Staunton Alpha 0.10 AnnouncementMore than a year after PyChess Philidor 0.8 went went into beta, we now present PyChess Staunton 0.10 Alpha! The release is named after Howard Staunton, who is regarded as the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851. And while we are still using the old theme for the chess pieces, we hope to get a real Staunton theme before going final. The release contains a lot of general improvements, but the two most important changes in this release are the possibility to play different variants of chess, as well as chat on the online chess community, FICS. The five largest changes: - With support for chess variants, PyChess now allows you to play Fischer Random with your majors shuffled, to play Losers chess with being mated as your goal, or simply playing odds chess as an additional way of giving a player a handicap.
- On-line play has been enhanced with chat support. Besides chatting with your opponent, the FICS community has several channels, in which you can discuss chess and varies of other topics.
- The FICS support has also been improved with built-in Timeseal support. This helps to terminate lag, and is especially helpful in very fast games, like bullet chess.
- If you prefer to play off-line, PyChess now lets you choose from eight different play-strengths. The built in PyChess engine has as well been extended 'in both extremes' now making many more human like mistakes in the easy mode, and playing at more than double strength in the hard mode.
- UI-wise, PyChess takes use of a new pure-python docking widget, which lets you rearrange the sidepanels by wish.
A longer list of changes: http://code.google.com/p/pychess/wiki/StauntonRelease#Changes_from_Philidor_to_Staunton Screenshots: http://pychess.googlepages.com/screenshots Download: http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/PyChess Changes from Philidor to StauntonLobais (UI wise): - Implemented chat for FICS (Internet chess) use.
- Created a new New-Game-Dialog, which better allows control over AI-level, timesettings and variants.
- Allowed you to specify which ports PyChess should use for FICS.
- Added yellow messages - similar to those of glchess - to notify of mates and draws.
- Wrote a new docking-system, which allows drag-and-drop of panels!
- Recorded chess sounds and bundled them with the distribution.
- Added a dialog to show the progress of discovering your local engines. PyChess Philidor would simply be stuck a few seconds the first time you started it.
- Improved the animation of knights-move and promotion of pawns.
- Wrote a new log dialog, which sorts logs in a nested tree, and allows search with a Google Chrome inspired searchbar.
- Made the two icons in the main window clickable. Clicking them will open a more advanced dialog.
- Added better previews when closing many games at once with a dialog heavily inspired by gedit.
Lobais (Chess wise): - Gave better knowledge to the comment-panel.
- Made the Engine stronger, by:
- Fixing bugs in transposition table and search.
- Creating a more advanced move-sorting.
- Adding more knowledge to the evaluation functions.
- Experimental use of end game tables.
- The use of low-level bitoperations from the gmp/gmpy library when available.
Lobais (Internal): - Reduced lag when playing on FICS, by implementing the python-timeseal from nboard.
- Improved UCI and CECP stability by fixing tons of box and rewriting process-control system.
- Let the engines chat back to you!
- Did a lot of fixes of various kind.
Tamás Bajusz - Implemented chess variants for the client!
- Added Fischer Random chess support for PyChess engine.
- Improved saving of epd files.
- Did many fixes around the code.
Leonardo Gregianin - Added more tips to the Tip-Of-The-Day.
- Made PyChess catch exceptions with the gtkexcepthook.
- Updated translations, wiki and credits.
Michel Sylvan - Made more icon-specifications tango complient.
- Moved PyChess datafiles from /usr/share/games to /usr/share.
- Fixed an import error.
Mattgatto - Fixed bug in FICS rating-handling.
- Added a Don't Care field to rating combo in FICS seeking.
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