Elements of the ULTIMATE Chess GUI?

[Graham Banks]

Knockout Tournaments

Ability to run TLCV broadcasts.

Adjustable adjudication settings.

[Dann Corbit]

Display elements of some other GUIs that are fabulous:
1. Wilhelm would show the hot squares for winning endgames graphically. A fabulous teaching tool.
2. Arena has a setting that shows every attack square for the side to move. Truly ingenious. It could be improved on by drawing arrows from the attacking pieces.
3. There should be a feature to play the pv like a movie. If there are two engines, pick a pv and play it. Then pick the other pv and play it. And the third option would be to play the combined pv to the point where they differ, if the first move or some of the first moves are the same.
4. Be able to store game logs as a collection of EPD records (that's for me).
5. Heat maps from a collection of games would be nice.

Imagine something that can help to visualize how the two bishop mate works by showing the attack squares and what is achieved by the bishop motion. Even more remarkable would be to graphically show how the bishop + knight makes works so that it becomes intuitive what is really going on. This could be done by showing the attacked squares of the two offensive pieces and the remaining flight squares for the king in a different color or with a different dot on them or whatever.

Anything you can think of that will help explain things in a graphical way, to teach the game of chess would be better than what is currently available.

Whatever you do, do not waste your time on those horrible attempts at 3-D rendering of a chessboard.

Just making something kind of pretty is really useless. If you want to make something that people should buy, make something that will teach them something.

IMO-YMMV

[PK]

- don't lag and don't cause losses on time, like Arena does
- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does
- exit gracefully, killing the engine processes (problems with Arena again)
- extend both Winboard and UCI protocols by adding "chat" command, by which engine can display something in a separate window (comments, evaluation details, trash talk, whatever). Rodent would gladly talk to its opponents, but unfortunately it cannot rely on "info string" UCI command, which is often ignored
- if the engine supports either UCI_Elo or some kind of level command (Stockfish style), implement usage mode that increases level when user wins and decreases it when user loses
- integrate PolyGlot book creator, so that it can be used from the GUI level (Scid allows editing existing books by changing move probabilities, but I'd like to be able to pick several pgn files for white and for black, and then create a book at one go)
- integrate stuff like ChessArtist by Ferdinand Mosca (it is a Python script that returns game analysis)
- Winboard is great with its time odds implementation
- automatically create web pages with a pgn of a current game/current collection of games

[Ferdy]

- don't force user to work on text files, hand-type engine paths etc. like Winboard does

I am not sure what do you mean by "don't force user to work on text files"?

Regarding installation of engine it is easier now.

[gbtami]

Whatever you do, do not waste your time on those horrible attempts at 3-D rendering of a chessboard.

+1

[Matthias Gemuh]

- support for all the current standards of Chess960.
- swiss tournaments with 5000 engines or more.
- rated tournaments/matches
- swiss tournaments with initial bonus points so that strong engines never face much weaker ones even in first round.
- swiss tournaments with scaled Time Controls so that weak engines play faster than strong engines.

[Nordlandia]

Supporting two computer match via wireless Wi-Fi and not causing connection issues (game stop midgame). Alternatively Null-Modem USB works fine.

6-men syzygy adjudication.
Draw adjudication (like cutechess)
Resign adjudication

[Werewolf]

Hey guys,

I've been considering working with (hiring) some developers at some point and creating a GUI that combines all of the best elements for engine testers enthusiasts and chess learners.

My question to you guys is:

What features would be absolutely essential in the PERFECT chess GUI?

IDeA.

[Ras]

- Easy to use with consideration of discoveribility.

Too often, the temptation is cramming too many features inside without any thought on how a new user would use it. Programmers love to expose any kind of plumbing to fumble around with everything, but users actually hate such software.

[giovanni]

The possibility to perform interacrtive analysis a la 'IDEA' in Aquarium.