Hard to explain clearly, but hope you guys get it
When you go to move times, lets say it's like
30mins + 5 seconds time control
1.e4 (20sec) e5 (7sec) 2.Nf3 (30sec) Nc6 (15sec)
A clock will display what the time is like in the real game
E.G
No move yet - 30:00 , 30:00
e4 -None (since lichess does not use clock time for both sides at move 1)
e5- None (same reason as above)
Nf3- 29:30 , 30:00
Nc6- 29:35 , 29:45
(Increment is added at next move)
Also, have the same clock for "Auto play realtime" (the clock goes like the real game, pretty self-explanatory etc)
I don't know how hard a clock is to code, but it would help alot if this was possible
Hope something like this gets added soon.
I completely agree. I also think this should be done when looking back at the game while you're playing
It probably won't work, because the movetimes are approximate (to save space) and so the clocks would be inaccurate, so they could even show that one side has timed out when that is not the case, causing all sorts of chaos.
Would be nice though...
What you described is available on other sites, e.g.
playchess.comThere you can replay a game and see clock time on each move.
So, I think it is possible to implement it here, on
lichess.org too.
It is very useful feature. It helps to better understand the exact game process while observing finished games, especially bullet.
I don't think the inaccurate clock thing will happen cause i don't think the approximations are that bad.
You could just add negative timers to prevent any chaos (and it will help to know how inaccurate the move times are)
If other sites have done it lichess should too :D
Even if it won't be coming soon, i think it should at least be one of the top priority features.
Lack of clocks is a huge missing feature in a chess site that, in many respects, outshines every other site on the Internet.
Just record the timestamped time when a move is received; you don't have to record move-times, just snapshot every clock time. Storage is cheap in 2015.
Yeah it's a cool idea, specially if you want to know if you were in time pressure when you made a certain move. You can do the math looking at the graph, but it takes quite a while.
I've suggested this before but recall the answer was it requires to much space. I think it's a good feature though.
Using an average chess game length of 55 moves, I get about 88GB required storage (16 bytes for two timestamps, per move number) for a hundred million games and with an average chess game length of 40 moves, this reduces to 64GB.
A refurbished 2TB drive costs just $54 in 2015 ;) That would fit about 3 billion games played, on one drive. Each dollar of hard drive storage corresponds to millions of games.
Clearly there is additional overhead if using storage in an actual database. So I'd suggest a flat file if possible, which is open to being corrupted, with a fairly minimal data layout scheme. There would be a corresponding utility to count up the games in a given storage file.
Perhaps what an actual database could store, is how to get to the timestamps: using a file offset (in bytes), and file number to the start of the time data for the game. Each game has a set of timestamps that are encoded until a new game identifier is found (this could be all zeroes for the pair of timestamps), or end of file is found.
So looking up data shouldn't be a problem, but for appending data to a flat file you could have a write operation of all timestamps upon game completion. Some additional details: perhaps there could even be a write queue, so the timestamps are published to the queue and then read to be written to disk.