Cute Chess 0.9.0 (GUI) released

[Guenther]

either I'm missing something or in Windows distribution options for running an engine are greyed-out and inactive (in "new game" tab)

They get active, if at least one engine is already installed.

[ilari]

Thank you very much for the new version. Several things in the program would have improved.

1. Added bookmark TB Hits. It would be good to know that the work tablebase Nalimov,Gaviota, Syzygy

Oh, now I know what you mean, maybe. There's a huge language barrier between us so I thought you meant something different. There's an issue about improving realtime engine statistics (including tablebase hits): https://github.com/cutechess/cutechess/issues/74

2. Change the game save. For example, the moves next to each other 1. d4 e6 2. c4 f5 3. g3 Nf6 4. Bg2 Be7 5. Nc3 d5 6. Nf3 c6 7. O-O O-O 8. b3 Qe8 9. Bb2 Nbd7 10. e3 b6 11. Ne2 Ne4 . But also allow to enable or disable rating and time movement in the game.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

3. Do not numbered chess engines in options Engine debug.

The numbering of engines in debug is actually very helpful especially in cutechess-cli with concurrency > 1. There needs to be a really convincing argument to remove that feature.

4.The last option I will not write because she had NEVER in the program is not created.

Again, I don't understand.

[ilari]

Little glitch/bug when playing as Human:

E.g. one needs to drop the K at h1 instead of g1 for short castling, which is unusual. (Needed some time to figure it out despite the move hint)
Haven't tested yet how it does it for long castling and if the bug is mirrored for the other color.

It's not a bug, it's the intended behavior because random variants like Chess960 have positions where moving to the target square is ambiguous, ie. the king has two different moves to the same square. But I agree that this is a bit confusing, and there's an issue about it: https://github.com/cutechess/cutechess/issues/97

Congrats for the first release!

Thanks!

A note:
The engines.json file saves so much info now, that it seems impossible to create just a macro/script for a mass import from other GUIs e.g. Winboard.
(I hate to create several 1000s of entries manually)

Related to this: It seems there exists no default GUI settings (yet?) dialogue for setting hash/threads generally and all must be set in the specific engines settings?

Even though Cute Chess saves a lot of stuff in engines.json, you can install and engine just by adding command, name and protocol, preferably also working directory.

Yes, hash/threads must be set for each engine individually at the moment. Setting hash size for all could be done quite easily, but unfortunately there's no standard UCI option for settings the number of threads. We'll implement this at some point.

[ilari]

It seems there is no dialogue to open saved PGN files with Cute Chess.
Is this intended?

It would be also nice to have an autosave dialogue for games played
outside the tournament dialogue.

Guenther

I wouldn't say that it's intended. It's just not implemented yet. But there is the Game Database dialog which can be used for managing and viewing PGN collections, and also for creating Polyglot books.

The autosave feature is a nice idea.

[Guenther]

It seems there is no dialogue to open saved PGN files with Cute Chess.
Is this intended?

It would be also nice to have an autosave dialogue for games played
outside the tournament dialogue.

Guenther

I wouldn't say that it's intended. It's just not implemented yet. But there is the Game Database dialog which can be used for managing and viewing PGN collections, and also for creating Polyglot books.

The autosave feature is a nice idea.

Thanks for the quick replies!
I have a question for the meaning of 'Game Wall'?
This term is quite unfamiliar for me.

[Guenther]

Even though Cute Chess saves a lot of stuff in engines.json, you can install and engine just by adding command, name and protocol, preferably also working directory.

Ok that helps a lot for mass duplication of entries via a macro/script.

A question related:

The initstrings needed for some programs how should they be written?
e.g.

Code: Select all

/xreuse /firstProtocolVersion 1

Do I need the preceding slash or some other sign or just the plain txt?

[gbtami]

either I'm missing something or in Windows distribution options for running an engine are greyed-out and inactive (in "new game" tab)

They get active, if at least one engine is already installed.

Telling the truth it can be confusing to a really novice/first_time user who is not familiar the concepts of chess engine vs chess GUI. I remember the old time when I first started xboard on my first Linux install and waited it to respond to my first move
This is the main reason PyChess has its own engine integrated with GUI.

[ilari]

Thanks for the quick replies!
I have a question for the meaning of 'Game Wall'?
This term is quite unfamiliar for me.

I couldn't come up with a better name. Game Wall shows all active games in a single layout. So if you have concurrency bigger than 1 you can watch multiple games at the same time.

[ilari]

The initstrings needed for some programs how should they be written?
e.g.

Code: Select all

/xreuse /firstProtocolVersion 1

Do I need the preceding slash or some other sign or just the plain txt?

The strings need to be separated by line breaks ("\n"). You can try giving an engine a bunch of init strings in the engine configuration dialog and see what comes out in engines.json.

[Guenther]

Thanks for the quick replies!
I have a question for the meaning of 'Game Wall'?
This term is quite unfamiliar for me.

I couldn't come up with a better name. Game Wall shows all active games in a single layout. So if you have concurrency bigger than 1 you can watch multiple games at the same time.

'Active boards' then sounds better to me, but I am no native English speaker.
OTH this option surely already exists somewhere and may be we should adopt that name ;-)