Will picochess ever connect to Lichess and/or chess-com?

[Andrea Gatti]

Hi everyone,

as the title says. I've recently read that the programmers' staff has now re-gained another member, which cannot be more than appreciated, I'm sure, by the entire community.

To those people, those involved into keeping Picochess alive, and to those spending hours testing and debugging, goes our fondest gratitute.

I've seen that many of the recent changes and improvements have been around PGN parsers, analyse mode, and more than anything, retro-gaming and emulation.

I think, this is my very humble opinion, that one of the "big" things that Picochess lacks, is the possibility to connect to those chess servers. I'm not sure wether this is actually in the works, but if the programmers were looking for "votes" on what to focus, I would definitely spend my virtual dollar on this.

Needless to say, I'm not a programmer, I don't know Python and as such I can't contribute to it, otherwise I would have already started doing so :-(

Long life to Picochess!

AG

[Scally]

Hi Andrea,

When Dirk introduced Picochess v3 he included a FICS Online server which still works today as I just tried it. The problem is that the time taken to move a physical piece on the board and then your opponents piece eats in to the available time, giving us a big disadvantage. Dirk introduced a an ‘OnlineDecrement’ parameter but that meant we were losing that time for every move, typically 6/10ths of a second per move is required. I just tried a value of 2.3 (2.3 10ths) and lost a Fischer 5,3 game with 40 seconds still showing on my DGT Pi, as clock times are not synchronised with the server.

We also tried a Lichess server link which worked at the time, but this was never released as even more time was lost per move. Even though I still have this an an option on my system it no longer works, something has changed and it needs a total rewrite. The initial selection and online logon works, but no opponent is ever found.

I know this isn’t easy as the Mephisto Phoenix team are also having problems implementing Lichess.

Cheers,

Al.

[Andrea Gatti]

Hi Scally, thank-you for your thoughtful answer. Too bad these connections to the servers alway need rework. I know that a number of months ago, Lichess changed something that has to do with the connection API, which resulted in several Apps broken, which needed then to be corrected.