Author: ujecrh
Date: 16:03:28 11/21/00
Go up one level in this thread
On November 21, 2000 at 18:34:13, John Merlino wrote:
>
>Ok. I've gone through all of the e-mail that users have sent us, and here are
>the only significant bugs (i.e. ones that are verified and/or happening to more
>than one user).
>
>-- Win2K users have reported that tutorials will crash if you make an error
>moving a piece. The dialog box comes up asking you if you want to try again, and
>pressing either the "Yes" or "No" button will result in a crash. This will be
>fixed in the patch.
>-- One user has reported that, on many occasions, several personalities will
>stop responding after leaving book. Has anybody else experienced this?
If I remember correctly there was something about that in the release notes
installed with ChessMaster 8K.
>-- Two users have reported sound anomalies such that both Thematic and Simple
>Sounds will not play on their systems UNLESS (and this is the weird part)
>Chessmaster is NOT the active app. Spoken move announcements works fine on these
>machines. The development team apparently has some idea of what the problem
>might be and are hoping to have a fix for the patch.
I noticed that and thought it was on purpose, in fact it is pretty nice to have
sounds disabled when you do something else and CM is in background too. Very
minor bug, if a bug at all.
>-- Two users have reported problems with command line parameters for XBoard
>engines, but the development team cannot reproduce any of them. Can anybody
>reply to this with some examples of this failing? I would need the engine (and
>its version number), and the EXACT text entered into the command line parameter
>edit field.
Even stranger, after having such a problem I noticed that if I started the
parameters by a blank space they were sent correctly to the engine. Maybe that
can help.
>-- A few users have asked for a "human adjudication" feature that would allow a
>user to intervene in a computer vs. computer tournament game, calling it a draw
>or a win for one side or whatever. This is a good suggestion, but it remains to
>be seen whether it gets into the patch.
>-- Of course, two users have reported that the program fails to run AT ALL on
>Windows 2000. They, sadly, are told that the program does not officially support
>Windows 2000 and that their best bet is to return it. It is unknown what is
>causing this problem.
>
>Other bugs that have already been fixed/addressed:
>-- There was a bug that would cause the mentor engine to restart thinking about
>a position if the Visual Thinking or Thinking Lines window was opened, even if
>the mentor engine had already been thinking about the position and sending its
>output to another window.
>-- Fixed a bug that would cause the "Positions" columns in the Thinking Lines
>window to display incorrectly after approximately 2.1 billion positions had been
>seen. These columns will now "wrap" their values (i.e. display incorrect data)
>after approximately 4.2 billion positions, but this is unavoidable. On a typical
>machine (Pentium III - 600 Mhz, for example) this will not occur until 30 or
>more hours have passed, given a typical midgame position.
>-- Fixed a crash that was caused by attempting to load a 16-color bitmap as a
>wallpaper in a room. 16-color bitmaps are not supported, but the program now
>tells you when you are attempting to load one as a wallpaper.
>-- The Vector Board that is mentioned in the documentation actually does not
>exist in the program. The documentation is in error.
>
>And some enhancements that I'm sure some of you will appreciate:
>
>-- Added a "Copy Contents" context menuitem to the "Thinking Lines". Whenever
>any checkbox in this dialog is selected, you can now right-click on any "best
>line" window (the one that has a "Score" column), and one of the menu items will
>be "Copy Contents". Choosing this item will copy all of the contents of that
>window to the Windows clipboard, formatted just like it is in the program. Since
>you can have more than one of these sub-windows active at a time (if you have
>more than one checkbox selected), whichever "best line" window you right-click
>on will be the one that copies its data to the clipboard.
>
>-- Added an "Import PGN Settings" dialog that allows you to set the criteria by
>which games in a PGN file are imported into an opening book. The following
>options are available:
>-- Moves for Color. Whether you want the moves for White, Black or
>both to be imported. The default is Both.
>-- Weighting Frequency. Whether you want the moves to be weighted by:
> Frequency (how often the moves occur in the PGN file)
> Wins (how often the move was made by the side that won the game)
> Losses (how often the move was made by the side that lost the game)
> Draws (how often the move was made in a game that was drawn)
> Long (how often the move was made in a long game -- the longer the
> game, the more likely the move will have a higher weight)
> Short (how often the move was made in a short game -- the shorter
> the game, the more likely the move will have a higher weight)
> Captures (how often were captures made in the opening)
> Low Captures (how rarely captures were made in the opening)
> Queen (how often were queen moves were made in the opening)
> Pawn (how often pawn moves were made in the opening)
> Gambit (how often gambits -- pawn sacrifices -- were made in the
> opening)
>The default is Frequency.
>-- Depth. How many moves deep you want the opening book to be. This number
>is in terms of plies, meaning the default depth of 30 equates to 15 moves
>by White and Black.
>
>At this time, the patch is hopefully going to be released within two months. Of
>course, many more users are probably going to be sending their bugs, so I'll
>keep you all updated with the most significant ones.
>
>jm
I would add two suggestions
1/ It would be nice if we could specify an initialization string that will be
send to the winboard engine when it is started like winboard does (with the
parameter /initString=...). It could either be from a ChessMaster text editor
dialog box or simply offer the option to give a filename. Then, when the
winboard engine is started, the content of the given file is sent as is. That is
great for example when you want to disable ponder and the engine does not
support any parameter to do it from command line but requires the "easy" command
to be sent.
2/ Allow custom personalities and winboard engines to have ratings and play
rated games ! Two reasons for that:
First: people will not have to launch Chessbase or any tools to compute
ratings.
Second: Some people, like me, use a fake winboard engines to play on a
wooden chessboard connected to the PC (UCB or Saitek autoboard for example). In
the actual configuration these games can not be rated.
Overall, this is by far the best ChessMaster upgrade I have seen so far,
congratulations to the whole development team and thanks for the great software
!
Ujecrh
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