Author: John Merlino
Date: 14:04:15 12/06/00
The development tells me that they are now confident that all time control issues have been fixed and will be available in the patch (due out in about six weeks). For those of you who are curious, here are the timing results of 13 games played against Crafty 17.13 at 40/120 (time left is in H:MM and Moves are for each side): CMColor Result CMTimeLeft CrTimeLeft Moves W 1-0 1:45 1:30 55 B 0-1 1:38 0:49 62 W 1-0 2:37 2:04 83 B 1-0 2:43 2:21 82 <--- W 1/2 4:12 3:02 142 <--- B 1/2 1:41 1:26 60 W 1-0 0:56 0:26 35 B 0-1 1:19 1:22 56 W 1/2 1:43 1:41 133 B 1-0 1:24 2:02 65 W 1-0 0:52 0:35 69 B 0-1 0:08 0:03 78 W 0-1 1:45 1:29 218 It is apparent, from the way that the CM has been behaving for those of you who have been using the moves/minutes time control, that the above represents a far better time usage (although the 4th and 5th games, as highlighted above, show that, perhaps, The King is probably still a bit conservative, at least compared to Crafty). The "seconds per move" time control now uses the "st" command, rather than attempting to fudge it like it did in previous versions of Chessmaster. This is now bug-free as well. Other items that have been fixed: -- Some machines would hang (or appear to hang) if sound failed to initialize for some reason. This has been fixed and appeared to be more likely to occur on Win2K machines. -- Fixed 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. -- Added a "Copy Contents" context menuitem to the "Thinking Lines" window. 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. -- 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. -- 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. -- Fixed a bug that occurred on some machines in which Thematic and Simple piece movement sounds would only play if Chessmaster was NOT the active application. Now, these sounds play properly but NO piece movement sounds play if Chessmaster is not the active application. Spoken Move Announcements were not affected by this bug. -- 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. -- Fixed a bug in the "Set Up Personality" feature that would give an erroneous error message stating that personality files that began with the letter 'Z' were damaged, meaning that, once created, these files could not be modified. -- Increased the minimum number of seconds in the hourglass time control from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. -- A few minor corrections to tutorials. Here are the items (some bugs, some enhancements) that are still on the development team's plate (in no particular order): -- Properly handling draw offers from imported XBoard engines when their opponent is also a computer. -- A Win2K specific crash that occurs if you make an error in a move question in a tutorial. -- Fast personalities (such as Max and Lacey) stop responding (and eventually lose on time) if they leave book and then come back into it due to a transposition. -- Proper formatting of the Date tag in a PGN header. -- A Win2K specific crash involving moving through menus quickly (but not actually selecting a menuitem). This has been reported by only one user and is not reproduceable by the dev team, yet. -- 3-fold repetition draws sometimes not being recognized by the GUI, causing the opponent of the side that made the drawing move to lose on time. -- Problems with the sizing of the Customize Board dialog. -- Putting "Mate in N" instead of "99.xx" in the Thinking Lines window. -- Supporting "whisper" and "kibitz" output from XBoard engines. -- Human adjudication of comp vs. comp tournament games, rather than having to wait for the legal finish to the game. -- A special INI setting to COMPLETELY turn off audio in the game, intended for debugging purposes only. That's about it. Thanks to all of you who helped to make these bugs (and their fixes) possible! ;-) jm
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