Banksia GUI released

[Modern Times]

The way cutechess gui do it. "Syzygy tablebase path" -> Tablebase adjudication. Once the tablebase location has been added, the checkbox for tablebase adjudication become available.

Syzygy path for engines need to be added manually. This can be argued to be little inconvenient at times but it works.

Yes I have no problem with the cutechess method. It is a simple matter to put the path into the UCI parameters when you create a new engine. (or separate engine ini file where there is one)

[Nordlandia]

The way cutechess gui do it. "Syzygy tablebase path" -> Tablebase adjudication. Once the tablebase location has been added, the checkbox for tablebase adjudication become available.

Syzygy path for engines need to be added manually. This can be argued to be little inconvenient at times but it works.

Yes I have no problem with the cutechess method. It is a simple matter to put the path into the UCI parameters when you create a new engine. (or separate engine ini file where there is one)

I definitely agree. This is a serious issue because the HDD drive where i have 7-pieces stored trumps the SSD engine syzygy path. It results in crashing the program because of the slowness of HDD drives.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.31 beta released

- Fixed bugs: some small bugs
- Some small improvements/adjustments
- New features: 

• Setup logos, countries for engines, human in general

• Copy UCI position (users could paste that command already)

• Can display two WDL charts (for two sides)

• New themes

• Show WDL, moves left with PV table (before showing in top place only)

• Analyze on ply with multi-engines

Notes:
- BSG may look messy/ugly since it changed materials, just select a theme for a fix quick
- The Analyzing function is totally redesigned (for much better capabilities). Please help us to test it thoroughly

[AdminX]

Thnaks, I love that you added the Logo Section.

[AdminX]

Problem with new Themes. White squares should me on the right. They are transposed in the current setup.

So, White Cell: Light and Black Cell: Dark

[phhnguyen]

Problem with new Themes. White squares should me on the right. They are transposed in the current setup.

So, White Cell: Light and Black Cell: Dark

Ooops
Thanks for the bug report!

[AdminX]

Hello,

Today I experienced a weird bug when using "Local Network". I was trying to setup a game between Allie+Stein v0.7 vs Eman 5.70. For some reason every time I tried to start the game from my laptop, the Allie engine would not start on my desktop. I was able to start the game from my desktop and all worked as it should on my laptop, just not the other way around. This may be a engine related problem, but I wanted to inform you anyway.

[phhnguyen]

Hello,

Today I experienced a weird bug when using "Local Network". I was trying to setup a game between Allie+Stein v0.7 vs Eman 5.70. For some reason every time I tried to start the game from my laptop, the Allie engine would not start on my desktop. I was able to start the game from my desktop and all worked as it should on my laptop, just not the other way around. This may be a engine related problem, but I wanted to inform you anyway.

Thanks a lot for the report. I have found a bug preventing a game of two remote engines playing (but for the pair of one local, one remote is still OK). Fixed for the next release.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.32 beta released

Version 0.32 beta released

* Fixed bugs: some small bugs
* Some small improvements/adjustments
* New features: 
- Armageddon timer: set two different timers for two sides, draw counted as a win for Black
- Create opening books based on engine searching



Armageddon timer

[phhnguyen]

Create opening books by engines

I have known that we can use engines to calculate to create opening books. I have also known about some major disadvantages in this way. Recently I was inspired by some discussions on how good (and bad) some engines when playing openings. I decided to create this tool as a new feature of BanksiaGUI thus we all can try.

At the moment this feature is limited to build opening books for chess variant and Polyglot format only. It will use an engine to evaluate nodes of the opening tree to rank, expand, or trim off them.

There are two methods to build tree and expand branches:

1. Evaluate nodes from the root, wide first, keep and expand only nodes if their scores are from the threshold. If we set the threshold high enought to trim harder, the tree could be deeper

2. Create a full tree to the given depth (it is actually a Perft tree), evaluate all leaves nodes then calculate all internal nodes (via min-max algorithm) and trim off all nodes under the threshold score. Look like this method give better quality (than the first one) for the same depth. However, because of trimming after calculating, it has to calculate too many when the number of nodes grows exponentially by the depth, thus it is suitable only for creating small/shallow trees as well as small books,

This feature is the first implemented and there is still huge room for improvement. Please try and give me your feedback.