PyChess Philidor beta

After the by far longest PyChess development cycle, version Philidor beta, codenamed 0.8 beta, has been released!

Download from: http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/PyChess

Screenshots: http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots

The long development time covers a close to total rewrite, the most throughout testing for a PyChess release yet, and a massive new base of features. Many of which users have been screaming since the first alpha of PyChess.

The new features includes, but are not restricted to:

• FICS online Internet play.
• Undo and pause functions.
• Support for UCI engines like Fruit, Glaurung and Shredder.
• Ability to turn analysers on/off, and to decide which engines should be used.
• An "Enter game" in pgn dialog.
• New fast start greeting screen.
• A 30x faster built in python engine.
• Internationalized or figure pieces in notation .
• Optional sounds.
• A comments side panel that helps you understand the moves made.
• Pychess now use Launchpad Rosetta for i18n

It should be noted, however, that even though the FICS implementation is generally very stable, it hasn't yet got support for chatting and console communication. Thus it should be used with some care.

We encourage everyone to try out the release, and report the bugs (if any) you find.

If you'd like to see PyChess translated into your language, you can help us from the web interface at https://translations.launchpad.net/pychess/trunk/+pots/pychess

And remember: "The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it" - Benjamin Franklin, 1779

Thanks, Pychess team

• Homepage: http://pychess.googlepages.com
• Screenshots: http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots
• Project page: http://code.google.com/p/pychess
• Downloads: http://www.gnomefiles.com/app.php/PyChess
• Bug list: http://code.google.com/p/pychess/issues/list
• Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/pychess-people

engines.ini

I just found a file in the Arena chess client download section called engines.ini. The file is in 1264 lines, and contains a description of an engine for each line. For CECP engines as well as UCI engines.

A snip from the cecp part, looks like:

Gnuchess4=EMPO
Gnuchess5=EO
Faile=O

The letters right to the equal signs are keys to the options in the dialog at the right, which means the gnuchess 4 supports "Edit mode", "Move now", "Ponder" and "Opening Book". Gnuchess 5 on the other hand only supports "Edit mode" and "Opening Book". Faile won't even be able to load a game, as it supports no such feature.

Of course it is a a weakness that there is no field to tell if the engine supports "protover 2", which means that we still have to base the loading on timeouts.

But still there are a lot of good things. Now we've actually got _some_ information for those engines which does not support "protover 2", and we will be able to send a proper error message when trying to load a game, playing against Faile or similar.

Also the file can be used to identify engines at the users PATH. It might however require some smart text comparison algorithms, as I can see no absolute way to tell that the binname of "Gnuchess4" is "gnuchess" and the name of "Shredder Classic" is "ShredderClassicLinux". At least on linux ;)

I plan to convert the file into the engine xml format