Bugteaser

As I said before, one of three most wanted features for Tonic is Bughouse and Crazyhouse variants support. The good news is that now I can examine and play Bughouse/Crazyhouse games in Tonic, bad news - to drop pieces I have to still use console. The side effect of implementing Bug/Crazyhouse is one more feature for Tonic - it now recognizes what is the variant of examined game. I implemented it mainly because I wanted to easily test Bughouse support in Tonic ;), but I think many of user will find it useful to be able to examined diffrent sort of games with Tonic - earlier it was possible to examine through any game, even those that Tonic didn't support - this way I could see what was send from server when playing Bughouse games :). I'll wait with release untill I create ui for dropping pieces. I will commit changes to cvs asap. So, here is the teaser for now.



I got employed finally so I will now have less time for Tonic, but again I code a bit faster so you may even not notice a slowdown in development.

New bridge on a way to real Tonic

I hope you all welcome this new bridge. I know I've said it already, but this time I'm pretty sure Channels Manager works as expected. And not only that. Now you can:

1.Remove channels by closing corresponding tabs.




If you aren't in a need to practice mouse sharpshooting (for some close icon might be a problem - it is in a small area and thus likely to be incidentally clicked) you can:
2.Set off closeable tabs for Channels Manager and also in the same dialog 3.Set Channels Manager to display timestamp at every tell.




4.You can still close tabs with popup menu (under mouse right button).




5.And the other option is to use this dialog. Just remember to put '-' in front of number of channels you want to remove. Type all numbers of channels you want add/remove and hit enter.




6. Channels Manager is not the only one part of Tonic that got mine attention. You can set initial size for new consoles in Main Console preferences panel. Note that if you've created a new console window it will hold values when it was last shown. This preferences is only for enteirly new consoles - like the ones you create when first chatting with user.




7. And one last little thing. Main Console window will now remember in which state you left new console panel. So you won't have to hide it every time you start Tonic (mine problem ;)).




8. You can open new console for chatting from console popup menu. Just point your mouse over user's name and choose 'Talk with'.

I also managed to logon with Tonic to ICC. It wasn't possible with previous bridge releases. If you want to try it too you will have copy icc directories from Jin resource/pieceset and resource/boardset to corresponding Tonic directories. I didn't do it for release packages since I don't support ICC (for now).

NOTE: This release needs Java 1.5.0 to run.

The source code is there

From now on Tonic is really open source software (and free as in libre as well) - I managed (I had some problems last time I tried) to import source to cvs sourceforge repository. It is a bridge2 release source with few little modifications. You can read how to get it from cvs here. If you are impatient paste'n'enter in console:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tonic-chess.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tonic-chess login

When prompted for password just hit enter. And then:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tonic-chess.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tonic-chess co -P tonic

You should see a list of files downloaded from cvs repository. If you are a non-console user (i.e. Windows or Mac user) I recommend visiting this site. I myself use Linux for development. And Netbeans sometimes as you could figure out from examining the contents of tonic directory. So, enjoy the opensourceness of Tonic!

I uploaded new screenshot to Tonic project site. It is Tonic in Aero GTK engine tuxedo. Quite a peculiar engine imo, but you can use other GTK engines if you run Tonic in Java 6 aka Mustang (you know you can get it from here, don't you?) I test Tonic with Mustang and I've problems with tray icon. After some searching I've realized why Tonic crashed under Java 6 - the problem was tray.jar plugin and its dependencies - tray.so or tray.dll, so if you want to run Tonic on Java 6 move them away from theirs directory. I've written a class for tray icon using new desktop API from Mustang, but it doesn't work as expected in KDE (tray icon is invisible) ; GNOME is better, but I have to work on the popup menu. Well, what could I say? Mustang is in beta stage, but it has some goodies to wait for (early splashscreen, access to tab component, ...).

Being lazy?

Have you noticed that you can stay in touch with Tonic related stuff using news aggregator? Here is the list for project's news and for this site you have Site feed entry in Links section.

For the next release I plan to fix the bug in Channels Manager I wrote about in last post. I also would like to add a popup menu for tabs. I've noticed that there is some problem with readability in Sought Graph. When Sought Graph's window is small time control types are too small to be read. Well, these are all small changes, but I plan to add something bigger. Maybe not in the next release, but... I think about bughouse/crazyhouse support. I've been looking at the code and tinkering how to do it and I have some ideas. I hope to test them next week. If you have any feature request or bug submission do not hesitate to use sourceforge Tonic's project site sections.

Workaround for Channels Manager's bug

So you don't see all the channels from your list in Channels Manager's tabs? If you want your tabs now just set width 119 and restart Tonic. If tabs aren't still there you can set width to bigger number. I plan to fix this issue in next release so you won't have to set width to some nonstandard values. If you found any bugs or thought about some feature that might be useful please use sourceforge.net site's sections (Bugs, RFE, Forums).