My gift to the community – a much better cutechessGUI

[Gabor Szots]

I can see Patrick is working on fixing our issues.

https://github.com/Yoshie2000/cutechess ... -1.0...dev

[pohl4711]

Hello,

First of all thanks for your initiative. Really appreciated!

I have found two minor glitches so far :

1) Setting time control in Tools>Setting>Games>Time Control, the minutes and seconds fields are not easy to change entering new values with the keyboard, if you enter a new number it is appended to the old one instead of replacing it

2) Only first move of PV is shown for Winboard engines (I tested EveAnn, Myrddin, Dirty)

Using Windows 11

1) no change here by Patrick

2) this was my wish. I dont need the movelist window on the screen. This modification makes sure, I know, which movenumber is on. Movenumbers after each move, would take to much space in the PV-lines, IMHO.

[pohl4711]

I stopped my tournament for the night and restarted it in the morning. It continued with the game it interrupted but after concluding that game it froze.

There is a bug in cutechessGUI, terminating correctly. Will be fixed (hopefully...).

Right now, just reboot your machine before resuming a tournament. For me, that helps.

I will give Patrick your output here, perhaps another problem?

Some additional information:

After stopping the tournament I switched off my computer completely.
This is a Soomi gauntlet, Soomi plays 9 opponents. The last game was its 11th game against Kiwi.

When I noticed the tournament froze, I exited Cute Chess and reloaded the tournament again. Again a Kiwi game was played although I could see in the PGN that it was finished normally. Then I exited, restarted and again Soomi played Kiwi. So in the PGN there were a couple of Kiwi games. It seems Cute Chess lost track and wanted to play Kiwi all the time.

I reloaded the tournament, it plays Kiwi again and I have just noticed that the Stop under Tournament is greyed out. I can exit Cute Chess and reload but it repeats the above. And the round counter remains at 11. I have now a few Kiwi games in the PGN, all are marked as round 11 games.

I don't know if that helps.

I may send you or Patrick my tournament file in case that might help.

If this happens again, please upload the tournament save-file of the cutechessGUI in a Cloud (Google Drive or Onedrive or so) and provide the link. This would be helpful for Patrick, to find the problem, he mentioned to me.

[pohl4711]

cutechess: error while loading shared libraries: libQt6Concurrent.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

??? Strange. All other people here seem to be able to run cutechessGUI, like me, too. But, I will tell Patrick about it.
And the Qt6Concurrent.dll file is part of th main cutechessGUI folder after downloading...

[pohl4711]

Because Patrick Leonhardt, the young author of the great engine PlentyChess, was looking for a student job, I offered him, to make a better cutechess for the community, payed by me.
CutechessGUI is already great, but has some flaws and room for improvements.

As I expected, Patrick did a fantastic job – I could not be more satisfied - and improved cutechess as I wanted.

https://github.com/Yoshie2000/cutechess ... ag/qol-1.0

Whats new?

The biggest improvement is, that engine-tournaments in the cutechessGUI can now be aborted and resumed – a save file is written after each finished game. So, even after a crash, an engine-tournament always can be resumed.

A complete new feature is introduced: Decision Time. DT means the time, the engine needed to find (and hold) the move, which is finally played on the board. The DT is not only displayed in the engine-windows of cutechessGUI, but also stored by cutechess-cli in the pgn-comments. IMHO, DT is a very interesting information (how hard to find was the played move?), which is just thrown away by all other GUIs (stupid !).

CutechessGUI is now „standalone“: No installation required, it can now run from an USB-Stick, like Arena, because all files needed, are stored in the cutechess-folder (and its subfolders). Including the engine.json file.

Above the chessboard of cutechessGUI, there are 3 new outputs:
100 plies rule (50 moves draw rule) counter, the material balance (-1 means, for example, that black has 1 pawn more) and the overall number of pieces on the board (max. 32)

2 new board color sets: Green and Blue

A darkmode (can be switched on/off)

The yellow triangle to point out the last move on the board is back (from V1.2), it replaces the (in my eyes) ugly arrow of the newer versions.

A larger font for the PV-line output and the first ply of each PV-line now includes the movenumber.

Great gesture.

I had a quick look at it and it looks much improved.

Is there any way we can pool funds together and have Patrick keep working on it?

GoFundMe or something?

I'd be happy to throw in a few bucks here and there and Im sure others feel the same.

And we all get a great GUI in return.

Very kind offer. But no need for this. Let me pay the bills here. Luckily I made some nice money at the stock-market in the last decades. So, I could already retire from my job at the age of 53 in 2023. No problems here.

[pohl4711]

I can see Patrick is working on fixing our issues.

https://github.com/Yoshie2000/cutechess ... -1.0...dev

Yeah, Patrick works hard, to fix all problems.

[Andres Valverde]

Hello,

First of all thanks for your initiative. Really appreciated!

I have found two minor glitches so far :

1) Setting time control in Tools>Setting>Games>Time Control, the minutes and seconds fields are not easy to change entering new values with the keyboard, if you enter a new number it is appended to the old one instead of replacing it

2) Only first move of PV is shown for Winboard engines (I tested EveAnn, Myrddin, Dirty)

Using Windows 11

1) no change here by Patrick

2) this was my wish. I dont need the movelist window on the screen. This modification makes sure, I know, which movenumber is on. Movenumbers after each move, would take to much space in the PV-lines, IMHO.

I think I din't explain well myself. In 2) I meant that PV is truncated and only the first move is shown, It only happened to me with Winboard engines (UCI engines full PV is displayed).

[Gabor Szots]

If this happens again, please upload the tournament save-file of the cutechessGUI in a Cloud (Google Drive or Onedrive or so) and provide the link. This would be helpful for Patrick, to find the problem, he mentioned to me.

The first link below leads to a tournament file. I also uploaded a filehow that shows results table when loading the tournament and the same table after freezeing (the only difference being Kiwi's game count). That's the second link.

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Add Swiss tournament - add flags next to engine names.