This chapter is about the sportman's point of view.

Figure 3.1. The Overall Architecture

XiStrat server, engine and client GUI in action

The client - server framework (see Figure 3.1, “The Overall Architecture”) uses connections through TCP/IP sockets. For the moment XiStrat™ is based upon (and therefore behaves in many ways like) the forza4™ software (see [F4]). The server spawns separate daemons for each game and uses a thread per player approach. In the future perhaps a more generic internet client - server communication framework will be implemented, but for now forza4™ completely serves our purposes.

So far only the Chess and Go variants are existing, the following documentation deals only with these particular families. But of course the other variants will deliver new insight into old games as well as soon as the implementation is done.

Now first of all the following quite useful feature should be mentioned: by CTRL - pressed left mouse clicks in the (client-side) GUI you can find out about a face's id.