drag it directly to the promotion square the move is
refused. Dragging it backwards does not alter the Queen in aything else.
Also here thismight just be a matter of connecting the mousemove event
to the proper handler.

When 'gating in' a piece in Seirawan Chess (i.e. selecting the piece from
the holdings, and then doing a drag-drop move with a back-rank piece)
doesplacethe selectedpiece on the from-square after the move, but it does
not 'uncover' it when you move it away. So probably unstacking a multiply
captured piece in Crazyhouse would not work either (I did not try that, but
it is the same code that does it).

The EvalGraph window does not remember its position in the next session.
Also, the expose event does not seemto redraw it.

Sizing the main window does not alter the size of the elements above the
board (clocks, message and menu bar, including the fonts these use),
like WinBoard does. As a result you cannot go nearly as small as what
WinBoard can, because the menu bar will start determining the width.
Perhaps we need something like 'tinyLayout' here, shortening the menu
texts to go really small without making the font unreadable. But the clock
font should really adapt to board size.

It would be nice if width and height of the main window were locked to
each other during sizing,so you don't create white margins around the board.
Or at least let them jump back when you are done sizing, as in WinBoard.

The board texture still seems to be rendered like every square is a complete
board. I still think that making the texture scalable gives an excessively ugly
effect; we really should find something better for this.