Bughouse game review interface ideas

The bughouse game review interface is currently extremely primitive.  You can't see pieces in hand (which is also a serious problem in crazyhouse), and there's no convenient way to see the two games side by side and watch how they develop together.

Here's an example of an interface that does a very good job of handling both issues: http://www.bughouse-db.org/cgi-bin/searchbug.cgi?gID=3479621

Note that you have three options for stepping through the game:
1. Step through the moves on the left board.  The right board will update to stay in sync with it.
2. Step through the moves on the right board.  The left board will update to stay in sync with it.
3. The middle option: step forward to whichever move was played next, regardless of which board it was played on.

This makes it easy to step through and watch how pieces taken on one board are made available to the other board.  You can see if one player sits to wait for events on the other board.  You can see if one player sacs their queen to get the knight their partner wants.  And so on.  Moves that make no sense if you only see one board make much more sense if watching the two together.  A pause on one board that might be totally overlooked (or mistaken for a pause for thought) is explained as sitting to wait for developments on the other board.  And so on.

What that interface fails to do, though, is display the move list on each board.  It would be nice to keep that.

What we ideally want is:
1. Both boards on a single display
2. The ability to step through them together or individually, but with the two boards staying in sync either way
3. All four clocks displayed
4. All pieces in hand displayed
5. The move list for both boards.

Really, these are all necessary to be able to accurately say chess.com has full bughouse support (other issues, such as better communication and live tournaments, might be essential too, but are discussed elsewhere).  Right now, it feels more like a standard chess site that has some limited bughouse support.  With some work, though, this could become a first-class bughouse site.

Anything else I overlooked?

That would be really good if it could be implemented.  Maybe also an option to play through game in real time.

That shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you download a PGN of a live chess game, it has the clock time next to each move for each player. The data is there to do this if we can get the interface first (baby steps).

But I also think @MGleason covered this in-depth and at-length.

Nope. I think you pretty much nailed everything on the head.

Another first-class write-up.

In all honesty, I don't know why things like this aren't already done. Game review in Live Chess might be one thing, but, reviewing Live games in our Archives ... it's simply a matter of putting a second board on the screen, and pulling the coordinated data from the other game into it as a separate entity. It's not like you have to develop a new game board from scratch. That's to start. And that should include pieces in hand to coordinated with piece drops (which can be backed into or validated and verified from the PGN data). A next logical step would be implementing a "play" button and synchronization of the two games. (And statistics.)

"In all honesty, I don't know why things like this aren't already done."

Because it takes work.  It costs developer time and therefore money.  Until this is done, though, bughouse is not really ready for prime time.

Thanks all! We are definitely going to do this. As noted, it takes resources to do it. It's in the pipeline, but not at the top. 

Great, thanks!

Hopefully it will be ready for the bughouse championship that I've heard will be coming in February.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I know these things, too.

I love having my arse handed to me first thing in the morning.

Really, what we're dealing with is a beta system that isn't explicitly identified as beta.  So it's not entirely clear what parts of what we see are due to the design of the system and what parts are just the temporary workaround until they actually implement the long-term solution.