Chess for Android - set time controls?

[JohnW]

So I just bought Komodo 8 and have it loaded in the Chess for Android application. But for the life of me I cannot find anywhere you set the time controls. Can somebody point me in the right direction? Thank you..

[Bill McGaugh]

You press the 3 dots on the bottom right of the screen....then press level...and
you have some time controls to select from.

[abik]

And more general time controls are in the making (for a while already, I have code in my local workspace but it is probably still one release out).

[MagnersCarlsbergsen]

Hi Aart,

Any plans for allowing changing of all UCI parameters/options for every engine?

So far Chess PGN Master is the only Android app with this functioning properly. Droidfish's implementation is yet to work fully. Would love the functionality on Chess for Android!

[abik]

Any plans for allowing changing of all UCI parameters/options for every engine?

Interesting. When I added this feature in 2010, I played with the idea of dynamically building a menu by adding an Android widget for each UCI option, but decided to go with the less general approach of only supporting a fixed set of most often used options (mainly so I would have better control on the layout of the dialog). It indeed seems a good idea to just generalize this if there is a wide interest for this.

[MagnersCarlsbergsen]

Any plans for allowing changing of all UCI parameters/options for every engine?

Interesting. When I added this feature in 2010, I played with the idea of dynamically building a menu by adding an Android widget for each UCI option, but decided to go with the less general approach of only supporting a fixed set of most often used options (mainly so I would have better control on the layout of the dialog). It indeed seems a good idea to just generalize this if there is a wide interest for this.

I'm sure there would be a lot of interest in this. On desktops, the ability to change UCI options for each engine is so staple at this point, and I think adding this to a mobile GUI is one more step to reducing the gap between desktop and mobile GUIs. Couple this with the relentless increase in the speed Android phone processors (getting near 3ghz now), and I can see myself using Android over my laptop more and more frequently!

Of course I also like setting ridiculous and stupid values for some parameters for various engines just to see them play like suicidal maniacs, but that's just a bonus of being able to change UCI options.

[petero2]

Droidfish's implementation is yet to work fully.

I think it works fully.

There are some buggy engines that incorrectly believe that UCI options are case sensitive though. A workaround for those buggy engines have been implemented in the development version of DroidFish.

[mjlef]

For the Play Store version of Komodo 8 for Android, Jeremy cleverly added the ability to set most of the UCI parameters from within the Android Chess App, since so many of the Android GUIs do not let you access them. This can work for ChessBase "MetaUCI" format and "open exchange" format which many of the GUIs support. It is not an ideal solution, but works well so far in practice.

[hgm]

There are some buggy engines that incorrectly believe that UCI options are case sensitive though. A workaround for those buggy engines have been implemented in the development version of DroidFish.

Could there be any reason not to send the options back to the engine in exactly the same way as they were announced?

[petero2]

There are some buggy engines that incorrectly believe that UCI options are case sensitive though. A workaround for those buggy engines have been implemented in the development version of DroidFish.

Could there be any reason not to send the options back to the engine in exactly the same way as they were announced?

In DroidFish I store all options in lowercase because there are some options that I need to detect because they need special handling in the GUI (such as Ponder), and because the name is case insensitive I don't know if that is reported as "ponder", "Ponder", "PONDER" or something else.

It is of course no problem to send the options back to the engine using the same capitalization as the engine reported. I just did not know there were engines that got this wrong, so I did not bother to do it like that in the first implementation.