I released a new version of Scid at http://scid.sourceforge.net/. For an idea of what Scid can do, see the screenshots section, which has been updated.
The changelog follows (a bit long and unordered) but main changes are :
- - fixed all known bugs (even those many years old)
- added a Mask to Trees so they can be commented with symbols, text, etc (useful for building an opening repertoire)
- compatible with Rybka 3 (workaround for a bug in command parser of this engine)
- when annotating a game, tactical shots are marked with an estimated difficulty
- Opening trainer :
* automatic switch to clipbase
* trainer window made easier to understand
- Removed Crafty engine, as tacgame.tcl does not need it any longer. So the two mandatory engines for Scid's features are Toga and Phalanx. Note that any Toga version should work, but only the patched version of Phalanx works.
- Correspondence Chess:
* do not drop a comment from the move list if one is sent via message.
* Add a visual indicator to the game list if a comment was sent by the opponent.
* Sort the game list by Site, Event, Round, Result, White, Black
* Add highlighting in game list
* Add tooltips for buttons
* Add tooltip with last message sent with the game (if any)
* Add tooltips for columns likely to be shortened (id, event, site)
* Add Tooltip translations for english and german
* Add basic game info for Resign/Draw (assign/offer/accept)
* Add Scrollbar for gamelist
* Add extensive icons/indicators help
* Add icon/indicators help button
* Add binding for ? to access icons/statusindicators help
* Save and Restore Xfcc game parameters (who has the move, messages etc.)
* Add visual indicator if Xfcc parameters were recently retrieved
or are restored from previous fetches
* Show time of last Xfcc update from server
* Update help files
* Mark games with moves sent recently in green till the next update
* Disable invalid menue entries in eMail chess (Draw/Resign handling)
* remove Next/Prev buttons, they're no longer usefull
- Added "sc_game push copyfast" call that behaves like "sc_game push copy" except there is no memory leak and tags and comments are not copied in the new pushed game.
- Minor bug fixes :
* tactical game against Phalanx (some info was missing)
* replacing a game with flags : all flags were not copied (for example tactical flag)
* error recovery code if the network drops when playing on FICS
* when deleting the last move of a variation by right clicking on board, the empty variation is removed
* fixed pgnscid so importing a game over 32 kB does not lead to a segfault (but will output : Fatal error encoding game!)
* GAME EDITOR : with comment editor opened, browsing a game would flagged it as "to be saved", even if there was no change in NAGS and comment values
* fixed tooltip display bug on MacOs (thanks to Israel Chauca)
* when info is available, the first line of engine window displays mate distance
* in case of engines not configured for some training stuff, added relevant error messages
* fixes on Tooltips display (max width, better placement, auto hide of the tooltip after few seconds, clicking on a tooltip hides it)
* it is no longer possible to add NAG codes before the first move of a game or of a variation
* when truncating a game, it is flagged as altered so the user will be prompted to save it
* PGN window with short header ON. If strip first moves -> the game was displayed incorrectly as empty
* The middle mouse button pops up a mini board in PGN window. The position was wrong when the game contains comments : fixed by stripping comments before calling "sc_pos pgnBoard" (a small bug that was many years old !)
* After adding variations calculated by an engine, the engine used to restart calculating from scratch
- Annotation : added an option "mark tactical exercises". The tactical flag will be set to the game and a comment with ****d<depth>sc<score>. This option is only available when annotating with an UCI engine.
- Training : find best move. Will go to the next tactical position marked with 4 stars (****). See "mark tactical exercises" in Annotation feature. Pressing the right mouse button on "goto last move" (">>") button will go to next tactical exercises. A training base of over 1500 games has been released (not included in Scid package).
- added extra options to "sc_pos analyze" :
* -mindepth. So if the thinking time is short, engine will not analyze for at least depth 4 (previous behavior), but to mindepth value.
* -searchdepth : maximum depth of thinking
- Analysis Window new features:
* new button "Show Engine Info" to add an extra line with the info returned by the engine (there is a button to hide/show it, works only with uci engines)
* new "Add all variations" button to add to the current game all the multiPV variations of the engine (works only for uci engines)
* now the "Add variation(s)" buttons work even at the end of a game (workaround, the variations are added one move before and the last game move is appended at the beginning of every variation)
* when a variation is added from analysis window, also the engine name is added
* the analysis window switches automatically to history mode when multipv = 1 (like in the 3.6.23 version)
* added the max move number indicator to the current move number (works badly with some engines that don't send the "info currmovenumber" string back to gui regularly, we have to wait some time to see the right value)
* new "Lock Engine" button (the engine keeps analysing the current position even if the user changes the position on the board)
* reordered the buttons on the right side of the window
* F4 and F5 starts/stops analysis of engines 1 and 2, respectively.
- The uci option window is now more large when it opens, in order to contain all the option of an engine.
- Completed translations of every pending label in italian language file.
- Fixed the help messages for some tools menus, probably wrong due to a new menu item added in 3.6.24 version (changed the code so that now it's not needed to change all menu indexes for help messages whenever a new menu is added).
- Finder : added a contextual menu (right mouse button to copy, move, delete and backup bases).
- updated swedish translation (thanks to Hans Eriksson)
- Added the scanning of filter files (.sso) from the command line (i.e. scid mydb myfilter, scid opens immediatly with mydb filtered by myfilter file)
- Tuned the startup communication between scid and engines
- Rybka 3 supported despite a small bug in its command line parser
- Scid-engine log files: maxsize to 5000 lines (was 500) and flush on every put (to aid problem detection when an engine crashes)
- Training - Serious game :
* UCI options of engines are now sent, so if an engine has for example an UCI_Elo present and set up, playing a serious game will be done in fact with a weakened engine (then similar to Tactical game that is designed solely for Phalanx usage).
* added a "Configure engine" button to tweak an engine before playing (style, strength for example)
- UCI engine configuration : spinbox entries are now user writable (a check is done to ensure input is correct) and UCI checkbox is ON by default when creating a new engine entry
- UCI engine output :
* display mate indicator in multi variations (M5 instead of +327.00) (thanks to Benigno Hernández)
* added move numbers in multi variation lines
- Tree window : added the ability to view a tree through a mask (or layer) that contains user defined data (NAG codes, color markers, comments)
* visible only if a Mask file (*.msk) is opened
* the mask can be automatically with a game (as much data as possible will be imported, like variations, NAG codes, comments)
- Tree window : scores are highlighted when the moves have good or bad results
* On average white should score 53.8%
Parameter : set scoreHighlight_WhiteExpectedScoreBonus 3.8 ; # on average white achieves a score of 53.8
* Check only if at least 15 games played
Parameter set scoreHighlight_MinGames 15
* Highlight score if score is -3 % (red) or +3% (green) from expected score
Parameter set scoreHighlight_Margin 3.0 ; # if +/- this value, something special happened
- updated spanish translation (thanks to Benigno Hernández)
- [inhibited] support for online endgame tablebases (up to 6 men tablebases) for Scid PC and Scid Pocket : sites like http://k4it.de and Schredder does not allow queries on their site from other chess applications (even if there is no particular mechanism preventing this). So the code is commented out until a free site offering this service is found.
- MacOS : support for drag and drop of files (thanks to Israel Chauca)
- New menu entry in Maintenance menu to repair corrupted bases (equivalent to "scidt -N" in command line)
Pascal Georges
