Previous to this release Caddell's browser component was primarily an after-thought add-on. Today it brings a powerful new feature that might offer currently unimaginable and creative competition.
The browser component now has a setup page that allows you to start a new game specifying the same parameters as the standalone device (color, engine, level, personality (if applicable), and opening book). Creating this functionality put down the framework to be able to add what I was really after…
I was very excited by a post by Ovyron from Oct 2017 that I stumbled upon. It talks about utilizing multiple and different engines within the same game. I’ll let you read the original post, but the current implementation in Caddell is to allow you to specify the engine/level/personality to be used for the opening, middle, and endgame… the engine will change automatically at those event boundaries. This feature is currently called “Relay Chess” in Caddell, after pass-the-baton type races.
One example is a game where you might play against Stockfish 12 Level 07 during the opening, switching to Rodent IV Elo 1300 Cloe personality for the middle game, and then back to Stockfish 12 Level 01 for the endgame (because I feel I’m weak and still working on that part of the game). Or any other combination you can dream.
Ovyron talks about a much more configurable set of options and I hope to get to those, this is just an initial “exploration/proof-of-concept” release while putting down frameworks for expansion.
This feature might be implemented in another GUI, if it is please let me know as I’d be very interested to see another approach. This feature might be considered profane and against the integrity of the individual engines… and I suppose it might be, but I found it to be an interesting challenge to implement and it entertained me
At this point this feature is very much an early release beta - if you find you want to give Caddell a try for this, you mustn’t be surprised if you encounter bugs, most likely focused during game setup. If you stick to the “happy path” (for example providing a level choice instead of leaving it blank - error checking is at a minimum still) you’ll be able to enjoy perhaps some memorable games.
If there is interest, I can look into creating an sd-card “image file” to ease installation sidestepping the need to do the manual install.
Caddell’s info page is at https://caddellchess.github.io/
And the project page is https://github.com/caddellchess/caddell-chess
