The biggest news first: the OpenTafl Engine Protocol is officially version 1.0. Future changes to the protocol will be backward-compatible, and will contain some way of alerting OpenTafl that you support a version greater than 1.0, but that’s not in the near term. The OpenTafl Notation Spec has changed in a few minor rules-string-related areas, particularly king strength; make sure you update your engines based on that. The Notation Spec is also finalized: changes will be backward-compatible for the foreseeable future.

With engine mode all set up, I spent some time hammering out bugs in the OpenTafl AI, and its external engine client functionality. The 2.4.x series has been almost entirely bugfixes since my last tafl post, so I have very little news on the recent-developments front. As always, you can read about the little changes in the latest README file, available as part of the OpenTafl download.

As I said in the last post, I’m taking a break to work on my schedule generator for Out of the Park Baseball, which should take me a week or two of coding time; after that, I hope to get the Lanterna-based UI working in a raw terminal context, so that it doesn’t depend on a system with a GUI. (The default will probably remain Lanterna’s Swing-based terminal emulator, but having a headless version will make running the tournament easier.)

Once I’ve finished that, it’s on to networking! Though it’ll be a huge pain, I’m looking forward to wrapping up that feature.