Scidb release 1431

[gcramer]

New test version r1431 of chess database application Scidb has been released, see http://scidb.sourceforge.net/index.html. For now only the source code package is available, packages for specific distributions may be released later.

[royb]

New test version r1431 of chess database application Scidb has been released, see http://scidb.sourceforge.net/index.html. For now only the source code package is available, packages for specific distributions may be released later.

It is great to see development moving forward with SCID! This looks *very* promising.

Some things that I noticed when using it for the first time:

1. Need to be able to name the engines so that not all SF dev builds show as "Stockfish" on the left most column of "Select engine" when you go to load an engine. I use at least a dozen different dev builds of SF. I want to be able to see which version I'm going to load without having to click on each one to see more details. Stockfish and Stockfish (2) doesn't help - I'd rather see something I can type into those fields to identify the engine, such as "SF-8" and SF-170819-1cpu and SF-170819-2cpu and SF-7, etc.

2. Need to support UCI Multi-PV with more choices than 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 lines displayed. I use MPV=3 *very* often when analyzing games, for example.

3. SF UCI settings - not all UCI parameters are shown when trying to set UCI options as part of the 'profile' for the engine.

4. When I try to load a SCID .si4 database, I get "cannot decode UTF-8" error message. I've no idea how to fix that. It turns out that the database still loads but it is annoying to get the error every time.

5. Loading .pgn files takes over a minute for a file with 159000 games in it. On SCID 4.6.4, that takes 7 seconds on my system.

Thanks for your efforts!

[gcramer]

1. Need to be able to name the engines so that not all SF dev builds show as "Stockfish" on the left most column

Yes, I understand.

2. Need to support UCI Multi-PV with more choices than 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 lines displayed. I use MPV=3 *very* often when analyzing games, for example.

I must confess that I did not expect the usage of an odd number of lines. But of course. no problem to provide a full choice.

4. When I try to load a SCID .si4 database, I get "cannot decode UTF-8" error message. I've no idea how to fix that. It turns out that the database still loads but it is annoying to get the error every time.

Here the help pages are not yet existing. You have to reload with a different encoding, open the context-sensitive of the database, and select "Recode...". In most cases the choice "iso8859-1" may help, but not in any case, Scid databases may contain different encodings, even Scid cannot handle this properly. The selected encoding will be remembered when open again, as long as the database is in history.

5. Loading .pgn files takes over a minute for a file with 159000 games in it. On SCID 4.6.4, that takes 7 seconds on my system.

Please consider that this is still a test version, with full debug code, and many expensive assertions, later the optimized alpha version will be much faster.