[bug #27772] Board and holdings out of sync

[Ben Asselstine-2]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27772>

                 Summary: Board and holdings out of sync
                 Project: XBoard
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Wed 21 Oct 2009 08:17:48 PM UTC
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

XBoard in ICS mode (FICS):
Observe a crazyhouse game and pause the game for a while. The board position
freezes, but the holdings still are updated when moves are made. When the game
is over, step through the game. Capture moves on the board and holding updates
are out of sync.
Even without pausing this happens sometimes.




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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Update of bug #27772 (project xboard):

                  Status:                    None => Ready For Test        

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Follow-up Comment #1:

uploaded patch by HGM in git, please test.

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #27772 (project xboard):

It has improved, but sometimes it's still off 1 move. Stepping through
afterwards shows a piece appear in the holding that is captured one move
later.


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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #27772 (project xboard):

I don't know, if this effect is somehow connected:
I have "Move sound" off and "set bell 1" on FICS. Capture moves while
observing crazyhouse often don't produce the beep.
All other move types (and all moves in the other variants) produce the beep.

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #27772 (project xboard):

It seems FICS sends holdings both before and after the board. Those before
the board were then overwriting the holdings of the previous board, of course.
I now tried to fix this by hiding a flag in each board that remembers if the
holdings were already set from the ICS, and then suppress any duplicate
holdings that really belong to the next board that is yet to come. (We do not
know the move number of this board before it really arrives; thre is no move
number in a holdings line... :-( )This seems to work.

In bughouse I still allow overwrite, as I suppose multiple holdings updates
can be made there between boards. I have not tested this.

(Not in git yet.)

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Remark: Looks like the holdings sent before a capture always have that
format:

<b1> game 174 white [PPR] black [NNB] <- WR

And afterward the board was sent that:

<b1> game 174 white [PPR] black [NNB]

That might be useful to differentiate the two, without using additional
flags.


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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Ah, good observation. I guess this tells us how they implemented it on the
server; when a piece is captured they first send a holdings update to the game
that receives it, and after it print the board to the game making the capture,
both in bughouse and crazyhouse. Except that in crazyhouse this is the same
game.

They should have sent the holdings update after sending the board, or
suppress it altogether in crazyhouse.

As it now seems to work with the flag, I will keep it that way for now, and
just keep in mind that there is a better solution for when we are going to do
some code refactoring.

There still will be a problem for the part of the game you have not been
observing. The holdings will be empty for that part, as move lists do not
contain holding updates. In crazyhouse the updates are implied by the moves,
of course. So in principle I could alter the flow of information during ICS
play, and derive holdings (and castling rights in FRC, and info on which
pieces are really promoted Pawns) from the previous position (if known) and
move, rather than from the board sent by the ICS. But that would still not
work in bughouse, so I am not going to bother with that now, and leave it for
a later version.

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #27772 (project xboard):

The synchronization seems to work with xboard-4.4.1.20091022.
The servers bell code still gets lost in crazyhouse capture moves.

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #8, bug #27772 (project xboard):

I guess the problems are indeed related: WinBoard only sounds bells that are
printed to the console. Normally the bells are appended to the prompt, or on
an empty line. But I guess when something is captured in crazyhouse, FICS
sends the holdings update before the board, and the bell gets appended to
that. (Not sure; there are virtually no crazyhouse games played on FICS at the
times I can do testing.) Now the holdings update line is not printed to the
console, so the bell gets suppressed.

Should we also sound bells that are not printed to the console?

If you want to hear a sound on every move, the moveSound is meant for that.

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #9, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Sure it can be worked around, but it's normally a good thing to have a closer
look to strange behaviour. There could be more serious things behind it.

As I see the bell is always sent on a seperate new line just before the
board:

^Mfics%
^M<b1> game 260 white [BBRQ] black [PN] <- WB
^Mfics% ^G
^M<12> ---rr--- -pp---pk p-n--pp- ---pb--N ---P---- --P---P- PP---PPP
RNB-Q-K- B -1 0 0 0 0 0 260 Horkko tiberiansun 0 1 0 51 27 21 11 26 N/f4-h5
(0:01) Nxh5 0 1 183

Seems the holding string before a capture kills the next line. Good thing
FICS even sends "^Mfics%" with "bell 0", otherwise the <12> line might have
been removed.

So it should be safe to keep that (at least with FICS).

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #10, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Ok, forget about the bell. I saw in the source, that the next prompt after
holding gets intentionally suppressed. So there might be a good reason for
this. Wouldn't be worth breaking something. So this item can be closed.



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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #11, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Strange! For me the Bell got prefixed to the prompt following the holdings:

<ICS:  12 15<b1> game 238 white [P] black [N] <- WP 12 15 07fics%  12 15<12>
rn--kb-r ...

I put in a patch that looks at the matched part when recognizing the prompts
after holdings with looking_at(buf, &i, "*% "), to see if it contained a bell
character, and if so, sound it. (Already a nuisance, as there was no call
available to sound the bell from the backend. Which means that adding the call
likely breaks XBoard.) This works for me. But it would not work if the bell
appeared after the %, as you show.

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #12, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Note that the 12 15 and 07 actually stand for lf, cr and bell; the software
of this board seems to replace the backslash+0 by a space.

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #13, bug #27772 (project xboard):

I used "telnet freechess.org|tee log.txt" to capture the strings (manually
setting style 12). I don't know, if that's a proper way.
The whole beep-thing was more to make sure, that a character isn't
overwritten by accident, so that "bell 0" would be safe too. I prefer "bell
1", because that's the perfect lag indicator, when making a move.




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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Well, it seems that for me, the bell character is almost always prefixed to
the prompt. I captured it from the winboard.debug file, but that should not
really matter. It might be that there is a kind of race condition in the
server, where two message of different rigin are sent to the same user, and
get interleaved in an unpredictable way.

But I guess it does not really matter. The code suppresses the prompt after
board and holdings (together with board or holdings itself), and then switches
on the displaying in the console. So if the bell arrives after the '%' of the
prompt it should be sounded. Only when it would arrive before the '%' it would
be considered part of the prompt, and be suppressed (and then also not
sounded). So the patch I have now,

                    /* Suppress following prompt */
                    if (looking_at(buf, &i, "*% ")) {
                        if(strchr(star_match[0], 7)) Bell(); // FICS fuses bell for next board
with prompt in zh captures
                        savingComment = FALSE;
                    }

should solve the only case that would lose the bell, and thus solve the
problem. I have been watching quite a number of crazyhouse games now, and I
neer noticed the bell not sounding.

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #15, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Bell() -> RingBell()

Works now.



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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #16, bug #27772 (project xboard):

Yeah, that was the nasty part. RingBell() strangely enough is the move sound
in WinBoard, and there is no way to call the sound produced by the bell
charactr from the back-end. Only the front-end routine that sends text to the
console produces it, by calling the low-leve sound driver directly.

So I had to add Bell() to make a consistent sound in WinBoard. I have not
tried to make it work in XBoard yet; obviously I would have to add a Bell()
routine there too, but what exactly it should do...?

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #17, bug #27772 (project xboard):

I guess I found a front-end-independent fix:

In stead of RingBell() or my new routine Bell(), simply call:

SendToPlayer(" 07", 1);

This sends a bell to the console, which both in WinBoard and XBoard produces
the required sound! :-D

H.G. Muller

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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #18, bug #27772 (project xboard):

That prompt suppressing reminds me of all those "fics%" lines filling up the
xterm-console while playing (each opponent's move adds one). Might be further
filter candidates.


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[Ben Asselstine-2]

Follow-up Comment #19, bug #27772 (project xboard):

I think those are exactly the prompts that are filtered here. Strange that
this does not work for XBoard: the filtering takes place in the back-end. In
WinBoard you don't get such prompts, and the console stays nicely empty.

H.G. Muller

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